Monster Hunt

[Limabean]

Scenario is great, just tested it with my friend. We played on rather small map and game was one-sided, I mean monster died very quickly. What map sizes do you recommend for balanced gameplay?

The default size for the map generator should be reasonably balanced, although it is far from perfect. Was this your first time playing it? I've noticed that playing as the monster has a very steep learning curve. I haven't seen anyone figure out the strategy on their first try, which makes it very easy for the other players to win. If you could post a replay, I'd be happy to offer advice.

[Tortellini]

I was playing as monster-hunters (controlling all 3 sides) and my friend as monster. Yes, that was our first gameplay on that scenario so I guess we are just not familiar with all monster's features and special abilities. I think we will give it another try:) In that case we won't change map size for now.

[Computer_Player]

Hi. I've been playing this scenario and having a lot of fun

Firstly, I would like to post tips on how to play the Monster: Ghast that I have gleaned. If you have additional tips, it would be nice to post as well, since this would help a lot in lowering the learning curve.

General

As the monster you have three priorities. In decreasing order of importance, these are
1. Castles - these are the holy grail. This is because they allow you to infect other nearby castle tiles. They are clumps of future zombies and provide much needed battle power. More importantly, hitting castles means less areas from which to recruit from. I put this in the highest priority because you want to limit the heroes' recruiting power right from turn 1. You can do this by choosing a suitable target heroe, getting teleport, and then making a grottoe near him. Teleport to the grottoe and use speed burst to reach the castle. If done right, it would severely delay that person's recruitment, village grabbing and ability to get items.

As far as I have seen, this is the only way right now to have a decent chance of winning against competent hero players.

Be sure that you have enough xp to survive possible attack from the enemy when you do this. Account for 30 HP speed burst and his/her 3 free units getting powerful items.

2. Villages - your primary source of zombies, early to mid game are a race to get to these locations before the heroes do. Once they manage to get a unit there, it's going to be hard to dislodge them and you might need to get up there with the monster or use guardians.

Taking villages aside from giving you zombies (and giving the enemy survivors) also reduces enemy Raise Alarm locations, healing, and most importantly, income. You want to paralyze their income as soon as possible. Villages also are the main medium you use to spread far using Chain Infections. Be sure to watch out for any villages or castles in movement range of your newly spawned zombies.

3. Enemy Leaders - I put enemy leaders here because it is downright impossible to kill them early game, but if it does become possibility, they shoot up right to the top as taking them out means taking out a recruiter. Of course, taking out the leaders are the only real way to win the scenario objectives, but in my experience the game rarely lasts that long.

Upgrades

At the start of the game you can upgrade your monster's abilities and spawns. I advocate that you do this only after doing the Castle rush tactic outlined above so as to be sure you have enough HP to survive a counter attack.

At anyrate, you have a few options to choose from.

AI controlled units vs Human controlled - AI controlled units are cheap in terms of Max HP, but in my experience not worth it, primarily because they do not go for castles and villages. UNLESS, and it's a big unless, you go with AI Random Spawn strategy, in which you buy nothing BUT AI Random Spawns, aiming to blanket the map with a deluge of random spawns. Thus, usually, you want Human controlled units. As a side note, you can temporarily transfer control of these units to AI in the same way you transfer zombies, and they do count to Monster Points.


Random vs Set location spawn - Random location are popular because they allow you access to parts of the map that would normally not be accessible to you. This means you could catch the heroes offguard, or beat them to a village or castle unexpetedly. The downsides ofcourse being it random, and that more often than not, they end up getting killed very fast, giving the enemy more xp. Set location has the advantage of a guaranteed safe spawning point (and thus consistent reinforcement). The temptation might arise for you to put it in an area that isn't exactly safe, or in forward points where nobody else is to facilitate castle/ village infections of far flung areas. In my experience this is a bad idea as they just, more often than not, get shut down fast. But if you are fairly sure it's safe, go ahead.

Grottoes - Grottoes are your only place of healing (generally) in the game, as the only villages you own. Use them to heal your monster (stacks with regen) or guardians or units. They also provide support for your teleport and concealment as well as the only place where you can recruit guardians.
You can set them anywhere as long as it's not less than 5 hexes away from the enemy. Use these to set the battlefields during the start and go behind enemy lines during midgame. Place them where you can reasonably set up chain infection or at least have lots of targets near.

With Guardians vs with no guardians - Generally, I get the one with a free guardian as with just being +3 Hp more, it's more economical. Besides you can just make up the difference with feeding. More importantly, I probably will be buying more guardians around the perimiter to reach nearby villages. Be sure to leave a guardian on top of the Grottoe as spawning survivors might reach it and extinguish it (as well as getting a free unit).

Concealment - Don't get this, it's a waste of HP. If it was cheaper maybe it would be worth it, but right now it's too expensive. Buying this also gives Concealment to all guardians bought afterwards.

Regen - Very important. Aside from healing, it's also replenishes your currency to but guardians (which is Active HP). Various builds on how much to buy, but I generally buy up to +12 or +16.

Feeding - Very important. This is your primary way to replinish Max HP. However, if you're not planning to kill many people personally, you might just forgo upgrading it.

Teleport - Useful. Buying this gives Teleport ability to all guardians bought afterwards. Buy this to move from one grottoe to another, and to execute the 1st turn Castle Infection Strategy.

Note: After upgrading, you probably hove a lot of extra Active HP (hp above your Max HP number). Use all the extra HP up buying guardians, because the next turn all those extra HP is going to be deducted automatically, bringing you down to Max HP no matter how much it was originally!

Attacks
As a monster you have a number of attacks to use against mortals.

10-3 Bite. Melee - Blade. Poison . - Your most damaging attack, this is the attack you'll be using most often, usually to kill off or damage units.

2-3 Possess. Melee - Arcane. Slows. Poison. Plague. Marksmen. Turn Undead. - When you can afford to, use this attack to kill. It turns into zombies living cratures and most importantly, it brings the killed undead unit under your control. This is your only effective weapon against undead (particularly ghosts). When there is an undead heroe- beeline for him personally since you want to Turn Undead his units before they dismantly yours.

1-1 disease. No retal. Desperation 5. Disease - Desperation attacks reduce your Max HP, in this case by 5, however you can still move after doing them. Disease is most useful against clumps of enemies such as Castle Guardians. However the best way to use disease is to get one of your own living units to catch it from an enemy. Thus, you can spread it to the enemy proactively, instead of waiting for them to make mistakes. The bonus is you get a free zombie once your unit dies.

1-1 cloud. No retal. Desperation 10. Poison Cloud - At 10 Max HP this attack is pretty expensive, but not only is it an area of effect attack (hitting all units around you, yes, even your own so watch out) Poison Cloud is actually many debuffs rolled into one. Aside from poison AND slow, it also removes the ZoC around those units. Use this to escape (perhaps after baiting the enemy to gather around you), to allow your units to "skirmish" through the enemy and infect vils or castles.

Miscellaneous.


I want to generally have around 60-70+ HP after upgrades so that I could do Speed Burst for attacking, or have a cache of HP to buy upgrades with to respond dynamically to the situation of the battlefield.

However it is conceivably possible to buy upgrades right until you are 1 HP. Ofcourse this would remove your Monster as a battlefield unit, but it might be a possible strategy.

As much as possible Transfer control of units to AI as this gives Monster Points for each unit. Every 50 MP gives +1 HP. Low, but better than nothing. It also makes the game go faster.

-End Tips-

As you can see, I think the Monster Side is a bit of at a disadvantage currently and at Standard HP it's pretty hard to actually win. IMO +50 or even +30 HP to standard would go a long way to making it a more even fight.

Also I suggest changing Concealment to Nightstalk (teach the enemy to fear the night yes ? ).

As for suggestions for the Heroe side, perhaps a method to create "barricades" or recruiting militia from flagged villages (maybe at twice the cost?).

The only major aspect that I think is lost, is the "adventure" part of Zombie scenarios. That is, perhaps you could send your "free units (the one with hero trait)" to a "scavenger hunt" in rubble. Chance it dies and becomes a zombie, but it's one way to get gold, units, or perhaps items when there are no income left.

An alternate win objective of infecting all villages?

Bugs - it seems you can't repair vils. If you try to, it just ends up becoming an encampment (also you can't re-infect these repaired keeps).

Hope to see the other monsters soon

For the wolf, perhaps change it to a Werewolf. Pack buffs may still work, but perhaps it could also have a lycanthrophy attack, where it turns the enemy into a wolf when killed?

For Dungeon Master, isn't he going to have trouble infecting vils?

P.S. Any suggestions on settings for a smaller map in an attempt to make a faster game (right now, they last quite a long while)?

[Computer_Player]

Sorry for the double post, but figured it deserved it's own post.

Just reminder that this isn't available for 1.12 yet.

[Limabean]

Computer_Player: I appreciate all the feedback and glad you're enjoying this. Unfortunately, it has been almost a year since I've done any work on it. I'm thinking about porting it to 1.12 along with a big balance update, but I've been on a bit of a wesbreak lately with RL keeping me busy. It will probably be a while before I get a chance to do it, sorry.

[Computer_Player]

So,any chance this can be ported? Is Limabean still around or is it possible one of those who know can take over / or just port this.

Coz I really really like this add-on and would hate it to just disappear D:

[Xara]

I ported this add-on to 1.12 after minimal playtest and only fixed deprecated description formats. If you find more bugs in your play, tell me and I will try to fix them.

[Computer_Player]

So I've played a few games (and lost some). Still as fun as I remeber.. when we manage to get it going.

aside from outdated script, the major bug is the frequent out of sync.. specifically, the spawns made by the monster side when it captures vils/ castles.

They spawn differently sometimes based on some factor. Different / Out-of-sync spawn is possible even between Host (with me controlling all human controlled sides) and obs.

Here's a test replay, not sure about Horus2's claim of a unit moving despite being out of turn (I'm thinking this is a hallucianation, pending more tests ofcourse).

Thanks very much. XD

[Ravana]

Unit moving out of turn just means that game of viewer and game of mover see units of different side at that location - game sends from where and to where is movement, not who moves.

[Xara]

Sorry, but I lost my Wesnoth userdata due to a recent failed attempt to update my OS to win10. I promised to maintain this add-on but I can’t. If anyone is interested in the task, he can ask the moderates for the passphrase of the add-on.

[Computer_Player]

Hi is it possible for this to be ported?

[Atreides]

Inspired by version 2.0 (which is great but very different) I decided to fish this one out and try it under 1.12. That's Xara's port. It needed a few small fixes to make it work properly (the stderr log still spits out some stuff which I won't even pretend to understand but from playing a few games it doesn't seem to matter) and is quite a lot of fun too.

It doesn't seem as well balanced and thought out as version 2 is but it does have some neat features that did not make the jump. It's generally wilder and less predictable thanks to the monster's ability to buy random spawns. The grottos and located spawns seem less valuable unless, I suppose, one follows a more "base oriented" strategy for the monster.
The hero side gets 3 heroes and 3 artifacts (presumably 1 per but you are free to do anything) plus the ability to rebuild villages (very costly 2 lvl 1 units must be sacrificed) but has a lot of territory to cover. Castle guards are provided which can only move 1 outside the castle. Probably best kept to guard the castle from random spawns as I've found out. It is tempting to send them to nearby villages (slowly at 1 hex a turn) but I think now that's a mistake. Mostly empty multi hex castles can be turned into dozens of zombies in 1 turn while villages could always be rebuilt.
Speaking of artifacts they are tricky to pick. Not all are useful for every hero. The undead specials like holy water, et. al. are obvious but it does randomly remove part of the list after each pick meaning you may end up with something unusable. Also you don't get a chance to know what units you start with before picking your items so generic choices tend to be it. They are dropped on the ground though so if you are patient you could match them up with a recruit instead of a hero.

The map is randomly generated which is cool. Trickily that means the scenario does not show up under scenarios because of that. It's under random maps which is not where you expect it to be.

[Limabean]

I'm impressed you went and dug it up. Your thoughts sound similar to my own. I think it was very chaotic, which was interesting. Anything that could be randomized was randomized. But it was also impossible to balance, pretty buggy, and not very fun for the hero players. I have thought about remaking a random-map version of the scenario, which would be much closer to the original. But I can't promise I'll actually have the time for it

[Atreides]

Digging stuff up is my "thing" I guess. : ) I always did love archaeology.

Yeah chaos is the word for it. Quite entertaining solo but in multiplayer it likely engendered some complaints, hehe.

P.S. I'm still fascinated by this, keep playing new games. The Monster is HARD to figure out. This time I read the excellent guide posted here by a player. Will try that out next. I guess I was wrong that grotto/teleport are useless, heh. As for the advice re: Feeding I did work out something different than the guide. 1 upgrade seems to be the only cost effective use. 10 MHP for 4 feeding means 2.5 feeds to recoup the cost. 2 means 21 MPH for 5 and as you can see, vastly diminishing returns. Feeding just seems too hard to set up. Maybe I'll try corralling lvl0's with zombies and over several turns eat all the peasants without turning them into zombies. Anyways there are almost infinite ways to play the monster... and most of them are wrong. :- )

[Atreides]

Something about this old version keeps me going back for more games. Maybe it's the free for all aspect, dunno. Heh, by now I've actually fully debugged it. Last thing was the Survivors not getting XP bonuses.

Code: Select all

rand=.3,.6,.9,1.2

looks alright, no? Hehe, nope it doesn't like the lack of a 0 before the decimal point.

For future searchers if you're getting Illegal Unary Operator errors in stderr something like this may be the cause.