19 - Costly Revenge

Feedback for the mainline single-player campaign Legend of Wesmere.

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CeltiK
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Joined: April 24th, 2011, 9:14 am

19 - Costly Revenge

Post by CeltiK »

(1) What difficulty levels and what version of Wesnoth have you played the scenario on?

v1.9.5, Medium

(2) How difficult did you find the scenario? (1-10)

9

(3) How clear did you find the scenario objectives?

Clear

(4) How clear and interesting did you find the dialog and storyline of the scenario?

Interesting enough.

(5) What were your major challenges in meeting the objectives of the scenario?

Lots of saurians, low mobility due to snow, no incomes and no way to heal.

(6) How fun do you think the scenario is? (1-10)

Only 2, this scenario is very frustrating.

(7) What, if any, are changes you would have made to the scenario to make it more fun?

I understand why we can't have any healer (or villages) here, but the large number of enemies plus the snow makes it frustrating. I managed to complete it because I had a lot of level 3s but I must admit that I had to save-load a couple of times, I really don't like to do it. Maybe the saurians should have less gold, around 25% less.

(8) Was there any event that caused you to lose the game and forced you to reload or restart the scenario?

No incomes and no healing so you have limited amount of troops. I think it must be impossible for players who don't have a lot of level 3s.
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rmj
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Re: Version 1.7/1.8 - Scenario Review: LoW 19 - Costly Reven

Post by rmj »

1.9.8 normal level

It was easy because the sylphs and shydes could be recalled.

And then at scenario 22 northern battle, the sylphs and shydes could not be recalled.
rmj
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taptap
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Re: V1.9/1.10 - 19 - Costly Revenge

Post by taptap »

Saurians are immobile on ice and the AI can't cope with ambush ability. I finished this with minimal losses (1 sharpshooter) and 220 starting gold - but admittedly nearly lost on time.
I am a Saurian Skirmisher: I'm a real pest, especially at night.
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Ninjuri
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Re: V1.9/1.10 - 19 - Costly Revenge

Post by Ninjuri »

(1) What difficulty levels and game versions have you played the scenario on?
easy 1.10.2
(2) How difficult did you find the scenario? (1-10)
10
(3) How clear did you find the scenario objectives?
Clear, it's your basic slash and burn.
(4) How clear and interesting did you find the dialog and storyline of the scenario?
Storyline was good, i'm noticing the growing rift between the two remaining main characters.
(5) What were your major challenges in meeting the objectives of the scenario?
This is what got me, I recalled every single leveled unit i had, and spent all my gold until i ran out, yet still got horribly overwhelmed two steps from my castle. When i looked at the status table, and the income and starting gold of the two enemies compared to mine, i yelled very audibly "HOLY HELL!" Now i literally have no idea how i'd get though this without cheating. This is supposed to be an elf massacre of the saurians, yes? It feels like the exact opposite, i'm the one getting massacred.
(6) How fun do you think the scenario is? (1-10)
It would be a lot funner if i could somehow get through it.
(7) What, if any, are changes you would have made to the scenario to make it more fun?
Ease up a bit on the difficulty, especially for easy mode players like myself.

(attachment related, it's me getting mobbed and slaughtered)
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Fate is against me.
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taptap
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Re: V1.9/1.10 - 19 - Costly Revenge

Post by taptap »

Don't make two steps from your castle - at least not forward - but make them follow you to the ice in the north. There they die so rapidly that you can even level units - which is your only way to heal in this scenario - and you can disengage at will. Send some ranger/avenger type units hidden through the forests and let them jump out to destroy villages (reduces AI income and takes time) when no saurian is close by, then hide again in time. This works well on hard and should do on easy as well.
I am a Saurian Skirmisher: I'm a real pest, especially at night.
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Ninjuri
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Re: V1.9/1.10 - 19 - Costly Revenge

Post by Ninjuri »

Well it's too late for that now, haha.
Fate is against me.
kallewirsch
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Joined: March 22nd, 2012, 6:30 pm

Re: V1.9/1.10 - 19 - Costly Revenge

Post by kallewirsch »

i kill all enemy leaders and destroy the villages but the scenario doesn´t end. I play wesnoth 1.10.2
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D-Wade
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Re: V1.9/1.10 - 19 - Costly Revenge

Post by D-Wade »

(1) What difficulty levels and what version of Wesnoth have you played the scenario on?

1.10.5, Medium

(2) How difficult did you find the scenario? (1-10)

10+

(3) How clear did you find the scenario objectives?

Clear

(4) How clear and interesting did you find the dialog and storyline of the scenario?

Interesting

(5) What were your major challenges in meeting the objectives of the scenario?

the number of saurians, not being able to heal any unit (besides leveling up)

(6) How fun do you think the scenario is? (1-10)

2, too frustrating (but not as harsh as Human Alliance)

(7) What, if any, are changes you would have made to the scenario to make it more fun?

Maybe you should give the player 1 or 2 healers or give him the chance to somehow recover units quick enough.
Also I'd like to see the whole forest surrounded by ice not just a small part, that would help defending it a lot.
And last but not least: Either increase the player's starting gold to 200 or decrease the saurians' by e.g. 25%.

(8) Was there any event that caused you to lose the game and forced you to reload or restart the scenario?

No incomes and no healing so you have limited amount of troops. I skipped it after trying numerous tactics and getting beaten every time. I only had 260 starting gold but the problem in this campaign is that you only get a good bonus from the mission before, if you, before playing it, already knew that it is covered in snow and level your units towards it. And I didn't want to go back just to get this done.
letsdance
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Re: V1.9/1.10 - 19 - Costly Revenge

Post by letsdance »

(1) What difficulty levels and what version of Wesnoth have you played the scenario on?
v1.10.6, Medium

(2) How difficult did you find the scenario? (1-10)
9

(3) How clear did you find the scenario objectives?
not very clear. the description did not tell me how to destroy villages (altough i correctly guessed it). and i was never told which units could destroy villages and which ones wouldn't. it was a mere accident that i found out, 3 rounds before the end, that kalenz could heal in a village. actually, knowing this earlier might reduce the difficulty to 8.

(4) How clear and interesting did you find the dialog and storyline of the scenario?
clear

(5) What were your major challenges in meeting the objectives of the scenario?
no healing, obviously

(6) How fun do you think the scenario is? (1-10)
5, if the balancing was ok. one big problem for this scenario is, that i didn't have enough money (250) to get the good units needed to win this AND some cheap fighters as cannon fodder. heavy losses on my beloved veteran units don't make for a high fun factor.

(7) What, if any, are changes you would have made to the scenario to make it more fun?
reduce the difficulty somehow. as with human alliance and breaking the siege, this one seems to be much more difficult than the rest of the campaign. which is very frustrating because either i have to play on easy, which i assume would be boring on most scenarios. or i stick with medium and have to play these levels with saving/loading (with that it was actually not very hard, due to missing healing this make a huge difference in this scenario). which i don't like.

(8) Was there any event that caused you to lose the game and forced you to reload or restart the scenario?
no
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Maiklas3000
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Re: V1.9/1.10 - 19 - Costly Revenge

Post by Maiklas3000 »

(1) Level, version, and gold? Hard, 1.11.15, 396 starting gold.
(2) Difficult? (1-10) 9 or 9.5.
(3) Objectives? Clear.
(4) Dialog? "Kalenz is not able to recruit or recall shamans or any of their advancements in this scenario." Actually, Kalenz is not able to recruit or recall the shaman line in any scenario. Maybe say, "Shamans and their advancements are not available in this scenario." Or "Cleodil and the rest of the shaman line will not be joining you."
(5) Challenges? Deciding on a strategy is difficult, and then of course the main problem is the lack of healing.
(6) Fun? (1-10) 9, a real mindbender, novel strategy required.
(7) Changes? None.
(8) Restarts? Several restarts from start, but no save-reloads here or at any time previous in the campaign.

Replay: If you've having problems with this scenario, take a look at my attached replay. I recruited only a few level 1's, mostly level 2's, some level 3's. I went very heavy on rangers, in part because my plan was to send two teams of 4 rangers to burn villages and then kill the leaders. That went to plan in the south, but in the north my rangers' path was blocked, so they just joined my army. The army was in the woods north of the keep, trying to encourage the saurians to step onto the ice to their doom while my units mostly stayed in good terrain. As hinted by the dialog, Kalenz and Arkildur can use villages for healing, so I used the top-left village for them, destroying it only near the end. For the others, rest healing and leveling are the only ways to heal, and I used rest healing religiously. After the 4 rangers killed the southern leader, they were also able to take out the middle villages and then the northern leader. I finished on turn 26/30. I made a couple of mistakes at the end. One was intentional. I lost very few units, intentionally - it could make a later scenario more difficult. The other thing was that I should have started my zombie rush earlier. By zombie rush, I mean all the critically wounded units that started struggling out over the ice to get to the enemy leader. As it was, all those wounded units accomplished almost nothing.
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Inky
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Re: V1.9/1.10 - 19 - Costly Revenge

Post by Inky »

Original Post
Spoiler:
(1) Level and version? Hard, 1.12.4, 435 starting gold
(2) Difficult? (1-10) 9. Would be 10, but you can lose all your veterans here without consequence.
(3) Objectives? Clear.
(4) Dialog? Fine.
(5) Challenges? No healing!
(6) Fun? (1-10) 6
(7) Changes? Seems fine as is.
(8) Restarts? 1 restart (Kalenz died)

I play quite badly here, losing almost all my units including a loyal one (it's better to lose now though than to have to kill them later on), so unfortunately this replay won't be very instructive.
Finished turn 30/30 (barely made it!).
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Violet-n-red
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Re: V1.9/1.10 - 19 - Costly Revenge

Post by Violet-n-red »

(1) What difficulty levels and what version of Wesnoth have you played the scenario on?
normal, 1.12.2. had less than a dozen 2lvl veterans, a bit more than 400 gold.

(2) How difficult did you find the scenario? (1-10)
11. can't beat it at the moment. i simply don't have the forces to beat it.

(3) How clear did you find the scenario objectives?
perfectly clear.

(4) How clear and interesting did you find the dialog and storyline of the scenario?
clear and intersting, but it made no sense. why do we have to destroy villages DURING the battle? why do we have to strip ourselves of healing and money? almsot like somebody casted curse of stupid on our whole army.

(5) What were your major challenges in meeting the objectives of the scenario?
enemy absolutely everywhere;
saurian shamans ignores defence of my forces in forests;
saurian shamans heals other saurians: other shamans, 3lvl veterans and retreating units;
no way to heal - 2hp from resting per turn simply does not cut in;
no veteran woses ;__; i had plenty of 2 and almost 3lvl woses from the last scenario.

(6) How fun do you think the scenario is? (1-10)
1 with my current forces. and i don't see myself replaying Human Alliance too soon.

(7) What, if any, are changes you would have made to the scenario to make it more fun?
options 1: give us some reinforcements thirsting for revenge!! elvish commander in previous misison told he will give us his forces!
options 2: greatly reduce enemies' starting gold and, if it will become too easy, maybe reduce the number of turns before defeat (or add some kind of buff to all enemy units when too many villages are destroyed and then when enemy numbers are too low).
option 3: during Human Alliance or earlier hint player that shamans and woses might/will abandon Kalenz and his party if they will be bringing meaningless violence?
option 4: give a choice of doing regular action or destroying a village?

(8) Was there any event that caused you to lose the game and forced you to reload or restart the scenario?
none. or all. saurians just swarm my forces and slowly kill them all.

i think i will abandon this campaign for now. it stopped being enjoyable few missions ago.
Caladbolg
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Re: V1.9/1.10 - 19 - Costly Revenge

Post by Caladbolg »

Not much to say about Hour of Glory, it has good dialog.

Costly Revenge
(1) What difficulty levels and what version of Wesnoth have you played the scenario on?
1.12.5, medium.

(2) How difficult did you find the scenario? (1-10)
8.5, on par with Human Alliance. Having a lot of gold helped.

(3) How clear did you find the scenario objectives?
Clear.

(4) How clear and interesting did you find the dialog and storyline of the scenario?
All good.

(5) What were your major challenges in meeting the objectives of the scenario?
Saurians!!! Aside from that, there's a lot of weird terrain- sands and swamps are awful for elves and awesome for saurians; snow/ice is bad for both; forests are the best for elves but the movement is very slow. All of that makes it difficult to get the idea of the best course of action and the fact that saurians can easily outmaneuver you (both due to high movement and skirmirsher) makes most strategies inefficient. Therefore, the biggest challenge is to come up with a strategy that might have a chance of working. And not to mess it up.

(6) How fun do you think the scenario is? (1-10)
3. I like the map but I don't like the complete lack of healing. It's good to have scenarios like this where you need to try different strategies and so on but this one just isn't my cup of tea. It's too frustrating.

(7) What, if any, are changes you would have made to the scenario to make it more fun?
Maybe make it so that destroying a village spawns a saurian (enemy gold would also slightly be lowered to compensate)? That way the enemy would still field about the same number of units but the player would have some degree of control over when new enemies appear. Not destroying a village means that the enemy gets the income, destroying it means that the enemy gains a unit. But you get to choose. It would remove the frustration that comes from fighting saurians as currently their sheer numbers and skirmirshing can completely overwhelm the player.

Also, I think it provides a very different experience if you're playing it for the 1st time vs playing it after already beating the campaign once. On the 1st play the player will naturally try to preserve higher level units. But if you know what happens on later scenarios (if you've already played them), you can just spend all your recalls here. A bunch of high level units makes this scenario much easier and getting them killed will also make future scenarios much easier. I don't think it's a really good scenario design but I don't know how to fix it either.
Bug?:
(8) Was there any event that caused you to lose the game and forced you to reload or restart the scenario?
Not to lose, but I did replay it 4 times. 1st time the problem was the poor choice of units on the 1st turn (higher level units). When I saw how many saurians there are, I realized that I'd suffer some heavy losses and sure enough, I lost several good units in the first few turns so I restarted. On the 2nd run I decided to go with only new recruits (I amassed a lot of gold so I could afford it). Nearly the entire army (worth ~850 gold) was wiped out, but I beat the scenario without much trouble. Intro to the next scenario reminded me that Landar goes haywire and from a previous playthrough several years ago I knew that he'll later get my recalls. So I replayed this one for the 3rd time, now with only high level units, with the goal of losing as much of them as I can. The run was really easy and I had to struggle to get my units killed but ended up with only ~5 of them. And then I though that I might as well use some strategy on this scenario instead of just throwing everything I have so I played it with only a few higher level units and tried to keep them alive. Commentary is for that last run.

Strategy: Recalling lvl 2s I want to advance and all of my rangers/avengers. The rest of the gold is spent recruiting. Outriders try to snatch villages on the edges of the map. A small force is sent to the northern forest. Avengers will be occasionally popping out of the forest to lure saurians north and reduce the pressure on Kalenz. Northern units also go onto snow to lure out units. On the south rangers assist with village grabbing. Most of the battle will be near the starting keep, with Kalenz churning out new recruits to be placed in front of him as a shield, with captains backing them up. They'll easily get killed and easily replaced, slowly whittling the saurian forces.

Turn 9, all gold spent. Turn 12, northern front and the fight near Kalenz's keep are pretty much settled. 13, captain->marshal. Turn 15, spent almost 20 minutes playing around with formations that could protect my loyal champion from a flanker before finally finding one. It's night and most of my units are on low hp. 16, a cleverly hidden avenger is placed next to flanker's path to ambush him, stopping him from reaching my wounded units that couldn't possibly run away. 18, southern leader evades almost all attacks. I try to give a kill to my ranger but he also misses and xp is wasted on a sharphooter. S leader killed. 20, all villages destroyed. 24, N leader killed. 25, last unit killed.

Stats: 852 start gold, 25/35 turns, -223 gold, 0/0 villages, 12 units, -14 income, 36 recruits, 7 recalls, 1 advancement, 37 losses (all lvl 1s), 42 kills, -1% dmg dealt, +2% dmg received. Slightly unlucky.
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devavrata
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Re: V1.9/1.10 - 19 - Costly Revenge

Post by devavrata »

No form for this scenario, so I copied the one for V1.7/1.8 - 19 - Costly Revenge (Locked):
(1) What difficulty levels and what version of Wesnoth have you played the scenario on?
Battle for Wesnoth 1.8.3, Easy/Medium, Battle for Wesnoth 1.10.7 Hard.
(2) How difficult did you find the scenario? (1-10)
9
(3) How clear did you find the scenario objectives?
Clear
(4) How clear and interesting did you find the dialog and storyline of the scenario?
Clear, interesting
(5) What were your major challenges in meeting the objectives of the scenario?
No healers, no villages (every village taken gets immediately destroyed). The first time I played this scenario, even though I played it on easy level, I found this scenario to be impossible to beat. I was bitter about it. I even sought and found the way to get any quantity of gold using the debug, because I was convinced that this was one of those games which are so difficult that cannot be solved without cheating. Never before in Battle for Wesnoth, and never afterwards, have I found a scenario so hard to beat. But then I found the walkthrough, and this forum, and forgot about cheating. I only needed the right strategy: to make a stand in the forest surrounded with snow (the one north from the starting keep), so elves get to fight on forest and saurians have to fight on snow (except by only two hexes). Also, I profited from the superior speed of the riders in the snow; taking good care, the riders would be never reached by the saurians, so I could send them around the edges of the map taking (destroying) the villages out of reach of the saurians without taking any risk. Also, by the time some saurians begin the assault on my stand in the forest, the rest of the saurians would head that way, so lots of villages would be unguarded and available to take, out of the reach of any saurian. Also, I profited from the Artificial Unintelligence: Even though I kept my riders out of reach of the saurians all the time, some saurians would sometimes head for them, then on the following turn forget about them and head towards my stand, then on the following turn pursuit my riders again... so it would help the elves fighting in the forest to deal with less saurians.
(6) How fun do you think the scenario is? (1-10)
7
(7) What, if any, are changes you would have made to the scenario to make it more fun?
When I wrote the feedback on the scenario The Saurian Treasury, I wrote "Saurians are too powerful. They're fast, they've many attacks and they deal a lot of damage in each attack. Too much.". In Costly Revenge, Saurians are even stronger - but then the snow slows them so the scenario is more balanced, and their skirmish ability is limited because of the shortened reach.
(8) Was there any event that caused you to lose the game and forced you to reload or restart the scenario?
No
SanDonk
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Joined: June 26th, 2017, 8:58 pm

Re: V1.9/1.10 - 19 - Costly Revenge

Post by SanDonk »

1) Easy

2) 10 even on easy

3) Completely clear (and interesting by the way)

4) Very interesting (the relation between Kalenz and Landar)

5) Horrible - no villages, no healing (even no shamans), no income, 2vs1 enemy numbers, a lot of snow that prevent moving and swamps that helps saurians much and massive income of enemies and no leveled units (due to human alliance)

6) It depends, it was really interesting and i like hard challenges, but this was way too much. It could be about 10, if simplified little

7) Maybe simplify it a bit, perhaps make normal basic income for the enemies or reduce their gold a bit OR put a easy large-scale scenario between Human Alliance and Costly Revenge to farm experience and start with experienced troops (because you loose the complete leveled army in Human Alliance and it is a pitty in this scenario, the two nightmare scenarios are too quickly following - this make the campaign more Expert level the Intermediate)

8) I had to completely restart 4 times, before I invented ideal strategy (make first two bunches of scouts and run over the villages to destroy enemies income AND make a squad of 5 bowmen that move around the edge behind line and kill leaders from the back), even then I had to reload several times, when I did mistake in grouping and my leaders got killed (played the turn again and better hide them or didn´t use them in combat), one critical turn I even had to save-load.
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