The Unstoppable Legion is back!

[santi]

First, congratulations on a great campaign -which is shaping up even better than expected. Great plot, interesting twists, keeps the tension throughout. So after finishing the Wrath of the stone on hard, here is some feedback:
1) I was extremely impressed with wrath of the stone. When cleaning up the 2nd and 4th baddies in a clockwise order, I was extremely impressed on how you got to contort their area in order to achieve a delay in the arrival of their troops to the battle area. This was essential since with the initial troops one can hold the pinch points in sections 1,3 and 5, but 2 and 4 are wider areas that are hard to hold with limited troops. So it is imperative not to have a continuous flow of baddies from areas 2 and 4 and you did a splendid job of achieving this objective
2)The key to this scecnario is holding initially until you get enough villages. I was able to defeat all 5 baddies(2 of them without Eridth), but it took some 100 turns. BY that time I had 2800 gold and nothing else was a problem-especially the 'mind-controlled'. It will be interesting to see if Victor gets to keep all that gold
-given the right map I could take on all the Legions with that amount of gold.
3)You may get some complaints that it is boring after you've beaten off the 5 baddies to march all your army to the runes. You may have something to the effect that Eridith can teleport them there to save people some 10-15 or so turns of marching troops. Personally I do not like to see magic if it's not needed by the plot.
4)I this this was the best campaign I have seen in a long time and still very open to guesses on what happens next-will there be some encounter with Deuteru's spirit? Is Deuterus really out of the picture?[probably he should be so Victor figures it out on his own] Anyway, congratulations and keep up the good work.

P.S> My view is FINISH it first, then rebalance, if necessary. Why? You should get more feedback this way(or maybe not)

[Chris NS]

Hi.

Sorry about the slow reply, you got me just as I was going on a short holiday.

The idea behind The Wrath of the Stone is supposed to be that you can't beat all the enemies, and you only hope is to split your forces into three and fight your way through the enemies to reach the three runes. That was the main idea of the long tunnels from the enemies - to give you a reasonable chance to arrive at these points before the baddies overwhelm you.

Are you still playtesting on hard? If so, did you attempt to fight your way through or could you only win by holding the villages until you could recruit a mega-army? At some point I need to rebalance several scenarios to prevent you killing enemies you're not supposed to be able to kill, but if it's not possible to complete the objective the way it's meant to be done, that's a more serious problem.

Good speculation about what comes up next. Keep the guesses coming in.

[ouzel]

The idea behind The Wrath of the Stone is supposed to be that you can't beat all the enemies, and you only hope is to split your forces into three and fight your way through the enemies to reach the three runes. That was the main idea of the long tunnels from the enemies - to give you a reasonable chance to arrive at these points before the baddies overwhelm you.

Played it and the tactic you described is the one I used. In order to beat all enemy leaders you need to split your army in five? groups and I did not have enough men to do that and it would have taken a very long time to finish the scenario also.

So get leaders to the runes fast and dont let your fast units walk too far from the slow ones.

[santi]

After disposing of the first baddie and earning a keep, I split the army in 3: one to hold the north, one to hold east and 3 units plus Eridith to take out the south(6 o clock). After finishing off the southernmost leader of course Eridith and co could assist other fronts, but the major contribution was the villages and associated gold. Basically I held the pinchpoints east and north and was able to fight off northeast and southeast sporadic(but significant) reinforcements until building a mega army and taking them out one by one. So south, southeast and east were the fronts taken out by Eridith and co, northeast by Sven and north was last. All these were on hard, of course. I should add that I hate running scenarios(althought I have written at least one myself) and I only see them as appropriate early in the campaign. At this stage, why deny your loyal followers the chance to chop off some baddies? You will suffer through the initial waves, so at least get the chance to enjoy sweet revenge by finishing off every baddie you can get a hold on!

[Chris NS]

*Bump*

Right, sorry for the quiet period. Anyone who's been e-stalking me will know that other things have been keeping me busy for a few months. But I now have a quiet moment, so here is The Unstoppable Legion verison 0.8.8. I'm afraid I've ignored popular demand to get on with the campaign and instead have concentrated on rebalancing the campaign so far to address some things that were getting on my nerves. But I promise, new scenarios will be coming next, including some new cliffhangers.

[Lord-Knightmare]

Damn, you release a new scenario during the time I lost all my saves for your campaign due to my old laptop crashing (I wouldn't say crash exactly as I accidently spilled water over it )

But, I'm gonna play it all over again, since this campaign is awesome. (BTW, you really need to update those deprecated graphics - I have some horse-back units in my era, War of Legends, if you're interested )

[Chris NS]

It's Christmas, the season for good will. Extradoinary things have happened in this season, such as the famous football match in the trenches in 1914. An inspring where war was shown to be senseless.

Luckily, Christmas hasn't been invented in Wesnoth or Suveran, so it's business as normal. For your pleasure is version 0.8.9, with a new scenario. In order to play this, you will need to have defeated the eastern enemy in "The Last Stand" and allied to the orcs. There will be an alternate scenario for those who went the other way, but that will have to wait.

Yes, I know it's taken me over three months to do one scenario, but I was super-busy in October and November and I've spent most of this month hibernating. Might be able to work a bit faster now things are a little calmer.

[Chris NS]

Any now, version 0.8.10. This is a killer scenario, but if you survive it, you are rewarded with a major plot twist at the end.

Please let me know if you consider this scenario too hard or too easy. It was a tough one to balance, but it does, but its very nature, have to be a skin-of-the-teeth survival one.

I realise that a lopt of you devvy guys might already be on 1.12 beta. At some point I'll made the transition myself, but I'll probably do another sceario or two in 1.10 first. Anyone who can't wait and fancies porting this to 1.12 now is welcome to do so.

[Velensk]

I liked the part of the Unstoppable Legion I played before (it's satisfying to take down skeletons and spearmen with cavalry). So now that I'm through with my own campaigns I've started to try it again.

I would like to request that on normal difficulty the tutorial messages be turned off.

EDIT: In the first scenario the bandits were quickly overwhelmed with their leader dieing on turn 6 before reinforcements could arive. Part of the issue being that the bandits mostly ignored the stationary guards who didn't do much and part due to bad luck on the bandits part.

[santi]

Hm. Playing the second Thorben siege (the "killer" scenario) on hard the issue was managing to kill all baddies faster than they are replaced by more waves, while still keeping enough gold for the future. That means attacking the baddies bases instead of sitting pretty at the walls/villages of the town, which would be too easy and boring. But of course that was because I did not replay the Wrath of the stone, meaning I started with some 2300 gold and making sure not to drop below 1700. So I see now why you wanted to rebalance Wrath, but if that's the only reson, I'd much prefer Victor and co making a donnation to Aldaden to help rebuild rather than making Wrath a(nother) running scenario. How much gold is one supposed to start with in the last killer scenario?

[Chris NS]

How much gold is one supposed to start with in the last killer scenario?

Not as much as you had. The loophole that enabled you to rack that the humungous amount of gold has now been closed, and it should no longer be possible to win The Wrath of the Stone the way you did.

Under most circumstances, you would start with 250 gold, and the idea is that this scenario is meant to be balanced so that you're spending all you time trying to hold off enemy forces stronger than you.

[santi]

Fine, but my point is: In order to limit the gold, use the previous fighting Wrath scenario and then
in order to rebuild Aldaden donnate (all gold-250) or some such function to reward efficiency, but even with the outmost efficiency make sure the gold you have left should not exceed 270 or so. This achieves your objective of not being able to build a mega-army while at the same time not ruining the fun (IMHO) of a fighting scenario.
Just my 2 cents

[santi]

BTW, thanks for the input, so I will manually reduce the gold to 250 and play the second Throben siege with that gold and see how hard it is. From what I have seen it should be doable at least till the dark guard arrives(have not played that far yet even with the 2500 gold start).

[Chris NS]

And now, introducing version 0.8.11. Unfortunately, I can't think of a vague amusing tagline to tie in the fact it's Easter Monday, so I'll just have to say this adds scenario 19b, so whichever way you went from The Last Stand, you can now go as far as scenario 20.

I have tested scenario 20 for functionality but not balance, so there may still be balance issues if you went via the swamp - suspect this path may currently be too easy. Anyway, I intent to add scenario 21 for 1.10.x, and then I'll probably port to 1.11.x before I complete the campaign. (Four playable scenarios to go, but the second one has a three-way split and the last two are uber-scenarios.)

[Gitanomad_X]

Hi Mr. NS,

I absolutely loved this campaign, but at some point a long time ago I made the tough decision to stop playing until it was finished simply because of the number of hours I was losing from work, school, and family. Nevertheless, I promised myself that when it was complete I would do the whole thing again. Is development still under way, and any news on the port to 1.12?

Thanks a million for all your work (and I know you have a life too…)