Campaign: Tale of a Mage

[pinguinsteve]

ahh sorry for that and thanks

[SirTheta]

Thanks for all the hard work you've done on this campaign SkeleRanger =] Love it campaign and can't wait to see it completed!
(Also, thanks Reval & Turuk, that fixed my problem [for those of you who don't know how to edit a .cfg file, you can open it in Notepad).

[indigo1414]

hi i beat the life of a mage how do you download part 2

[SkeleRanger]

SKELERANGER RETURNS FROM THE DEAD!

Sorry, I've really busy with school. I'm up and going again though and I'm trying to upgrade to 1.6. I just ran a massive dialogue and bugfix('till about 11:00 last night) and I should have the latest version uploaded soon.

Undead hoard

While the image of an ancient treasure that is sick of being ignored and goes out to wreak havoc does tickle my fancy, I think perhaps you mean;

Undead horde

I wondered why it looked so wierd. Thanks.

hi i beat the life of a mage how do you download part 2

The "to be continued" is just there to make it look nice and polished. It's simply one campaign that I haven't quite finished yet.

[SkeleRanger]

0.7.8 is on the server.

[SkeleRanger]

0.7.9

I've got a few things I was wondering about.

1. The campaign takes place in section of Wesnoth history reported to be rather peaceful. Is this whole war of the Icestone thing too much? I could dumb it down to a simpler The Evil Mal-Karin attacks Weldyn, and Dillon and Arand have to summon an alliance of elves, saurians and orcs who meet in an epic battle to decide the fate of Wesnoth for generations to come?

2. I'm also trying to add some character development for the three royal children. I had in mind showing Arand kind of bumbling, or relying on force too often, to the point of it being obvious Ana'sar is the better choice. I felt Arand is a better character for Dillon to work along side, but historically Ana'sar is the heir, so I might have to get rid of him. I was thinking maybe having him travel off in search of the Green Isle and never returning.

Input?

[t3st3r]

Btw, "Battle for the Swamps" appears to be a way too hard for "Normal" difficulty. I'm always losing at turn 5-6 or so. Problem is that Saurians have ton of gold, can recruit at least L2 units and there is only swamps. They're also skirmishers, etc. So they have awful advantage.

Also, even if I manage to protect royal family and clean-up my flank, moron AI pushes his elves to swamps and loses them. Then this idiot also often walks by leader into swamps and then there is nothing what can save him.

Suggestions are:
1) Weaken saurians a bit, they have awesome advantage due to terrain and units properties. They have strong units at advantageous terrain, often can walk 7 moves and some are skirmishers. On other side I have weak heroes I have to protect, I can't move units quickly due to swamps, I can't kill saurians in swamps quickly and I also have to protect stupid AI which loses elves in swamps at very first turns and then loses leader as well. Or at least, a bit fewer swamps on map? For example, better terrain near castles so main waves can clash on swamp border or so?
2) Either give elves more gold or make them more cautious? Right now AI is just doing suicide. It recruits few powerful units, pushes them into swamp and on turn 5 or so (while there is night and saurians are especially strong) all AI units are killed. Then leader can walk into swamps and will be surely dead very soon.

On BfW 1.4 and older campaign I was able to handle this map. Now I'm failed after 5 retries on "normal" difficulty level. As for me, it's pretty challenging rather than "normal".

[Webster52402]

As for that problem in the Swamps, the solution is this: Mages. Mages, mages, and more mages. Their Fire Magic will make short work of Saurian ambushers, and if you send a phalanx of powerful units, which by this point in time you SHOULD have if you hope to do anything, along with the Mages they will make mincemeat of the Saurians. Li'Sar's Scepter of Fire is a Saurian Slayer no matter what time of day she uses it at, so rushing her to the right along with your Advanced Mage/Mystical Mage/higher hero unit to place her in those trees where she gets 70 percent terrain makes her insanely useful. Saurians will outright avoid engaging her at all, as even at night their Cold Magic is pathetic next to the power that Sceptre will deal in return.

Also, if you suck up a few Ambushers relatively quickly using above tactic, then the Elves that go traipsing into the swamp don't actually do half bad. Their Sharpshooters will take down at least a few Saurians, and those LVL 2s are expensive. You simply have to make them pay for each and every step that they take, ambushing a Saurian with Mage fire magic, then surrounding them with stronger units in close quarters combat. If you can get them onto that earth/grass strip that runs through the swamps, then it helps too... Just a few tips.

Overall, I only failed that scenario once, and that was due to an incredibly lucky Oracle, and a small oversight that left a tiny hole for it to slip through and assassinate the wounded Konrad who was pulling back from the front... The next time, I breezed right through it. Not as hard as it seems, but perhaps that's just me. *Shrugs*

Wonderful campaign, SkeleRanger, and I can't wait for you to finish it. I had a blast with it.

[Kelben]

I enjoy the campaign.

There is one thing which is frustrating: scenario old ennemies...
The magician allies recruit their troops and store them in front of their fort then no more
The cavalry guy send everything right away to the ennemy

Try to improve the AI behavior cause it is completely numb (suicidal knights by night in a forest against undeads... I have difficulties to imagine a poorer strategy )

[TrashMan]

1. The campaign takes place in section of Wesnoth history reported to be rather peaceful. Is this whole war of the Icestone thing too much? I could dumb it down to a simpler The Evil Mal-Karin attacks Weldyn, and Dillon and Arand have to summon an alliance of elves, saurians and orcs who meet in an epic battle to decide the fate of Wesnoth for generations to come?

I'd say write the story however you want and ignore canon for now. If it's awesome enough (and I think ti is), chances are canon will be adjusted to squeeze your story in
Trying to follow canon is cool, but your story should come first methinks.

[Kelben]

I get the following error message at the scenario "The Knalgans"
The game could not be loaded: load_game_failed: Attempt to de-serialized a unit with no 'type' field (probably empty)

[stillcen]

I got a crash.

In uneasy tidings, i first got a error message, tried ignore and got a crash. I reloaded and no error message, just a dump back to the wesnoth start menu.

playing 1.5.14-1.6rc

added-on ToaM on april 30th.

non-sequitor----------

in the privious scenario, The prince of wesnoth, he as a ruddy suicidal fellow. I had to "cheat", a bit to keep him alive and even with cheating had to sacrafice a Lancer. He was just determined to charge out on his own against level 3 foes without any cover....royality.

[SkeleRanger]

@stillcen
So if I got that correctly you were playing on Wesnoth version 1.5.14, with the source code intended for 1.6? If so that's probably why its not working.

I get the following error message at the scenario "The Knalgans"
The game could not be loaded: load_game_failed: Attempt to de-serialized a unit with no 'type' field (probably empty)

Ah, my bad. I'll fix it.

Try to improve the AI behavior cause it is completely numb (suicidal knights by night in a forest against undeads... I have difficulties to imagine a poorer strategy )

I noticed this too. 1.6 seems to have a different ai. It'll take some serious trial and error to fix that one. Screwdriver, monkey wrench, chainsaw....

[AloisiusHingerl]

Hi,

nice campaign!

However there's one small thing that always struck me odd: In German, 'Karin' always is a decidedly female name yet your Karin seems to be male. I've played the english version and I'm not sure whether Karin can be used as male name in English but I haven't met any male Karin yet. (As the difference between German and Italian: In German, 'Simone' is decidedly female, in Italian it's common for both genders.)

Guess, nothing can be said against some mixing up of gender stereotypes but if that's intended there might be a hint included. (May be that's what brought Karin up against his parents initially? Having to live with a female name because they liked it so much?) If it's just a difference between languages, the name should be adapted during translation. 'Caryn' sounds the same but looks foreign enough to german eyes to be accepted as either male or female.

Servus,
Aloisius

/***
* A quick version's of the bavarian story of Aloisius: He died, went to heaven, didn't get any bear, got really angry
* and to pacify him, god gave him the order to deliver a letter once a week in Munich where he might stay a little
* and have a beer or two. Well, Aloisius took the first letter, returned to Munich, entered his pub, started drinking and
* that's where he's still sitting and drinking. Since then, the bavarian government never received it's heavenly
* inspirations.
***/

[SkeleRanger]

I'm honestly not sure if Karin is even an English name as I just picked some random syllables and threw them together. Maybe I'll try Caryn, just to see how it works.

I randomly picked the name Elendil for the white mage in the dungeons because it sounded like a cool name. Later I found it was actually the name or Aragorn's legendary sword in LOTR. Lord Gilder was originally called Lord Gelding, until my sister informed me that a gelding is a fixed horse. Whoops.