A simple MP campaign

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TL
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Joined: March 3rd, 2007, 3:02 am

A simple MP campaign

Post by TL »

I just made a simple 6 scenario campaign for two players head to head (mostly, in spite of a few co-op scenarios), called Valley of the Ancients. Some of you may have seen me testing this on the MP server, but the MP server has been acting up this weekend so I figured I may as well go ahead and let other people try it; it's on the dev campaign server now. It seems to be working OK but the later scenarios have not been thoroughly tested online and the whole thing could use some playtesting for balance tweaking, so caveat... uh... players.

Mostly it's a pretty experimental campaign. The plot is pretty generic and cliche; I just made it to play around with MP campaign design a bit. It tries (sometimes a bit clumsily, I confess) to mix things up in the later scenarios by giving the player who's doing worse various "catch-up" bonuses to prevent a runaway leader situation. It hasn't been balance-tested very much, so any feedback would be appreciated.
SkeletonCrew
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Post by SkeletonCrew »

Very nice to see new MP campaigns being developed again :)
Rhuvaen
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Post by Rhuvaen »

I just did a dry run of this to see what you made, and it's nicely done! :)

I like that you try to explore and showcase some of the possibilities of adjustments from scenario to scenario - ranging from having the player cooperate (rather unwillingly) to giving them different starting positions etc depending on previous outcome. Note that I haven't played this in a real game yet to judge balance.

In the fourth scenario, I get the following error the first time a dwarf is killed by an attack (and turns into a walking corpse):
console wrote:error general: An error due to possible invalid WML occured
The error message is :
An invalid weapon is selected, possibly by the Python AI.

When reporting the bug please include the following error message :
Condition 'attacker_weapon < static_cast<int>(attacker.attacks().size())' failed at actions.cpp:250 in function 'battle_context'.
It happens just after the dwarf dialog part (the WC is already there). I can't see a problem with the WML (WC getting placed on a die event), so perhaps this is a new issue in 1.5+svn? :(
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TL
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Re: A simple MP campaign

Post by TL »

Strange. I haven't had any problems with it before, and a quick check reveals it's still working as of 1.4. So... I'm all for blaming 1.5+svn.
SkeletonCrew
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Re:

Post by SkeletonCrew »

console wrote:error general: An error due to possible invalid WML occured
The error message is :
An invalid weapon is selected, possibly by the Python AI.

When reporting the bug please include the following error message :
Condition 'attacker_weapon < static_cast<int>(attacker.attacks().size())' failed at actions.cpp:250 in function 'battle_context'.
It happens just after the dwarf dialog part (the WC is already there). I can't see a problem with the WML (WC getting placed on a die event), so perhaps this is a new issue in 1.5+svn? :([/quote]

This sounds like this [1] bug, which I fixed in 1.4.
If it still happens in 1.4 please post a bug report.

[1] https://gna.org/bugs/index.php?10926
grrr
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Re: A simple MP campaign

Post by grrr »

Sorry to say that but already the first map isn't very balanced. The south west favors rebbies while the bulk of cavs move towards P1. Now say P1 starts with northies ... yep, instantly screwed.

So perhaps fix the factions? Or make a campaign era? Surely it gets easier to balance then.
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TL
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Re: A simple MP campaign

Post by TL »

grrr wrote:Or make a campaign era? Surely it gets easier to balance then.
Yes, albeit a bit less diverse.

In practice I've yet to see either of these issues have a major impact. I purposely went with a more naturalistic and less rigorously MP-balanced design for the first map since it is, after all, just an AI fight. Unless you charge headlong into the AI's superior numbers, you shouldn't be in any trouble. I've done well as northerners even on earlier versions of the map where the AI steered towards P1 even more heavily (the times I've tried it on the current version, it tends to split its forces more or less evenly unless one player rushes way ahead of the other).

The campaign as a whole is intended very much as an experiment in alternate modes of balance, so I'm not critically concerned with conventional balance. I suppose you could make the argument that equalizing map/faction balance would make it easier to judge the impact of the balance adjustments imposed by the campaign, though. Perhaps another, more traditional MP-style campaign with adjustments may be in order.
Troopadoop
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Re: A simple MP campaign

Post by Troopadoop »

Three of us have played Kill the Virgins twice to not be able to finish the game. The virgins do not appear when we land on the windmills at the alter.
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