Epic of Vaniyera

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UnwiseOwl
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Epic of Vaniyera

Post by UnwiseOwl »

There's been a substantive rewrite to this campaign, the maps and story remain the same, but balance and dialogue has been almost completely redone, so I'm soliciting comment on the new version from anybody, whether or not you played the old version. Epic of Vaniyera isn't that epic timewise, especially now that I've cut out the final level and made the easy levels...easier, so it should be playable in a decent length session. I'd greatly appreciate the feedback, most of all on the points below, but any other suggestions you'd care to give would be great.
 
Please keep in mind that this campaign relies on the Imperial Era for most of its unit artwork and balancing. If you are interested in contributing to this campaign, era, or in helping develop other campaigns set in the World of Orbivm, please post in the relevant threads or drop me a private message.
 
Scenario 0 - Camp of Lavinium
(1) How clear and interesting did you find the dialogue with regards to the campaign setting?
 
(2) Do you feel the dialogue expresses the nature of the various characters?
 
Scenario 1 - Ambush
(1) What difficulty did you play the scenario on? Have you played it previously on this or any other difficulty level?
 
(2) What unit mix did you employ? Did you use furies? Did they die?
 
(3) How many turns did it take you? What tactics did you employ? How difficult did you find the scenario on a scale of 1 (taking candy from a baby) to 10 (childbirth)? Were there any aspects that seemed too easy/difficult for the campaign rating?
 
(4) How clear and interesting did you find the dialog and storyline?
 
(5) Would you make any changes in order to help new players learn the basics of Sidhe tactics against the Marauders, or would you prefer to just fight and work them out for yourself?
 
(6) How enjoyable, on a scale of 1 (watching paint dry) to 10 (bullfighting) did you find the scenario? In your opinion, how could this level be improved?
 
 
Scenario 2 - Too Late
(1) What difficulty did you play the scenario on? Have you played it previously on this or any other difficulty level?
 
(2) What unit mix did you employ? Did you use furies? Did they die?
 
(3) How many turns did it take you? What tactics did you employ? How difficult, on a scale 1 to 10, did you find the scenario? Were there any aspects that seemed too easy/difficult for the campaign rating?
 
(4) Did you defeat the auxilla? How many turns did it take you?
 
(5) How clear and interesting did you find the dialog and storyline? Did you feel that the portrayal of the relationship between the Lavinians and auxilla worked, or how would you improve it?
 
(6) Would you make any changes in order to help new players learn the basics of Sidhe tactics against the Lavinians, or would you prefer to just fight and work them out for yourself?
 
(7) How enjoyable, on a scale of 1 to 10, did you find the scenario? In your opinion, how could this level be improved?
 
 
Scenario 3 - Just in Time
(1) What difficulty did you play the scenario on? Have you played it previously on this or any other difficulty level?
 
(2) What unit mix did you employ? Have you given up on furies yet?
 
(3) How many turns did it take you? What tactics did you employ? How difficult, on a scale 1 to 10, did you find the scenario? Were there any aspects that seemed too easy/difficult for the campaign rating?
 
(4) If you had the chance, would you make any changes to the AI behaviour, either allied and enemy?
 
(5) How many of your allies and Athus' units survived?
 
(6) How clear and interesting did you find the dialog and storyline? Did you feel that the interplay between, Sidhe, Lavinian and Auxilla worked, or how would you improve it?
 
(7) How clear did you find the mission objectives? What would you change?
 
(8) How enjoyable, on a scale of 1 to 10, did you find the scenario? In your opinion, how could this level be improved?
 
 
Scenario 4 - Remnants of the Past
(1) What difficulty did you play the scenario on? Have you played it previously on this or any other difficulty level?
 
(2) What tactics did you employ? How difficult, on a scale 1 to 10, did you find the scenario? Did you feel the sceptres were too weak/strong?
 
(3) What units were autorecalled for you? Did you feel that the units recruited were enough to win the level?
 
(4) How clear and interesting did you find the dialog and storyline? Are you interested in the story of the Hero of Old?
 
(5) How clear did you find the mission objectives? What would you change?
 
(6) How enjoyable, on a scale of 1 to 10, did you find the scenario? In your opinion, how could this level be improved?
 
 
Scenario 5 - Retribution
(1) What difficulty did you play the scenario on? Have you played it previously on this or any other difficulty level?
 
(2) What unit mix did you employ? Did you leave Vaniyera behind to recruit or bring him to the front line?
 
(3) How many turns did it take you? What tactics did you employ? How difficult, on a scale 1 to 10, did you find the scenario? Were there any aspects that seemed too easy/difficult for the campaign rating?
 
(4) How many advanced units did you lose? Were you forced to save/reload?
 
(5) Did you feel that the Imperator's reinforcement guards and hippos were fair? Did you feel like they appeared too suddenly, giving you not enough opportunity to respond?
 
(6) How clear and interesting did you find the dialog and storyline? Did anything feel forced or particularly unnatural?
 
(7) How clear did you find the mission objectives? What would you change?
 
(8) How enjoyable, on a scale of 1 to 10, did you find the scenario? In your opinion, how could this level be improved?
 
 
Epilogue
(1) How clear and interesting did you find the dialogue?
 
(2) Do you feel the dialogue expresses the nature of the various characters?
 
(3) This level is pretty unpolished. What would you change?
 
Original post:
Spoiler:
Last edited by UnwiseOwl on April 17th, 2013, 1:37 am, edited 1 time in total.
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emilwoog
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Re: Epic of Vaniyera

Post by emilwoog »

So I just got to Remnants of the past, and I got Vaniyera leveled up to Shadowdancer during Just in Time. In Remnants of the Past, Vaniyera is back to being a Veiledblade, although I can recall the shadowdancer version of him.. I lose if either of them dies. I'm playing on medium difficulty.
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Re: Epic of Vaniyera

Post by turin »

emilwoog wrote:So I just got to Remnants of the past, and I got Vaniyera leveled up to Shadowdancer during Just in Time. In Remnants of the Past, Vaniyera is back to being a Veiledblade, although I can recall the shadowdancer version of him.. I lose if either of them dies. I'm playing on medium difficulty.
This is a bug I've had reported a few times but I cannot for the life of me figure out why it would occur. Anyone have any ideas?
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zookeeper
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Re: Epic of Vaniyera

Post by zookeeper »

turin wrote:
emilwoog wrote:So I just got to Remnants of the past, and I got Vaniyera leveled up to Shadowdancer during Just in Time. In Remnants of the Past, Vaniyera is back to being a Veiledblade, although I can recall the shadowdancer version of him.. I lose if either of them dies. I'm playing on medium difficulty.
This is a bug I've had reported a few times but I cannot for the life of me figure out why it would occur. Anyone have any ideas?
Umm...you're using description= instead of id= as the filter in a lot of your MODIFY_UNITs.
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turin
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Re: Epic of Vaniyera

Post by turin »

zookeeper wrote:Umm...you're using description= instead of id= as the filter in a lot of your MODIFY_UNITs.
Yeah, I figured that out about half an hour after making that post and forgot to edit it. :P
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Re: Epic of Vaniyera

Post by Mist »

(1) What difficulty levels and game (& campaign) versions have you played the scenario/campaign on? (If reviewing a specific scenario, please specify. Give detailed reviews of as many scenarios as you feel like.)
Normal 1.6.x release.
(2) How difficult did you find the scenario/campaign? Which, if any, parts posed problems that felt like they should not, and which, if any, seemed unintentionally easy? Were the scenario objectives ever unclear?
Difficulty :
From a point of view of person with no Imperial Era experience - at least challenging. It takes a while to catch how *not* to play the Sidhe and it requires getting over some natural wesnoth habits. This makes first playable scenario (Ambush) harder than it probably should be, I can imagine that "average player" (yeah, I know such thing doesn't exist) after few failed attempts not to get wiped out by the Marauders (which requires somewhat unbalanced recruit and really conservative playstyle) will just drop the campaign as unbalanced and move on. If you get past that, and actually accept that fighters are *not* the way to dispose of lavinian archers (which is again, counterintuitive) campaign is pretty steady until Retribution, which again becomes unplayable until you get a spark of insight and rush the green (instead of natural village grabing and trying to fight the lavinians in the trees). When you finally get through, last mission is somewhat anticlimatic and a lot easier, the map is large and there's not nearly enough enemy horsies to make you worried.

Objectives:
"Just in Time" is one huge issue objective-wise. There's absolutely no hint auxilaries can join you if alive, there's absolutely no hint that sidhe lvl 2s on the map can join, and guess what, they are all suicidal, so without these hints it's just not worth it to try keeping them alive. Having or not having a couple of extra lvl2 units and an additional recruit option is to big a bonus to leave as a completely unnanounced easter egg.
"Remenants of the Past" - That cairn you're supposed to be looking for is not south west. It's nowhere near being in the south west, it's actually due south (or even south-east if you want to be strict :P). Is the start dialogue supposed to be misleading? And I'd scrap that first turn recruit in favor of having no keep and three autorecalled units from the raindancer line. If you get anything else here it's going to be ripped to shreds by ghosts anyway.

General issues:
Furies - while they might be useful for a faction as a whole, they are useless in this campaign. Expensive, weak against absolutely everything you encounter and really hard to level (5 kills? get real). After few false starts I ended up not touching them at all, fighters are marginally better at holding the line (while being a lot cheaper) and raindancers make much better bowman killers and executioners of the wounded.
Wanderers - any reason why you're not allowed to get them earlier? they could find their uses in first scenarios, and when you finally get them in Retribution, they are far back behind the ghosts and end up largely redundant.
(3) How clear and interesting did you find the dialog and storyline? If you have suggestions for rephrasing of certain parts of the dialog that seemed awkward or were grammatically incorrect, post them.
Storyline is good. Dialogs need some serious love to bring out the full potential of the storyline.
(4) How fun do you think the campaign is? What, if any, are changes you would have made to the campaign to make it more fun?
It's decent. Mostly because fighting against lavinians is not fun. It's challenging, interesting and forces you to look for unorthodox tactics, but generally there's little fun in fighting an enemy your units are somewhat inferior to. Not being able to kill an archer at night with three fighters is just a case in point. Having to do with a very limited recruit options (two viable for most of the game) doesn't help either.
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turin
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Re: Epic of Vaniyera

Post by turin »

Mist wrote:Difficulty :
From a point of view of person with no Imperial Era experience - at least challenging. It takes a while to catch how *not* to play the Sidhe and it requires getting over some natural wesnoth habits. This makes first playable scenario (Ambush) harder than it probably should be, I can imagine that "average player" (yeah, I know such thing doesn't exist) after few failed attempts not to get wiped out by the Marauders (which requires somewhat unbalanced recruit and really conservative playstyle) will just drop the campaign as unbalanced and move on. If you get past that, and actually accept that fighters are *not* the way to dispose of lavinian archers (which is again, counterintuitive) campaign is pretty steady until Retribution, which again becomes unplayable until you get a spark of insight and rush the green (instead of natural village grabing and trying to fight the lavinians in the trees). When you finally get through, last mission is somewhat anticlimatic and a lot easier, the map is large and there's not nearly enough enemy horsies to make you worried.
Yeah, Sidhe are weird to play. Not sure what I can do about that though. I am going to make Wanderers recruitable from the start, though, so that should do something.
Mist wrote:Objectives:
"Just in Time" is one huge issue objective-wise. There's absolutely no hint auxilaries can join you if alive, there's absolutely no hint that sidhe lvl 2s on the map can join, and guess what, they are all suicidal, so without these hints it's just not worth it to try keeping them alive. Having or not having a couple of extra lvl2 units and an additional recruit option is to big a bonus to leave as a completely unnanounced easter egg.
Yeah. Totally agree. I didn't write either of those elements in, Oreb did, and I don't really like either of them. (But the level 2 units joining you works better than it used to - you used to have to keep them alive or you'd lose!) I might just take them both out.
Mist wrote:"Remenants of the Past" - That cairn you're supposed to be looking for is not south west. It's nowhere near being in the south west, it's actually due south (or even south-east if you want to be strict :P). Is the start dialogue supposed to be misleading? And I'd scrap that first turn recruit in favor of having no keep and three autorecalled units from the raindancer line. If you get anything else here it's going to be ripped to shreds by ghosts anyway.
Ooh, good idea. Dunno why I didn't think of that before.
Mist wrote:General issues:
Furies - while they might be useful for a faction as a whole, they are useless in this campaign. Expensive, weak against absolutely everything you encounter and really hard to level (5 kills? get real). After few false starts I ended up not touching them at all, fighters are marginally better at holding the line (while being a lot cheaper) and raindancers make much better bowman killers and executioners of the wounded.
Yeah, I'm removing them from the recruit list. Seems to me having berserking/raging units be recruitable in campaigns is almost always pointless.
Mist wrote:Wanderers - any reason why you're not allowed to get them earlier? they could find their uses in first scenarios, and when you finally get them in Retribution, they are far back behind the ghosts and end up largely redundant.
Nope. Fixing.
Mist wrote:Storyline is good. Dialogs need some serious love to bring out the full potential of the storyline.
Agreed. Any volunteers to touch up the campaign dialogue? This sounds like the kind of thing the new Writers' Forum would be good for...
Mist wrote:It's decent. Mostly because fighting against lavinians is not fun. It's challenging, interesting and forces you to look for unorthodox tactics, but generally there's little fun in fighting an enemy your units are somewhat inferior to. Not being able to kill an archer at night with three fighters is just a case in point. Having to do with a very limited recruit options (two viable for most of the game) doesn't help either.
Hopefully adding Wanderers (one of the most fun Sidhe units, IMO) as recruitables earlier in the campaign will help.
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And I hate stupid people.
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Re: Epic of Vaniyera

Post by Mist »

turin wrote:Yeah, Sidhe are weird to play. Not sure what I can do about that though.
I'd suggest something like an optional help mode (something like pick up scroll to enable hints, or new turn event with a help/no help option). It'd mean some writing to do, but if player decided to use it he could get some hint's about how to use your units or fight against given units sides (or whatever you decide to give as a way of a hint)
turin wrote:Yeah. Totally agree. I didn't write either of those elements in, Oreb did, and I don't really like either of them. (But the level 2 units joining you works better than it used to - you used to have to keep them alive or you'd lose!) I might just take them both out.
.
They might still be made to work, but that would require :
*Driving up caution for your ally (or making him outrightly forbidden to leave the castle before the second night with [avoid])
That, with some dialogs would actually counteract the suicidal tendencies and make it *possible* to try keeping them alive
*Driving up caution for the auxilareis and make them group defensively to make them appear reluctant to fight
Add some dialogs from lavinians promising heavy punishments after the combat and player might actually get a hint something's up and go south instead of east
*Optionaly, make the auxilaries surrender when defeated regardless of wheter the rest was defeated or not. It'd still make sense storywise.
turin wrote:Seems to me having berserking/raging units be recruitable in campaigns is almost always pointless.
Well with all these archers with no meele roamiong around full berserk might work, but more often than not three rounds of combat are not enough to kill, so rage just doesn't have a chance.
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Re: Epic of Vaniyera

Post by Zachron »

Funny enough, I found a Fury or two to be quite useful, but i recruited them rarely.(Used them mainly against the Archers and the Auxiliaries) Drawing upon my experience playing Lavinians in the Fall of Silvium campaign, I went straight for the Lavinians and ignored the Auxiliaries, save for posting a few Fighters between the Auxiliaries and my Allies.

I failed utterly to get past Remenants of the Past.
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Re: Epic of Vaniyera

Post by revenant »

I downloaded the campaign but when I tried to play it I got a 'unknown scenario' message. Could it have something to do with me having a mac?
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Re: Epic of Vaniyera

Post by artisticdude »

Nah, add-ons don't have anything to do with what OS you're on, they run completely through the Wesnoth application. It's probably either a campaign bug or you have the campaign version for 1.6.
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Re: Epic of Vaniyera

Post by Telaron »

revenant wrote:Could it have something to do with me having a mac?
No, nothing with mac. The campaign was probably made for a previous version of wesnoth. (Like 1.6) You will have to convert the code a bit in order for the campaign to work on, say, a 1.7 version.
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Re: Epic of Vaniyera

Post by UnwiseOwl »

Yep, that's the problem allright.
I've converted my fall of Silvium to run in 1.8, and I plan to do the other IE campaigns. The only major change from the 1.6 to 1.8 version is the editing of the "@campaigns" to "~add-ons" in any file reference in the code. I'm not a coder , so I'm going through manually to change this, but obviously other people have had to convert other campaigns to 1.8, I presume there's a tool that can make the automatic changes from 1.6 to 1.8...if someone sould point me in the right direction, that'd be sweet. I'll be trying to put up new versions of these campaigns so that they can continue to be edited and improved in the absence of Turin, who wrote them.
Last edited by UnwiseOwl on April 12th, 2010, 4:17 am, edited 1 time in total.
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Re: Epic of Vaniyera

Post by AI »

It's called wmllint, and is shipped in the data/tools directory.
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Re: Epic of Vaniyera

Post by Icarusvogel »

(1) What difficulty levels and game (& campaign) versions have you played the scenario/campaign on? (If reviewing a specific scenario, please specify. Give detailed reviews of as many scenarios as you feel like.)
1.4.3, I think. Not sure though.
(2) How difficult did you find the scenario/campaign? Which, if any, parts posed problems that felt like they should not, and which, if any, seemed unintentionally easy? Were the scenario objectives ever unclear?
I think about 4 on a scale of 10. No problems that should not be.
(3) How clear and interesting did you find the dialog and storyline? If you have suggestions for rephrasing of certain parts of the dialog that seemed awkward or were grammatically incorrect, post them.
The story was not very complex, which is hard to do with that little number of scenarios, but the dialogs were quite good. Nothing that needs rephrasing.
(4) How fun do you think the campaign is? What, if any, are changes you would have made to the campaign to make it more fun?
The campaign style is not quite my style, so it wasn't the campaign that was best for me - but that's just my personal opinion.
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