Legend of the Invincibles

[Ashes]

I'm not patient enough to kill all the demons over and over again... to be honest, I think chapter 9 stretches way too long anyway, fighting the same enemies over and over again in scenarios which are mostly very similar. I haven't thought about suggestions to improve gameplay in this chapter, but I feel that it needs a lot more variety to really stay interesting.

I think that one problem is that the demon have random traits, which make each encounter very similar, and pushes to have generic units rather than specialised ones. Generic unit meaning unit that can kill any demon, based on penetration and sustain (resistance, absorb, suck). Chapter 9 would be more interesting, IMHO, if each area had demons with specificities, e.g. cold-based demons around the Island of atrocity. And instead of having always the same units with autorecall, I would prefer to have to choose specific units for each area.
Currently, my way of playing chapter 9 is very automatic: Efraim and Lethalia can sustain any attack, they go alone; I have six normal units around my Duke (with Legacy of Kings, Tome of Bards and a royal diadem, any adjacent unit becomes a super-warrior, but now that these units have gained a lot of experience, they don't really need the Duke anymore); plus a Warlock, a Dwarvish Battlerager and a Duelist Wizard that can survive alone, unless they are completely surrounded by demons, and whose job is to stay near spawning locations to kill demons one by one.

[ForestDragon]

so, here is a new female prophet made the 'The_Gnat':

arcane-female.png (262.26 KiB) Viewed 4665 times

[Chewan]

@ Xargon » chapter 9: fighting the same enemies over and over again in scenarios which are mostly very similar

Yeah, thinking of this stretch still makes me shudder... it illustrates successfully the endless agony of hell. I love exploring big maps and caves, but often had to take a break, was close to throw in the towel in frustration - and in this spirit I voted in the poll above on parts in most need of improvement.

@ Ashes » my way of playing chapter 9 is very automatic – if each area had demons with specificities...

Battling stoically on and on without thinking too much isn't worthy of LotI, IMHO. Yes, perfectly terrain adapted demons is a good suggestion! Different foes in each scenario, more chambers that create absurd illusions (such as Execrable Sanctum), even turn your whole army into something else (IDK, ghosts or animals) or temporarily disable certain abilities, traits or items... Well, I readily admit that I am no expert on item strategies, balance or the extra coding work it would involve, or whether such miracle transformations are doable at all.

@ Ashes » having always the same units with autorecall

Quite possible I'm wrong... but isn't auto-recall configurable? Of course, changes only take effect at the start of the next scenario – too late, with unknown area.

@ ForestDragon » a new female prophet

Much better! Nice!
I just came across a reasonable pointer by revansurik about a more feminine shape of the breastplate … There is an image that gives an initial idea of what he meant (spoiler 1). Just a suggestion...

[Xargon]

I think that one problem is that the demon have random traits, which make each encounter very similar, and pushes to have generic units rather than specialised ones. Generic unit meaning unit that can kill any demon, based on penetration and sustain (resistance, absorb, suck). Chapter 9 would be more interesting, IMHO, if each area had demons with specificities, e.g. cold-based demons around the Island of atrocity. And instead of having always the same units with autorecall, I would prefer to have to choose specific units for each area.
Currently, my way of playing chapter 9 is very automatic: Efraim and Lethalia can sustain any attack, they go alone; I have six normal units around my Duke (with Legacy of Kings, Tome of Bards and a royal diadem, any adjacent unit becomes a super-warrior, but now that these units have gained a lot of experience, they don't really need the Duke anymore); plus a Warlock, a Dwarvish Battlerager and a Duelist Wizard that can survive alone, unless they are completely surrounded by demons, and whose job is to stay near spawning locations to kill demons one by one.

Good suggestions! Having to use different units would definitely be great (apart from the annoying issue of having to reequip every time...).
I similarly try to build generalists. My levelling is far from optimal, since this is still my first playthrough and I actually wanted to experiment with the redeem spells (most of which do not really pay of) and other things - therefore, I am glad that normal difficulty makes it easy to win without having to grind or pay too close attention to developing the most powerful units.
That being said, I have some units that can survive on their own (some dwarvish heroes with high resistances, some suck, absorb and berserk from lycanthropy, champion with high evade, resists, suck and berserk from lycanthropy), plus some units that can kill almost everything offensively (nightprowlers with berserk/slow/cold attack, technocrats with 25-46 attacks without bonuses, scythemaster with 45-8 whirlwind), but I usually move in formation. I also built some leadership type units, two faeries with royalty and one has legacy of kings, an elf warlord with legacy of kings, royalty and bardsong, a duke with bardsong. Like you describe, a formation is basically unbreakable.

Yeah, thinking of this stretch still makes me shudder... it illustrates successfully the endless agony of hell. I love exploring big maps and caves, but often had to take a break, was close to throw in the towel in frustration - and in this spirit I voted in the poll above on parts in most need of improvement.

In fact, this stretch caused me to stop playing for quite a while. I took a break of over a year before I randomly got some motivation to play Wesnoth again. I also voted for chapter 9 now. I do see that endless hordes and vast wastelands fit the philosophy of hell, but that doesn't mean it's a good idea for gameplay, unfortunately... Instead of being able to steamroll everything, it would be interesting to have certain points where you have to circumvent the main forces by going through a tunnel system, for example (which would allow for something different from demons). I like the change in the autorecall system (starting with 8 and having to buy more), but it can still get tiring to move 15+ units across some of the large maps, with little challenge apart from 1 or 2 big battles against the recruited waves. I think it would be good to restrict to very few of the large, unit-heavy maps. The terrain is pretty repetitive as well.

Quite possible I'm wrong... but isn't auto-recall configurable? Of course, changes only take effect at the start of the next scenario – too late, with unknown area.

It is, but reconfiguring it manually plus doing all the reequipping work for little benefit is not very motivating... it would be better if there were truly different scenarios as Ashes suggested, maybe with some dialog beforehand to give you some idea of what's ahead, and e.g. an option to at least unequip units automatically when taking them off the recall list.

All in all, I think the recall list still gets too big at the end. Maxing it at 10, for example, might provide some motivation to recall additional units in difficult scenarios, meaning you have to actually pay some attention to gold.

I attached the savefile in case Dugi wants to have a look at it at some point. I wanted to give the faerie a bardsong tome and noticed that giving her any book kills performance whenever she is on screen.

[Celtic_Minstrel]

so, here is a new female prophet made the 'The_Gnat':

That does look more feminine, though it gives the impression of her helmet being a little too large. I also have a vague feeling that body proportions should be subtly different than in the male version, but I'm not familiar enough with that area to describe exactly what would need to be done. Maybe you should try posting this in the art forum so that actual artists can comment on it?

[Xargon]

Another small bug: In Antechambers of Ultimate Evil, there was a dialog with Abaddon - except he was not there, so my characters just said their lines of dialog without any answer...

[Zebo12345]

Hey, I have been playing this campaign, and I love it. The unit advancements are fun, equipping my troops with high-end gear is fun, and I love taking on hordes of enemies with a squad of elite troops. I am currently in chapter 7, which is written very well. I only have one complaint so far for chapter 7. The enemies are kind of bland. They are all weak to arcane, and they practically all have shadowbolt. There is just something boring about fighting 2-4 groups of these enemies for 4 scenarios in a row, because every enemy acts the same way. There is very little difference between drakes, orcs, naga, and elves in these scenarios. The effect this has on me isn't severe, though I find myself resorting to debug mode more often (When I cheat, it's only for a scenario which I have spent a lot of time on already and am bored of. Doing this makes my units get less XP, since I really just use the kill command, so it actually hurts me in the long run) just to escape these scenarios. If you have general purpose mages, with resistance to arcane/cold you can really just win with those. Unfortunately for me, I only have a few mages, and am mainly using heavy hitting melee characters. (I like smashing things ) In other words, I tend to take too much damage fighting them. While this is definitely something which I could have prepared for better on my part, it does disappoint me that my units which I have been leveling since chapter 6 are acting primarily useless against these enemies.

Another general piece of feedback that I have is that the redeem abilities just aren't as good as the old abilities my heroes had. (Don't remember what that was called) Redeem is not easy to pull off consistently, and the advancements I get from them aren't as substantial as the old ones were. Efraim used to have a fantastic shadow bolt which could steal enough life to have him GAIN HP when attacked, which was really fun. Lethalia could drop a meteor and kill entire squadrons of enemies (except for the guy who she targeted. He somehow dodges that meteor surprisingly often ;D ) and that too, was lots of fun. The abilities I have gained from Redeem so far have been basic stat upgrades, and though they affect a wide spectrum of things (weapons enhancements improves ALL weapons, magic enhancements improve ALL magic) they have not changed my playstyle at all, so my heroes feel very basic. Good, but basic.


My suggestions are as follows:
1. The enemies in ch. 7 should be specialized by race. I get that you wanted to give them necromancer attacks, so I would keep the shadowbolts. Orcs, for example, might have a weak shadowbolt, but hefty melee attacks. Maybe even some good specialties on their melee attacks, like cleave. Drakes are already kind of fitting, though maybe they could have something like a mid-damage shadowbolt with pierce (or whatever that weapon specialty is that also damages the person behind the target). Elves are already magically in-tune, so they should have no hard time "adapting" to the addition of necrotic spells, so they would have the heavy-hitting spells like they do now. This way, the player can use all different kinds of units effectively in these scenarios. The player would indeed be encouraged to attack the elves with Lethalia (dat faerie fire) to handle the elves, and Efraim to handle the orcs. This would be an improvement over the current system, where every enemy feels like the same kind of enemy, and no matter who you fight, the same characters will be effective, using the same attacks.

2. Either make the advancements more unique, or make them easier to get. (You have already made them easier to get before, and I don't particularly think it would solve the problem, so I think making them more unique would be better.) The advancements as they are now are indeed powerful, but they lack any character-defining factors. Correct me if I am wrong (and I might be, I am not that far past the introduction of Demigods) but the weapon/magic enhancements don't add anything but damage and maybe attacks to your combat choices. If they added weapon specials like Magical, or Cleave, or even Merges Attacks, they would be more fun.

As a side note, #2 was the same feedback I had for Fallout 4. It was missing something in the perk system that Skyrim and Fallout: New Vegas had, and Fallout 3 had: Character Uniqueness. Your warrior in Skyrim is not going to do well with a spell, and your melee weapons expert is going to excel with melee weapons in Fallout 3/New Vegas. In Fallout 4, every character can do well with every weapon. This reduced replayability, and my interest in the game. LOTI does not suffer from that in the first 5 chapters, and doesn't suffer much in chapter 6 from it either, but afterwards, once you have Demigods, the heroes become all-around characters instead of specialists.

[Xargon]

Your comments about advancements are a bit weird because all the things you are missing do in fact exist already. There is a whole magic spells tree in the redeem advancements, most of which have some area effects (although it is still debatable whether most of them are worth the advancements). There is also cleave and I believe marksman in the advancements somewhere. There are also so many advancement options that you might have a hard time to create characters doing well against everything in later chapters (once enemies show up who can deal a lot of damage). I suspect that ignoring most of the fancy spells will actually work best...

[Xargon]

Is the passage of detriment just completely empty? After 15 turns of walking, nothing at all happened. It also has terrible performance. The description sounded like something cool could be hidden there, but it looks like it is just a pointlessly large, completely empty, repetitive and boring map. Sorry for sounding so negative, but I feel that having this map, even as an optional one, gives a rather bad impression.
I do like the idea of having the option of bypassing some of the "regular" levels, at some disadvantage, but I really don't like this execution.

[Zebo12345]

Your comments about advancements are a bit weird because all the things you are missing do in fact exist already. There is a whole magic spells tree in the redeem advancements, most of which have some area effects (although it is still debatable whether most of them are worth the advancements). There is also cleave and I believe marksman in the advancements somewhere. There are also so many advancement options that you might have a hard time to create characters doing well against everything in later chapters (once enemies show up who can deal a lot of damage). I suspect that ignoring most of the fancy spells will actually work best...

Yeah, I was thinking about it today, and I have NO clue what I was thinking. It's still quite fun, and I am not having any of these feelings playing it today. I take back EVERYTHING I said. Sorry 'bout that guys!

[Xargon]

I am now going through Uria's lair/castle, which I think is quite a bit better than the first part of Inferno (apart from the passage of detriment which I still consider pointless). However, there are too many events where your whole army gets moved to a specific spot and a lot of enemies appear. Most of the time, this is just annoying because there are a few units I had positioned somewhere and who I still wanted to move. I would prefer getting some kind of warning and having to move the units myself.

[Me2]

1.- I´m not getting any drop at all in LotI and I don´t know why. All I can get are the items generated as treasures and the buyable ones. I uninstalled it (and deleted all folders) and reinstalled it all over again, but problem persists. I´m unable to get drops in "Custom Campaign either" in despite I downloaded the LotI mod...

2.- I have read the "map creation" -and even I have created many now, so I can even balance them- but I would like to put some units here and there as well as treasures... but I can´t find the option in the menu. It would be very useful (if possible) a map creator in the style of "Empire Earth", in which you can even modify stats of units. If developers could do this thing easy we would have a lot more ppl (besidesprogrammers) developing stories. I would love to work in Wagner´s "The ring of the Nibelung" for sure i.e!

[Xargon]

Not sure if Aura of Universal Annihilation works the way it is intended to. I have the sword on Vritra, and whenever she stands next to other units, it seems to raise the "double defence" limit that steadfast gives from 50% to 80%.

That being said, I found this effect VERY helpful in the early chapter 10 scenarios. After failing quite miserably the first time, I read a tip here to use the item Defensive Stance and craft lots of lowlevel items focused on defence. This helped greatly (and consumed the majority of my gems), and the above effect helped to have units which can actually withstand an attack... I think the difficulty curve is a bit steep from the first to the second scenario - first you face scattered demons that you can pick off one by one, then you are faced with a large blob of demons. It gets more complicated if some demon has berserk(3), because the orc will suicide literally all of his army, leaving no cannon fodder at all. I think it would be nice if the orc reacted once you kill your first demon, recognizing that you are powerful enough to kill some demons, and sending goblins to protect you (as he suggests himself the following scenario). Since the AI probably can't do that, this could be in the form of just moving them somewhere and giving them to you, or simply giving them to you.

edit: Um, and another quick question: How does lesser redeem work? I slowed animations to be able to read what it displays when it works, and it was 2/7.5, which I can't really make sense of.

[ZIM]

I want to ask something,

Does it intended that Legacy of Sorrow's AMLA that says " -10% to resistances of all adjacent enemies" only gives the conviction ability that only reduces fire, cold, and arcane resistances? Doesn't it also needs to give frail tide ability?

Also, is it just me or that the item Unprecious Ring drops too often? I've already got like 8-9 pieces.

[braknor]

I encountered a bug with the AMLA on Wesnoth version 1.12.5. When two units are close to level up at the end of the round and they both gain enough EXP to level up during the enemies turn then the AMLA dialog will appear only for one unit. The other unit will not get the chance to choose an AMLA. The best way to reproduce this is to use DEBUG mode and modify the EXP of two units who are standing near enemies to max_exp - 1. Then end the turn in order to let them get attacked by enemies. Both level up but only one gets the AMLA.
Has anyone else observed this behaviour?