Cities of the Frontier - now for BfW 1.11

Discussion and development of scenarios and campaigns for the game.

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AfterDawn
Posts: 50
Joined: February 3rd, 2012, 6:51 pm

Re: Cities of the Frontier (aka sim-Wesnoth)

Post by AfterDawn »

How about control points on the map.
Places that you have to build on in order to win.
would mean you not only have a main town but also smaller outlying outposts that you would need to defend.
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Evander
Posts: 60
Joined: October 18th, 2011, 5:28 pm

Re: Cities of the Frontier (aka sim-Wesnoth)

Post by Evander »

I absolutely agree with every suggestions to make this campaign bigger and more complex.

Bigger maps, side quests, monster lairs, payable bandits (pay them gold to leave you alone), end game boss (all enemies attacking at once), upgradeable tent (I want my castle!), maybe even inventory and blacksmithing like in doofus campaigns?

Tavern with some gossip would be pretty amazing, levelling up a town as a whole (say, after 10 villages you can build market etc), would add a nice depth without making the game over-complicated.
Would be nice to move your leader unit into tavern and get a message "You see some workers killing time over a mug of ale" or "you are greeted by your soldiers, resting next to almost eaten roasted boar".

I miss that sort of games, and having such campaign in BfW would be pretty nice.
MRDNRA
Posts: 212
Joined: September 11th, 2009, 5:06 pm

Re: Cities of the Frontier (aka sim-Wesnoth)

Post by MRDNRA »

This campaign has so much potential, but unfortunately it seems unlikely to come to fruition. Esci (the creator) hasn't even visited the site since May.
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dogscoff
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Re: Cities of the Frontier (aka sim-Wesnoth)

Post by dogscoff »

Couldn't resist posting this:

Image

Played on medium (just can't progress on hard) and achieved 60+ villages, 100+ troops (mostly peasants, obviously, but a healthy number of level 2s and 3s), almost all castle tiles upgraded to stone.

I had planned to continue it to all four signposts but accidentally went over the gold limit as I moved from Autumn to Winter (which ought to be impossible, - it said I would start the next scenario with 984 gold, but somehow I started with >1100) and I couldn't be bothered to go back and replay the autumn.

This was the first ever map generated for me with decent amounts of flat, treeless land ready for development. Every other town I've built has been painfully squeezed in among natural features, required heavy terraforming, or both. Terraforming on this map was minimal. I think this made a big difference to my success. In the early game I was able to use taptap's horse+bow and minimal fortifications strategy to great effect. I don't think I ever lost a single village. Certainly not more than one.

Note my fortifications near the orc fortresses - basically designed to spawnkill them as soon as they show up. By the end I had 8 silver mages sitting around for such occasions.

Note also that almost every castle tile you see on the map is linked to my keep - I was able to recruit / recall troops to the very front lines of any attack as soon as the enemy neared my wall. In theory I could defend the whole complex with nothing more than a few dozen peasant lookouts and a stash of gold to recall units directly to the scene of any attack. In practice I rarely used this ability, instead keeping a decent army active and just defending my borders. Mostly this was because I needed to keep my income down to avoid the money limit.

About special abilities: Again I struck lucky. Firesword + magnetism for my loyal cavalier (pick up the sword *before* the magnetism, or it won't get the to-hit bonus), levitation + spectral bow for my swordsman. Powerful combinations.

I got the ring of undead summoning , which I gave to a cavalier. He was able to spend all his time banished to the edges of the map, endless going in a big circle laying zombies and skeletons for the bad guys to fight. His movement meant he could get away from his creations before they turned on him, with the exception of ghosts in the winter who were a bit of a pain. He was effectively a minelayer that made the bandits and orcs a lot easier to deal with. I would suggest that summoned undead should move about a bit more, either randomly or on a steady course toward the map centre, to mitigate this use / abuse of the ring.

Stoneskin I gave to a mage, who I upgraded to silver. His teleport ability almost (but not quite) made up for the movement penalty. It's worth doing.

I think I'm done with this mod for now, but you can be sure I will be back to it eventually (or immediately if a new version is released)

If you're still reading, thanks again Esci.
Collection of my wesnoth bits and pieces at http://www.dogscoff.co.uk/wesnoth/wesnoth.htm
timmerlj
Posts: 4
Joined: March 29th, 2011, 6:33 pm

Re: Cities of the Frontier (aka sim-Wesnoth)

Post by timmerlj »

What is the protocol for abandoned efforts? Is there any point at which someone can/will pick up th mantel of a good idea and run with it?
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taptap
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Joined: October 6th, 2011, 5:42 pm

Re: Cities of the Frontier (aka sim-Wesnoth)

Post by taptap »

Ask the original author first for good style if you want to take over, technically you can always start a fork. Calling it abandoned when it is already a complete and working campaign is a bit harsh.

I wrote my suggestions some posts before, but if someone takes this over I hope that person will resist feature creep and limit itself to balancing tweaks, bug fixes and few additions. Some of the proposals go too much into dwarf fortress territory to be viable in a wesnoth framework, imho.
I am a Saurian Skirmisher: I'm a real pest, especially at night.
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AxalaraFlame
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Joined: December 4th, 2011, 1:07 pm
Location: Pasadina, Caltech

Re: Cities of the Frontier (aka sim-Wesnoth)

Post by AxalaraFlame »

It is easy and some bit of IMBA, but rather interesting. Pick nightmare, spam villages, get loyalist horse at first, then archer/HI. Hopefully finish it before autumn might be possible (is it?). I finished it before winter comes
Triglo
Posts: 8
Joined: January 30th, 2012, 2:52 am

Re: Cities of the Frontier (aka sim-Wesnoth)

Post by Triglo »

Mad props to Esci for this campaign and of course all the hardworking volunteers who have made this game so awesome.

Basically played Wesnoth obsessively for a few months until I got bored, then decided to check it out again recently and when I stumbled across Cities of the Frontier I was super intrigued.

Really like this campaign and I echo the enthusiasm for all sorts of improvements.

Here's my two cents:

For me a big part of the fun is planning and building my town; having the option of differently shaped farms would make this more interesting.

Also, It might be fun to play as undead/elves/etc, and have different rules for how you build your town.

I know that AI is hard to make and inevitably dumb as a rock, but perhaps there is some way to make the flow of enemies a little more consistent (unpredictable direction and timings of attacks is good for challenge, but it's very frustrating to have no one to fight or to get completely overrun.)

I don't really want to spend a lot of time learning how to program and then encoding things, but I would like to offer my services helping to create dialogue and storyline as well as bounce ideas around if some folks want to take up esci's mantle.
Triglo
Posts: 8
Joined: January 30th, 2012, 2:52 am

Re: Cities of the Frontier (aka sim-Wesnoth)

Post by Triglo »

I'm a little confused about the Dwarf Fortress vs. Wesnoth issue. What I like about Cotf in many ways is that it combines some of the resource management/sandbox elements of DF with Wesnothian military tactics. Taptap, I'm not sure why you think this is a problem-- is it perhaps because the coding would become a nightmare?

After skimming through the posts on City of the Frontier over the last hour, my impression is there's enthusiasm for seeing it expanded and tweaked, as well as a lot of creative ideas for doing so. I'm interested to find out if some of all you forum dwellers wanted to get together in irc some time and see what the level of willingness (and technical ability) there is to commit to creating maybe an expansion pack to CotF if you will. I am a little curious, echoing a recent poster, about the etiquette of using esci's groundwork without his permission, but in the spirit of open source I think it would be really cool if a group of people got together and built on his idea.

As I said before, I don't know how to code and don't want to put in the effort, so someone or someones would have to step up to do that. But please post if you are interested, and how much effort you are willing to put in, and if there seems to be some interest I will work to set up an online meeting.
Chrysophylax
Posts: 36
Joined: October 19th, 2011, 2:42 pm

Re: Cities of the Frontier (aka sim-Wesnoth)

Post by Chrysophylax »

I played this campaign and I loved it! Unfortunately, I'm already maintaining one campaign, so I can't really work on this and my own projects. However, I can comment on some of the ideas proposed.

Extanding the campaign is fairly easy, although balance would be a slight issue. Adding additional content that esci thought of is also not that hard, and neither are adding upgrades to buildings, diplomacy and so on. Some of the suggestions are very difficult, however. The watchtower, as far as I know, could not be made to work properly as suggested. A unit's movement and vision ranges are one and the same, so anything that affected vision would be either misleading or overpowered. After 1.11 the [movetype] tag will accept [vision_costs] as well as [movement_costs], but the wiki doesn't say anything about vision becoming a unit variable, so there would be no way to modify a specific unit's vision range without a lot of clunky code. In any case, modifying a unit would require a lot of clunky code no matter how you did it, so it's not a good method.

On the other hand, a custom terrain that achieved similar purposes is fairly easy. A watchbeacon would be a 3x3 terrain with the central hex (the tower) impassable. All 9 hexes would be illuminated and the central one would have a spriteless L0 team-1 flying unit (a Fog Clearer) on it and the Fog Clearer would have code to kill it if a unit destroyed the watchtower. Elves and undead would destroy watchbeacons for being on fire.

Making elves and undead hostile to each other is easy. The problem arises because sides 2, 6 and 7 are all members of wild_animals. This can be fixed by adding two new teams. Side 2 would belong to elf_animals and undead_animals, side 6 would belong to elf_animals and outlaws, and side 7 would belong to undead_animals. This might be improved by adding another new team. Side 6 (elves) would be members of nice_outlaws, as would side 3 (nice outlaws), and sides 3 and 4 (mean outlaws) would be outlaws. This would make the elves tolerate the outlaws who never burn villages, but not the ones who do.
grizdog
Posts: 12
Joined: December 20th, 2012, 12:51 am

Re: Cities of the Frontier (aka sim-Wesnoth)

Post by grizdog »

Not many posts recently, let's see how much interest we still have in this campaign.

First off, this is my favorite campaign in the Wesnoth Canon. If nothing else were ever done to it, I would be happy. Having said that, some observations:

1. I wouldn't want too many of the recommended additions to be implemented. I do like the idea of the settlement getting more sophisticated as it grows, with things like taverns and markets. Maybe the workers would have to build a carpenter shop first before they could do that. A tavern would bring in lots of income, but if you have one occasionally a unit would pass out, and be unable to move or fight for one turn. I don't know. Not a big deal.

2. The biggest flaw with the campaign, for me, is that it is unbalanced. Some campaigns you just have no chance, no matter how carefully you play. And I have never tried it on hard, only easy and normal. With that, the most important place to "get lucky" is at the very beginning, when you are looking for a suitable place to settle. If you find a big open area on turn one, you are golden. If not, you'll need a lot of luck to follow.

3. Tactics. I disagree (at least on easy and normal) that you want to build a forge first thing. You won't need to recruit any soldiers until the raiding parties appear, which is around turn 15. So you can start both your work parties on farms and get the forge after the first or second farm is done. I said "both" above - it seems to me that there is no question you want to begin with two work parties, and maybe stand one of them down when the gold gets low. Also, I find bowmen at least as useful as spearmen, but I suppose that is matter of taste. A bowman with one of the magical swords makes for a real badass. Finally, try to lure any sea monsters you find into positions where they can be of use, preferably poisoning the orcs. They are often content to just sit there if no one gets too close to them.

Thanks for a great campaign!
AfterDawn
Posts: 50
Joined: February 3rd, 2012, 6:51 pm

Re: Cities of the Frontier (aka sim-Wesnoth)

Post by AfterDawn »

Yep still inlove with this campaign.

I would like it if we kept it as the original and perhaps someone make like an off shoot that tries to add more complexity.
I've basically played it as far as I think I can. Its time someone took it a step further.
PhantomJedi
Posts: 22
Joined: October 25th, 2013, 1:44 am

Re: Cities of the Frontier (aka sim-Wesnoth)

Post by PhantomJedi »

This is probably a stupid question, but is this campaign still available for download?
grizdog
Posts: 12
Joined: December 20th, 2012, 12:51 am

Re: Cities of the Frontier (aka sim-Wesnoth)

Post by grizdog »

Yes, it is on the add-ons server, easy to do from right inside Wesnoth. Go for it.
PhantomJedi wrote:This is probably a stupid question, but is this campaign still available for download?
One more thing - it would be nice to have a planning mode. For me. it would be enough just to have the hex overlay pattern visible, and be able to mark things down, laying out your settlement.

Great campaign. Thank-you, esci.
PhantomJedi
Posts: 22
Joined: October 25th, 2013, 1:44 am

Re: Cities of the Frontier (aka sim-Wesnoth)

Post by PhantomJedi »

I was able to find i in the addon browser for Wesnoth Portable (Windows), but I can't find it in the addon browser for the Mac version. Odd.
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