Ruthless (single player campaign, BfW 1.11)

[homunculus]

Can two stones be worth more than two stones?
Main character orc; playable to the end; difficulty intermediate; 10+ fights; small maps; annoying cutscenes.
Maps are designed to have at least one easy tactical solution that may be boring for advanced players who already know everything.
If you enjoy detailed descriptions of ruthless acts and gore, you better look elsewhere--it is more about the reasons why the orc pushed further, until appearing ruthless.

The campaign script and the maps work, but I am not really a fiction writer and in the spirit of community effort feedback is needed about the impressions players get from the story.
If you are a not playing it for the first time and remember the older versions, I hope the improvements are noticeable, and that is in no small part thanks to player criticism that pointed out the annoyancies and unclarities which I failed to notice myself.
Other feedback is also interesting, about whatever attracts attention.

FAQ
(Best C&C would be (as if) not having read it--the campaign should be playable without supplementary text)
(Some of those questions are from previous thread)
(Does not mean that any of those points are above criticism)
1. Why is the main character female?
2. Why do Ruth and Less get married?
3. Why does the story fail to follow a long-term strategic action plan?
4. Why is there not much ruthlessness in the campaign, especially in the beginning?
5. Why are the two stones there at all?

Spoiler:

1. Why is the main character female?
It all started with some memories from Jagged Alliance, particularly this bio: "Unusually Ruthless" Reuban.
Me not being an English speaker, and Ruth being a girls name, I thought: who was this Ruth person anyway?
This sounded like a campaign, and therefore the main character is an orcish girl named Ruth.

2. Why do Ruth and Less get married?
Certainly it would have been reasonable if I had interpreted 'ruthless' as 'without Ruth', but I remember my sister telling me how the teacher at school asked: how did the book "Taras Bulba" end? And one of her classmates answered that Taras married Bulba. I thought it was very fitting because Bulba does sound like it could be a girls name, like Less sounds like it could be an elf's name.
This is why I decided that Ruth and Less get married.

3. Why does the story fail to follow a long-term strategic action plan?
I didn't want Ruth to be the stereotypical warlord with unexplained ambition, like some demon worshiper in a Hollywood movie who wants to open the gates of hell for no apparent reason (I am not saying such movies are bad nor should be judged by the story).
And I didn't want Ruth to perform a fertility ritual to marry Less for no apparent reason.
Instead, Ruth is trying to make the tribe strong enough to survive (reasonable), and the fertility ritual is a side effect.
Ruth feels bad about destroying Less's family and betraying some of her own tribe, and the side effect is going to battle more than she intended (to keep herself busy).
I wanted a plot that is directed by the side effects of fulfilling reasonable goals.

4. Why is there not much ruthlessness in the campaign, especially in the beginning?
I wanted a campaign about how Ruth established a great tribe and started to appear ruthless to others because of trying to escape a secret character weakness of hers, rather than because of being cruel.

5. Why are the two stones there at all?
Firstly, as agreed upon in the forum, orcs and elves are different species, meaning they get no children, so a bard being motivated to make up a fake story would free me from the need to follow the lore.
Secondly, to make Ruth not forget about Less after the introduction, and to make the narrow-minded orcs annoy her.

[SkyOne]

Hello homunculus,

As my opinion from a quick look:
- you'd probably better to say more information about the campaign by editing the first post, such as orcish campaign, total 21 scenario, etc...
- is the game-leader a female orc? If so, it is an interesting idea because I have never seen it.
- the double wolf looks a bit too funny to me. How about a wolf has two heads (or an armed wolf)?

Anyway, good luck.

[Adamant14]

I play Ruthless first time, and I really enjoy it.
A great campaign, - but for me it is not a beginner campaign.
The difficulty is rather hard.
(maybe it's partly because I play really bad when I play Orcs)

But some scenarios (e.g. Troll Bridge) are real tough.

I'm at scenario 11 and found no bugs till now.
Recommendable campaign, really worth to play.
Thank you.

[homunculus]

@SkyOne
I am bit tired from porting to 1.11 and refactoring and testing to push the campaign out of the door for 1.11 at the moment, but otherwise I agree about including general campaign data in the first post, and some other things I am bit worried about.
Right now the only general info is in the description in the add-on server.
By the way, if people are expecting 21 scenarios, some of them are cut-scenes and some were merged, so the numbers do not go from 1 to 21 but have some gaps. There are about 10 fights.

If I change the disguised scout into something that looks more like a goblin wearing a wolf hide while riding a wolf, will it still be clear what the assassins are talking about?
The fertility ritual is the reason why some later events happen (and up to this point the campaign was about causing the fertility ritual to happen), but I don't know if I have managed to make it clear enough.

@Adamant14
Well, if you liked it then you should thank the people who posted criticism for the previous version, because the first playable iteration was really very much full of crap (some of it is probably still there, but it is hard for myself to spot).

I wonder what was the reason for Troll Bridge being difficult?
Did you have a few level 3 units to recall?
Did you try to rush the trolls or did you let them close enough so that Ruth could help out?
I agree it can be difficult, there are several ways to make it easier, or help the player figure out the right thing to do, depending on what the problem was exactly.

[Adamant14]

I wonder what was the reason for Troll Bridge being difficult?
Did you have a few level 3 units to recall?

Yes, a few.

Did you try to rush the trolls or did you let them close enough so that Ruth could help out?

First I was too impatient, and attacked with just 2-3 L3 units. I lost them, so I started new with a bit more patience.
The more passive tactic worked.

I agree it can be difficult, there are several ways to make it easier, or help the player figure out the right thing to do, depending on what the problem was exactly.

Don't change anything.
It is a great joyful scenario.
The only thing I would mention, I don't think you should call it a 'Beginner Campaign', its to hard for a 'Beginner Campaign'.

Well, if you liked it then you should thank the people who posted criticism for the previous version, because the first playable iteration was really very much full of crap (some of it is probably still there, but it is hard for myself to spot).

A little thing:
In scenario 13 Elvish Host one of the elvish leaders attacked, and died in the fire.
After that the chat between the two leaders was a bit strange (because one of them was already dead).
Maybe add a passive_leader=yes or an alternative sidekick for the case only one of the leaders remain.
And maybe avoid the area about the two fire-start locations for the elves, otherwise they can easy block the spots, and the scenario is spoiled.


EDIT:
In scenario 17 Ruth and Less:
I killed the Orc leader with an Outlaw, the Outlaw levelled to Fugitive and the scenario ended.
Next scenario should be 'scenario 18 Dream_1', but it wasn't.
Next scenario was scenario 17 again.
Maybe killing the leader ended the scenario before the alternative goal was reached???

EDIT2:
I did a restart, and killed an Orcish Archer instead of the leader, and the next scenario was scenario 18.

EDIT3:
In scenario 21 Two_stones:
This seems not to work:

Code: Select all

ellipse=miscs/blank-hex.png

Image not found.

ImageNotFound.png (171.46 KiB) Viewed 6244 times

[homunculus]

I wonder what was the reason for Troll Bridge being difficult?

Don't change anything.

Well, I noticed that trolls have the same defense on forested hills as on hills, and that makes the assassin leader's plan to attack from forest sound unreasonable in the next scenario. I guess I will also check if it was the same in 1.8 when I did it like that, or maybe I just messed it up. Should change the forested hills to forest, and that should help a little.

A little thing:
In scenario 13 Elvish Host one of the elvish leaders attacked, and died in the fire.
After that the chat between the two leaders was a bit strange (because one of them was already dead).
Maybe add a passive_leader=yes or an alternative sidekick for the case only one of the leaders remain.
And maybe avoid the area about the two fire-start locations for the elves, otherwise they can easy block the spots, and the scenario is spoiled.

That needs some thinking, maybe I can hint it somehow that the player is intended to rush low level orcs into forest to block the elves, and send two archers (or better, pillagers) to run towards the fire spots at first turn. Elves blocking those spots never happened that way, and I would like to keep invisible barriers as few as possible (because [avoid] is a hard tag). On the other hand it would make sense for the elves to leave the keep after fire. I should perhaps make the hexes around fire unwalkable, might improve the general behavior of units also, but that's a lot of WML crunching. Breaking dialog is bad, I may need a temporary fix first.

Edits 1 and 2 should be easy fix, edit 3 is interesting, I guess I should try with a real image first, because I didn't see such thing in my game.

Thanks : )

[Adamant14]

What about temporary passive leader?

Code: Select all

        [ai]
            turns=1-10
            passive_leader=yes
        [/ai]

Btw, I added your campaign here:
Guide_to_UMC_Campaigns
If you think something is wrong, feel free to change it.

[homunculus]

I hope there is a slightly improved version on the server now, including correction of the issues mentioned so far.

Changed the difficulty to intermediate as suggested, though a bit more feedback on the difficulty would be nice (maybe it should be beginner after all).

There were gaps in the scenario numbering (because of merging scenarios while porting) which apparently created a lot of confusion about the total number of scenarios.
Renumbered the scenarios, I hope it is more obvious that there are really 12 fights (minimum) and 5 cutscenes, but on the downside I guess it must have broken savegames from the previous version (if anyone cares about those).

I do not like passive leaders very much, because in the newest versions of BfW they no longer attack adjacent units.
I prefer max_moves=0 to make the enemy leader not give the keep to player too easily.
It can be argued if this is the best way or not, but it has the benefit of being visible to the player rather than being a tomato surprise.

About making the tiles around fire unwalkable, I found that I had already done it, in a less obvious way because of what the fire graphics looks like.