Dragon Fight: SP Scenario for 1.12/1.14

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sergey
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Dragon Fight: SP Scenario for 1.12/1.14

Post by sergey »

For Wesnoth 1.12 and 1.14

Hello, Wesnothians! :)

This is my first scenario. It is pretty simple and self-descriptive. There is no story behind the scenario, neither time nor place are specified.
I would say, it is focused on the situation and the atmosphere. Imagine you are a citizen of a small Wesnothian town. You live simple and peaceful life. And one day, a scary tale you have heard being a child happened to you.

A few questions:
Do you have any ideas on how to make the scenario more fun, still keeping it simple?
Do you think that difficulty is correctly balanced?
Is there any mistakes in the dialogs?
Do you find any bugs?
Anything else I didn't mention?

Have fun!
Last edited by sergey on December 19th, 2018, 1:20 pm, edited 2 times in total.
Author of SP scenario Dragon Fight and SP campaign Captured by a Nightmare.
Created The Rise of Wesnoth (alternative mechanics) version of the mainline campaign.
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The_Gnat
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Re: Dragon Fight: SP Scenario

Post by The_Gnat »

Great scenario! I have attached an archive with the replay for my scenario in it. Overall it was lots of fun. I enjoyed that there were many events and units you could find in towns. Maybe add more items (like the cold gloves) that units can pick up.

The only thing is i didn't realize for quite a few turns that EVERY unit that surrounds the dragon is attacked (and killed because the dragon has berserk) on the dragons turn. I think that this to easily allows you to exploit the dragons weakness by only leaving 1 or 2 units next to the dragon at the end of your turn and never putting more than two units next to each other, even though i lost almost 30 units i don't think the scenario was very hard because of how disadvantaged the dragon was on melee without his berserk attack.

The dragon inflicted heavy losses but in the end i was able to beet him only because of the leadership of my general and the back stab of the rogue. Also i had to restart the first few turns after realizing that the mages, which cost 20 have absolutely no effect on the dragon. (maybe a hint could be given to the player that the mages do nothing) Also maybe if the mages go to a certain temple their melee attacks are changed to arcane making them not useless!

I do not understand how the dragon decides who to attack because even though he easily could have killed my king he never did instead he foolishly attacked my ranger with his berserk melee attack and suffered almost 60 hp damage before he took out the ranger. The dark adept seems like it would be good against the dragon but because of the dragons powerful ranged attack any unit that attacks the dragon on ranged dies so i decided not to attack with the dark adept.

Overall i believe that the dragon poses an interesting gameplay and is very fun. However his strengths mean that almost everyone dies, removing the possibility of advancement. And his weaknesses can be to easily used (for example by not putting units adjacent). I don't know what exactly you can do to remedy this because this unique game style unbalances the game, however you might improve the situation if you remove the dragons ability to attack everyone around him and instead make him able to ALWAYS move twice and attack 2 units. Also i suggest removing berserk on the dragons attack and instead giving him marksman on offense to make his offense neither a absolute kill strike nor a disadvantage to himself when he attacks strong units.

I don't know how helpful my feedback and you can choose to change the scenario, or not. Overall i think no matter what you do with it this is a very good scenario and very enjoyable! :D
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DF-Dragon_Fight_replay.zip
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sergey
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Re: Dragon Fight: SP Scenario

Post by sergey »

The_Gnat, thanks for detailed feedback!
The only thing is i didn't realize for quite a few turns that EVERY unit that surrounds the dragon is attacked (and killed because the dragon has berserk) on the dragons turn.
That is why I added hint to the objectives "read carefully the dragon's description". Also the dragon offensive attacks becomes berserk when it has less than 40% of hitpoints. Maybe I will make some unit say that when it happens.
I think that this to easily allows you to exploit the dragons weakness by only leaving 1 or 2 units next to the dragon at the end of your turn and never putting more than two units next to each other, even though i lost almost 30 units i don't think the scenario was very hard because of how disadvantaged the dragon was on melee without his berserk attack.
Dragon has only offensive berserk, the player can't make him use berserk. If the dragon can't attack many units because they are not standing at the adjacent hexes I don't think that it is his weakness, but a player's strategy. Anyway I will continue to think about tweaking the dragon.
The dragon inflicted heavy losses but in the end i was able to beet him only because of the leadership of my general and the back stab of the rogue.
On the higher difficulty the general is a lieutenant and the rogue is a thief ;)
Also i had to restart the first few turns after realizing that the mages, which cost 20 have absolutely no effect on the dragon. (maybe a hint could be given to the player that the mages do nothing) Also maybe if the mages go to a certain temple their melee attacks are changed to arcane making them not useless!
The presence of useless mages is intentional. If player knows that they deal fire damage, he simply won't recruit them. If he don't, he will probably remember that after playing this scenario. I can make the mage mentor to say something like "unfortunately our fire magic is useless against dragon", but it may be better to not give too many advices to the player. Maybe I will make mage to say that on the first mage fire attack in the scenario.

Also I like the idea of a temple, but I don't want all mages (I mean, any number of mages) be able to get arcane attack. I think it may be combined with your proposal to create more useful items and place several magic stuffs to the temple. So, only limited number of mages can take them.
I do not understand how the dragon decides who to attack because even though he easily could have killed my king he never did instead he foolishly attacked my ranger with his berserk melee attack and suffered almost 60 hp damage before he took out the ranger.
Probably this dragon is not a very smart creature. I agree that was a stupid AI decision to go berserk against ranger. Or maybe the ranger was just lucky to survive for a while and deal much damage.
The dark adept seems like it would be good against the dragon but because of the dragons powerful ranged attack any unit that attacks the dragon on ranged dies so i decided not to attack with the dark adept.
I think that dark mage may decide to sacrifice itself :)
Overall i believe that the dragon poses an interesting gameplay and is very fun. However his strengths mean that almost everyone dies, removing the possibility of advancement.
I think that is what happening when a man fights a dragon.
I don't know what exactly you can do to remedy this because this unique game style unbalances the game, however you might improve the situation if you remove the dragons ability to attack everyone around him and instead make him able to ALWAYS move twice and attack 2 units. Also i suggest removing berserk on the dragons attack and instead giving him marksman on offense to make his offense neither a absolute kill strike nor a disadvantage to himself when he attacks strong units.
I will think about that. But generally I like the dragon's abilities. Usually when you have only one enemy unit you want to surround it. That doesn't look possible to surround a real dragon (of course if there are real dragons). That's why my dragon can attack all adjacent units and have berserk on offensive (when hp < 40%). And it is also a skirmisher.

P.S. Any remarks on the dragon's abilities are highly appreciated.
Author of SP scenario Dragon Fight and SP campaign Captured by a Nightmare.
Created The Rise of Wesnoth (alternative mechanics) version of the mainline campaign.
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The_Gnat
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Re: Dragon Fight: SP Scenario

Post by The_Gnat »

sergey wrote:The_Gnat, thanks for detailed feedback!
Thank you for responding! If you modify this scenario to add new events or create new scenarios i would be interested in trying it! :D
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sergey
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Re: Dragon Fight: SP Scenario

Post by sergey »

Released version 1.1.0
- added new item to the magic school
- chief guard is now Lieutenant instead of Sergeant on the hard difficulty, since leadership level drastically affects the balance in this scenario
- mage mentor is now Red Mage instead of Arch Mage on the easy difficulty, so he won't be super powerful with the new magic item
- minor dialog changes, emphasized important hints
Author of SP scenario Dragon Fight and SP campaign Captured by a Nightmare.
Created The Rise of Wesnoth (alternative mechanics) version of the mainline campaign.
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Samonella
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Re: Dragon Fight: SP Scenario

Post by Samonella »

Great scenario, short and sweet! I played on normal difficulty, and as you can see in the replay, I made a few mistakes but still narrowly won. I thought it was well balanced. Here are my bits of feedback:

1) The berserk ability: this just confused me. After reading this topic, apparently it's supposed to work only offensively, and only after the dragon reaches 40% hp? The unit description doesn't mention either of those conditions, so I thought it was just some weird bug when berserk only sometimes happened.

2) The message when you enter the treasury: it makes it sound like it's a surprise to find gold in there.

3) The lieutenant's messages started to get a little annoying.

4) A message for when/if the lieutenant dies would be nice.

5) Here are some vague ideas that might make the scenario funner, although maybe it's better as it is. Maybe the dragon summons some fire spirits at some point in the fight... maybe you get unexpected reinforcements... maybe when the dragon is almost dead it spits fire in all directions and damages all your units.

6) Have you seen the Irdya Dragon addon? It's another dragon with lots of animations, so if you used it as a [base_unit] you could spice up some of the key moments like when the dragon appears, dies, starts berserking, etc.

Overall, it was a pretty fun scenario. Thanks for making it!
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DF-Dragon_Fight_replay.gz
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sergey
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Re: Dragon Fight: SP Scenario

Post by sergey »

Samonella wrote: 1) The berserk ability: this just confused me. After reading this topic, apparently it's supposed to work only offensively, and only after the dragon reaches 40% hp? The unit description doesn't mention either of those conditions, so I thought it was just some weird bug when berserk only sometimes happened.
That is described in the "Special Notes" of the dragon's description (right click on the dragon -> "Unit Description", or "d" hotkey). Alternatively you can hold the mouse over unit and it will be shown in the right panel. There will be shown stats, traits, attacks and so on. Moving the mouse over any of the stats, traits, etc will show additional information. I played the scenario many times and the berserk really works as I described (when dragon hp are less than 40% of maximum, each attack on its turn is berserk). Probably the dragon kills most of its victims at first round of attack, so you don't see berserk all the time. Anyway, that is an important feedback that abilities should be somehow more predictable / hints more obvious. Will fix that in next releases. Maybe just remove the berserk and give some extra hitpoints to the dragon.
Samonella wrote: 2) The message when you enter the treasury: it makes it sound like it's a surprise to find gold in there.
Agree, I will change it.
Samonella wrote: 3) The lieutenant's messages started to get a little annoying.
4) A message for when/if the lieutenant dies would be nice.
I like his orders :) He is not fighting, so at least inspires his soldiers. And I like him to die silently. Let's keep it as is now and wait for the opinion of the other players.
Samonella wrote: 5) Here are some vague ideas that might make the scenario funner, although maybe it's better as it is. Maybe the dragon summons some fire spirits at some point in the fight... maybe you get unexpected reinforcements... maybe when the dragon is almost dead it spits fire in all directions and damages all your units.
I should think about that.
Samonella wrote: 6) Have you seen the Irdya Dragon addon? It's another dragon with lots of animations, so if you used it as a [base_unit] you could spice up some of the key moments like when the dragon appears, dies, starts berserking, etc.
It's really cool! I should take this nice dragon to my scenario. Thanks!
Samonella wrote: Overall, it was a pretty fun scenario. Thanks for making it!
Thanks for playing it :)
Author of SP scenario Dragon Fight and SP campaign Captured by a Nightmare.
Created The Rise of Wesnoth (alternative mechanics) version of the mainline campaign.
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Samonella
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Re: Dragon Fight: SP Scenario

Post by Samonella »

sergey wrote:
Samonella wrote: 1) The berserk ability: this just confused me. After reading this topic, apparently it's supposed to work only offensively, and only after the dragon reaches 40% hp? The unit description doesn't mention either of those conditions, so I thought it was just some weird bug when berserk only sometimes happened.
That is described in the "Special Notes" of the dragon's description (right click on the dragon -> "Unit Description", or "d" hotkey). Alternatively you can hold the mouse over unit and it will be shown in the right panel. There will be shown stats, traits, attacks and so on. Moving the mouse over any of the stats, traits, etc will show additional information. I played the scenario many times and the berserk really works as I described (when dragon hp are less than 40% of maximum, each attack on its turn is berserk). Probably the dragon kills most of its victims at first round of attack, so you don't see berserk all the time. Anyway, that is an important feedback that abilities should be somehow more predictable / hints more obvious. Will fix that in next releases. Maybe just remove the berserk and give some extra hitpoints to the dragon.
Checking again, I see that there is an accurate description in the panel on the right, and in the special notes section of the description. If you follow the yellow link in the weapon description, however, you get the page for the mainline berserk ability. This (inaccurate) description is the only one I read until just now, funnily enough.

Anyway, I think most players won't look at any of these. Seeing "berserk," it seems safe to assume that it's just the mainline ability. I'd advise you to not put berserk in the unit definition at all; instead, add it via an [object] once he reaches 40% hp. This way you can easily show a message/sound/etc at the same time as the berserk ability comes into effect, and there's much less room for confusion. For further simplicity, I would also recommend using the mainline berserk ability that works on defense too, but of course it's all up to you. Another option would be to come up with different name for the ability; that would make sure people read the right description.
The last few months have been nothing but one big, painful reminder that TIMTLTW.

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sergey
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Re: Dragon Fight: SP Scenario

Post by sergey »

Good points. I will try to make the dragon's abilities as much intuitive as possible. Though I would like to create my super original unit, from the player's perspective well known abilities and traits are better.
Author of SP scenario Dragon Fight and SP campaign Captured by a Nightmare.
Created The Rise of Wesnoth (alternative mechanics) version of the mainline campaign.
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Re: Dragon Fight: SP Scenario

Post by The_Gnat »

Hello, your dragon campaign is really good but unfortunately your dragon has no animations, the war of the gods era has a few awesome (and super epic) dragons that you should definitely look at. Here is a gif i made which shows one of them. This is just an example of how SUPER AWESOME the dragon is, you should definitely put it in your cammpaign! Also there are some other dragons in war of the gods which are good. 8)

Image

Also once you finish balancing the dragon in this scenario i think it would be very good if you made this scenario with other races. For example: a deadly dragon soars down upon a small elvish village. This would have a new map with different terrain (that looked elvish) but then would allow a player to battle the dragon with elves. Similarly a cave/mountain map for dwarves. It is so fun fighting the dragon it would be great if there was other versions of Dragon Flight that had different events and different races who had to defend against a dragon.

Thank you, for making this and if you don't have time to make new scenarios currently, i totally understand! :D

(NOTE: i was mistaken and did not make the gif of the dragon loop, so i think if you want to view it again you need to reload your webpage by holding shift and clicking the reload bottun)
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Re: Dragon Fight: SP Scenario

Post by Samonella »

The_Gnat wrote:Hello, your dragon campaign is really good but unfortunately your dragon has no animations, the war of the gods era has a few awesome (and super epic) dragons that you should definitely look at. Here is a gif i made which shows one of them. This is just an example of how SUPER AWESOME the dragon is, you should definitely put it in your cammpaign! Also there are some other dragons in war of the gods which are good.
Samonella wrote:6) Have you seen the Irdya Dragon addon? It's another dragon with lots of animations, so if you used it as a [base_unit] you could spice up some of the key moments like when the dragon appears, dies, starts berserking, etc.
To get credit where it's due, I'm pretty sure the dragon that both of us mentioned is originally from Library of Kratemaqht, by Rich Marinaccio (cephalo).
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Re: Dragon Fight: SP Scenario

Post by sergey »

cephalo did an excellent work. I am thinking about using his campaign The Library of Kratemaqht as a dependency. Irdya Dragon is smaller than the original dragon and I want a giant one.
Author of SP scenario Dragon Fight and SP campaign Captured by a Nightmare.
Created The Rise of Wesnoth (alternative mechanics) version of the mainline campaign.
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Re: Dragon Fight: SP Scenario

Post by The_Gnat »

sergey wrote:cephalo did an excellent work. I am thinking about using his campaign The Library of Kratemaqht as a dependency. Irdya Dragon is smaller than the original dragon and I want a giant one.
Yeah a giant dragon would be great! However i suggest not using another players addon as a dependancy because they might change it at any time, i think it would be better if you add the files to your scenario. Of course it doesn't really matter :D
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sergey
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Re: Dragon Fight: SP Scenario

Post by sergey »

The_Gnat wrote:Yeah a giant dragon would be great! However i suggest not using another players addon as a dependancy because they might change it at any time, i think it would be better if you add the files to your scenario. Of course it doesn't really matter :D
Generally I agree, but particularly in this case it looks safe to depend on The Library Of Kratemaqht since it is a finished campaign and I am just reusing images. The reason why I don't want to copy images to my campaign is their large size - 50 megabytes totally. It would be ideal if cephalo published dragon animation as a separate resource add-on making The Library Of Kratemaqht rely on it. Then War Of The Gods, my scenario and anyone else could also rely on the animation without need to copy paste it.

I will propose him the idea, though he is not active on the forum now.
Author of SP scenario Dragon Fight and SP campaign Captured by a Nightmare.
Created The Rise of Wesnoth (alternative mechanics) version of the mainline campaign.
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Re: Dragon Fight: SP Scenario

Post by The_Gnat »

sergey wrote:
The_Gnat wrote:Yeah a giant dragon would be great! However i suggest not using another players addon as a dependancy because they might change it at any time, i think it would be better if you add the files to your scenario. Of course it doesn't really matter :D
Generally I agree, but particularly in this case it looks safe to depend on The Library Of Kratemaqht since it is a finished campaign and I am just reusing images. The reason why I don't want to copy images to my campaign is their large size - 50 megabytes totally. It would be ideal if cephalo published dragon animation as a separate resource add-on making The Library Of Kratemaqht rely on it. Then War Of The Gods, my scenario and anyone else could also rely on the animation without need to copy paste it.

I will propose him the idea, though he is not active on the forum now.
Yes i agree. Overall it will be a large improvement to have such a good fully animated dragon in your scenario!
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