Black Tide faction

[Gyra_Solune]

So basically because I am slightly perfectionist and don't like all these perfectly usable things already in Wesnoth's files not present in the multiplayer, I decided to stitch them together into a faction of its own! In lore terms it's pretty much just the same thing as any given outlaw faction, slightly pirate-ish themed because conveniently most units look the part, with a beast summoner element to it. But instead of the approach of say, EE where most of these are plugged into their respective factions, I just wanted them to be collated like this to retain the balance of existing factions.

Units lines present:

Mermaid Initiate
Dwarvish Scout
Dwarvish Runesmith (Leader only, AoH recruitable, altered to upgrade into the Dwarvish Arcanister)
Thug
Young Ogre
Orcish Leader
Pirate Galleon
Transport Galleon
Tentacle of the Deep
Mudcrawler
Giant Rat
Wolf (Altered to upgrade into Great Wolf and Direwolf)
Giant Scorpion
Fire Guardian
Water Serpent (Leader only, AoH recruitable)
Cuttle Fish (Leader only, AoH recruitable)
Sea Serpent (AoH leader only)
Giant Spider (AoH leader only)

This is mostly just for me to get accustomed to faction development - in the future I hope to make a lot more factions done in a simple plug-in and use style, all balanced around the base Default Era in both gameplay and presentation. But who knows, maybe this could be considered an interesting faction to seriously play as in its own right!

i maintain giant rats are useful somehow

[UnwiseOwl]

Welcome to the forums and congrats for jumping right in to UMC creation. It's the best way to learn and a lot of fun, too.

In your factions document there are quote marks " around your unit and terrain ids, so it's looking for units called "mermaid this, mermaid that ..."
Just remove those quotes, and you should be a lot closer

Good luck, Owl.

[Gyra_Solune]

That's the way both mainline and add-on faction configs are formatted though, it's needed to define that as a string. The problem isn't with that, it's with tags messing up somehow.

But uh I got it to work anyways! Mostly just by cleaning up the organization of the code. Will be linking the faction properly with a dropbox link or so - alongside, ah, having it utilize the Khalifate by default, forgot to let it do that!

[Gyra_Solune]

Alright, it is on version 1.0.3 and that is liable to be the 'complete' version in its current state. The only real possibilities in question involve porting units over from other campaigns (not many that really fit), and maybe altering the info to list that the wolves and Runemaster have upgrades. Otherwise, it is more or less complete - I hope it is enjoyable! It's definitely a weird faction to play as, and has been called into question whether it's up to snuff with the other factions - given, well, the units within were not designed as such. If you find any effective tactics playing as them, feel free to share! I maintain it could well work out amongst other factions in a seriously competitive environment, if maybe very awkwardly, but it takes unusual movement.

In any case, I hope all enjoy it!

[Gyra_Solune]

A bunch of updates later and things are pretty much in their most complete state that I could really hope to achieve, save for drastic new mainline changes or additions. I relented and finally added in the boats and the Tentacle of the Deep, which manage to work fine as standard units so long as you make sure to recruit them next to water tiles, heh. So basically the faction has literally every leftover unit possible in some way within it excepting the three level 0 peasant guys, those errant higher-level units of the Armageddon Drake, Elder Mage, and Ancient Lich, the two dragons, and the Yeti, who would be a prime candidate for the level 4 leader in an Era of Legends scenario.

It sounds weird and overwhelming, and is almost certainly completely broken in Age of Heroes, but so far in Default era play it's been surprisingly well-behaved. It turns out that of all these, there aren't very many standard level 1 recruits left...and in this case there's a very simple and standard 6 normal units that promote as usual, all of them being pretty standard fare, with mostly normal melee land units, the same scout as the Northerners though promoting a little differently, and an aquatic mage. On its own these would probably be pretty underpowered actually, with most of the units being extremely expensive for what they're capable of, the cheap Thug being the only exception. Arrayed around it though are a very large amount of non-promoting monsters and stuff though, which provide a bit of extra capacity that you want to be careful not to feed too much XP to. There's a slightly interesting dynamic there, with a land force composed largely of very normal, slightly beefy chaotic melee units who are heavily lacking on range, and an extremely potent lawful aquatic set of units that have extremely high range potential but are both incredibly fragile to melee and are restricted to limited terrain. In general, I think it could actually kind of work mainlined, even though it would be very very silly if it were given its conception. I slightly worry Undead has problems dealing with it, with their abundance of cheap, hard-hitting impact, and it very much had no options against Drakes when last I tested it, which is what prompted me to add in the boats that even things up somewhat...depending on the map.

But yes, I can see people have downloaded it muchly and I hope they rather enjoy playing around with units uncommonly seen or used in the rest of the game. Hooray!

[Atreides]

Crashed wesnoth 1.14 when tried in afterlife scenario vs khalifate.