A Vision Blinded (15 scenarios, all complete and working)

Discussion and development of scenarios and campaigns for the game.

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Jim Goodridge
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Re: A Vision Blinded (15 scenarios, all complete and working)

Post by Jim Goodridge »

First of all, I think this campaign has the potential to be great and also, I appreciate the amount of work that must be put into the campaign. After spending a lot of time playing this one - I just think it is out of whack and it seems to be getting harder with each revision.

I've played through on normal until "Nature's Fury" where I get wiped out by the 18th turn. I haven't played the latest version where apparently Silver Mages are going to teleport in to "For the Checkmate". I found the game great until "And the River Ran Red" ( I don't know if that will be the case now that "For the Checkmate" has been increased in difficulty). And the River Ran Red was a long and tiresome scenario. The only strategy that I found worked was to hide in the mountains until it was over, and there were so many enemy units moving that each turn took a long time to complete. And the River Ran Red didn't reduce any units but used up a significant amount of gold. "For Auld Lang Syne" required extra units to bail out the Ally early on. The Ally's units tried to defend from bad terrain and thus had to be protected or they got wiped out way to early, so by the end of that scenario I was out of gold and had to start Nature's fury with minimum gold.

It seems that each revision is just making it harder to play. I know that most people will be better at this than me ( for instance I do not see how you can get through "Emerging from the Depths" without losing anything on Normal level") but the games are not fun if you are always behind the eight ball. There was another great campaign "Bad Moon Rising" where no one reported winning one of the scenarios. There was no point keeping playing.

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Jim
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LemonTea
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Re: A Vision Blinded (15 scenarios, all complete and working)

Post by LemonTea »

Jim Goodridge wrote: I've played through on normal until "Nature's Fury" where I get wiped out by the 18th turn. ... "For Auld Lang Syne" required extra units to bail out the Ally early on. The Ally's units tried to defend from bad terrain and thus had to be protected or they got wiped out way to early, so by the end of that scenario I was out of gold and had to start Nature's fury with minimum gold.
Those two are the final two battle scenarios. They actually have not been balanced at all :/

River Ran Red is... an annoying scenario, that's what I feel when I play through it. Hence the reduced turns in 0.4.8. But I actually don't like survival scenarios, so I might replace it completely if I can think of something good to replace it with (not a go-kill-everything scenario though, I got enough of those :P)
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Jim Goodridge
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Re: A Vision Blinded (15 scenarios, all complete and working)

Post by Jim Goodridge »

LemonTea wrote:[

Those two are the final two battle scenarios. They actually have not been balanced at all :/

River Ran Red is... an annoying scenario, that's what I feel when I play through it. Hence the reduced turns in 0.4.8. But I actually don't like survival scenarios, so I might replace it completely if I can think of something good to replace it with (not a go-kill-everything scenario though, I got enough of those :P)
My apologies, I did not realize that they were not balanced yet. For River Ran Red, have you thought of doing a scenario where your heroes have to sneak through enemy lines during the battle? It might be ucky to program but it also might be more fun than waiting on top of the mountain. Sorry for my rant, but, I hate not being able to see how the story ends.

Best Regards
Jim
ulfgur
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Re: A Vision Blinded (15 scenarios, all complete and working)

Post by ulfgur »

Hi, heres ulfgur.

third mission a wee bit unbalanced. (i got past the second one, all I had to do was stick to the hills :oops: )

cant beat the third one.

------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Okay, now that I actually have time to say what the problem is, I can say that the terrain is an interesting challenge.
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Orcish Shyde
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Re: A Vision Blinded (15 scenarios, all complete and working)

Post by Orcish Shyde »

It probably says something for the high campaign quality that I only have three pieces of constructive criticism to make.

1. In "New Mutiny" it seems a little odd to have all those villages scattered around in the middle of nowhere. I ended the level with minus a lot gold; was I meant to actually run after those villages?

2. Given the nature of the scenario "Emerging from the Depths" could do with having the turn limit removed outright. I only just completed it on the very last turn, with my gold deep in the red; after such a long, painful slog, the chance of running out of turns should be exactly zero.

3. CHANGE THE MUSIC IN "Emerging from the Depths". Seriously. Hearing that frantic tune applied to a long, slow, torturous slog through a cave not only was inappropriate, but drove me insane. I'd have gone with "underground.ogg" all the way through myself.
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LemonTea
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Re: A Vision Blinded (15 scenarios, all complete and working)

Post by LemonTea »

Version 0.4.9 uploaded. Changes to scenario 13 (to make it easier):

- Side 5 (ally) has slightly more gold
- The northern enemy has a lot less gold.
- If the northern enemy or the undead enemy get very close to side 5's keep, 4 units spawn to help defend it.
- Side 5's AI parameters changed so it's less aggressive and more cautious

Increased scenario 6's turn limit (sorta forgot to go back and check after turning up the difficulty a few versions back :P)

Final battle scenario (14) still completely unbalanced. My holidays are at an end so I'm slower in maintaining this now :(

ulfgur wrote: (i got past the second one, all I had to do was stick to the hills :oops: )

cant beat the third one.
Hmm... could it be that sticking to the hills in scen 2 made you finish too late and gave you too little gold in scenario 3? :hmm: Also helps to know what difficulty setting this is on.

Orcish Shyde wrote:CHANGE THE MUSIC IN "Emerging from the Depths".
Good idea. Made a last minute change to v0.4.9 that did that. :geek:
Orcish Shyde wrote:1. In "New Mutiny" it seems a little odd to have all those villages scattered around in the middle of nowhere.
That was one of my earlier maps :P A lot of the earlier scenarios had that kind of thing. I did go back and fix a bit of it but quite a bit is still left there :wink: Maybe I should go back and edit those maps again :P
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Orcish Shyde
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Re: A Vision Blinded (15 scenarios, all complete and working)

Post by Orcish Shyde »

After several cycles of "attempt scenario, give up in frustration and despair, repeat", I have this to say about the one after "Emerging from the Depths": it feels ridiculously hard. Between the hideously short time limit, the fact you're horribly outnumbered by loyal units from the beginning, the fact half the map is horrible terrain for your troops, and the undead ambushes, I end up unable to think how I'm meant to win, and unable to even contemplate how you thought anyone could even survive on minimum gold. Isn't it hard enough, fighting endless hordes of abominations against which your troops have little to no effective defence, in obscenely unfavourable terrain, in a ridiculously short time, without making them invisible to boot?
Granted, maybe it's meant to be a gold-eater, but for some reason "Give up in despair" and "Debug mode" are higher in my list of reactions to a mission that's too hard than "Assume the campaign designer has made the next scenario nice and easy, and thus throw everything you have at this scenario in the hope of completing it at all". The only reason I treated "Saving Inarix" in SotBE as a gold-eater was because the walkthrough told me it was one.
The fact I don't really understand why elves care a wit about an undead army that didn't actually attack them before they said "Eww, ugly things, must kill them before they can raise an army that we might possibly be able to bribe into fighting for us!" I mean, Quoscelia isn't above using humans and trolls as expendable cannonfodder, so why does she draw the line at people who are already dead?

If the above sounds biased, it is indicative of my mood after trying to play through "On The Marshes" and thus indicative of the scenario's difficulty.

EDIT: Replaying after a night's sleep has done nothing to improve my opinion of the scenario, and I suggest one or more of the following would make it better:
- Increase the turn limit. By a lot. Despair really sets in when you hit half time having got nowhere.
- Make the ambushers exclusively "fleshy" undead - Ghouls, Necrophagi, Soulless, and Walking Corpses. This way your non-Sorceress elven units can actually put up a fight against them. On the other hand, maybe your intention was to make the player level up magi and trolls here.
- Leave the time limit as it is - but induce victory on surviving 20 turns, not defeat. My main worry was "I'll never do this in time" and that is moot if running out of turns means 'congratulations, you've survived this hellish mission'.
- Remove "On The Marshes" outright. Why would the elves attack an undead army without first knowing its intent? Why can't Quoscelia do the sensible thing, flip off that shyde, and run from the swamps despite her advice?
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LemonTea
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Re: A Vision Blinded (15 scenarios, all complete and working)

Post by LemonTea »

Thanks for pointing out how you get swarmed at the beginning, cos that was a bug. It happened when I was tweaking something and screwed up/missed some coding. Those units were meant to be ambushers who don't move :augh:

It's fixed in version 0.5.0. I also halved the number of ambushers and raised the starting gold.
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stillcen
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Re: A Vision Blinded (15 scenarios, all complete and working)

Post by stillcen »

Oi'

I am playing version 1.4 and on hard.

I Have played up to "On the marshes" and thought that up till the "marshes" things were well balanced. I understand that it is on hard.....er...

but i tried two different tacks; First was to put my elves in the foresty bits north and south of the keep, with 2nd and 3rd level Trolls along the waters edge (9 of them), to absorb the inital wave. I got trashed.

Next i tryied to hold back in the keep with the trolls and still put the elves in the woods. I did not get trashed, but the inital swarm of undead did not end untill turn 11, giving me only enough time to pick off the northern most leader.

Hope this helps, and i appreciate the Creativity and effort people have put into Wesnoth.


stillcen
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LemonTea
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Re: A Vision Blinded (15 scenarios, all complete and working)

Post by LemonTea »

stillcen wrote:First was to put my elves in the foresty bits north and south of the keep, with 2nd and 3rd level Trolls along the waters edge (9 of them), to absorb the inital wave. I got trashed.

Next i tryied to hold back in the keep with the trolls and still put the elves in the woods. I did not get trashed, but the inital swarm of undead did not end untill turn 11, giving me only enough time to pick off the northern most leader.
Hmm... I think the 'initial swarm' refers to the bug that was fixed in v0.5.0 where the undead 'ambushers' don't ambush but rather actively attack you? What campaign version are you on?
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stillcen
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Re: A Vision Blinded (15 scenarios, all complete and working)

Post by stillcen »

err..... As to what version; I added-on the 1.4 version as i am running the 1.4.5 version of Wesnoth.

it seems very probable that the ambushers were a movin, as i was not ambushed the last turns i was able to move forward.



As a more general question.

There are version 1.5 add on's but as i downloaded the 1.4.5 version of wesnoth (it be listed as the stable version) i downloaded the 1.4 add-ons.

As such is my feed back outdated as developers are working on 1.5 versions?

cen
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Orcish Shyde
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Re: A Vision Blinded (15 scenarios, all complete and working)

Post by Orcish Shyde »

AVB is still a 1.4 campaign. To update it, go onto the Add-On Server and download it again, then load the save made when the scenario began (NOT the autosave of the first turn) for changes to take effect.
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taptap
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Re: A Vision Blinded (15 scenarios, all complete and working

Post by taptap »

Thanks for porting it to 1.10.
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WanderingHero
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Re: A Vision Blinded (15 scenarios, all complete and working

Post by WanderingHero »

I liked this campaign, but I dont think you playtested Emerging From the Depths properly. And if that was because the scenario was excessively long and dull, well that might be the problem with it.....

If you adjusted Emerging from the Depths to make it easier and less annoying I'd hate to see what it was like before.

I mean dam that scenario is boring, unfun and just plain aggravating. I mean does an EIGHTY turn slog through and excessively long and twisty cave(which you cant see the end of) REALLY sound fun? What is with people putting long obnoxious cave scenarios on a pedastool? Most of them suck and are insanely boring to play through. I had been saving my leaders Lv4 for whe she needed it and i sent her up top because I had no idea how ridiculous long and twisitng the map was

People a huge map with a ridiculous amount of units does not inheriantly make a better scenario, simarly ridiculosy long timed walks through a cave with units not designed for it is agonizingly annoying.

Whats the design philopshy behind it and no drastically revising the map? Id debug past it (their is no map that is more annoying to run out of turns on than this one....) but I dont want to unbalance the rest of the campaig (dont know how much gold im expected to have).

I don't normally rant but I see you made only minimal changes to it, so I'm wondering if theirs some value and desing philsophy you place on it, particurly seeing as it follows a map that dragged on a bit long (I wonder if it could have been trimmed a little so the elves and dwarves reached other sooner).

Sorry for the rant, but long maps (espeically boring cave levels) have been a pet peeve of mine and running out of turns on an 80 turn map when i was just a few turns from the exit was a bit much for me....
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taptap
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Re: A Vision Blinded (15 scenarios, all complete and working

Post by taptap »

I tend to agree with Wandering Hero. I had several tries now, and didn't finish it yet, either because of losses or because of time running out. (Staying focused so long isn't easy too). Especially bottlenecks can be really tedious, when you don't make it past the first one before the enemies arrive it can take you ages to make it past the bottleneck (that you can start recruiting only on turn 3 doesn't help either). Especially if you do the natural thing and recruit mainly trolls you easily get bogged down at the first bottleneck (and I am just playing on normal :))

I looked at the map in debug mode and it feels like you are close to the turn limit even without enemies (only slight exaggeration). Another problem might be that you will inevitable end this scenario with a ridiculously high-level army.

Later: Rushing the first chokepoint (with cavalry!), leaving a force behind to take out blue (I had a big bonus in the last scenario, so enough gold.), the second chokepoint saw several reloads (sorry! dwarves suiciding against trolls sometimes leave unexpected free spots) and a dead troll warrior. Finished on the last turn by hurrying very much after finally breaking through. End the scenario with 4 troll warriors and 2 lobbers - in the first scenario where I could recruit trolls.

Proposal: Make the cave half as long, remove two AIs, make the remaining AIs stronger (but not so strong as the joined forces of the 3 AIs clogging up your way now) aiming at a 40 turn max scenario - this would also limit the amount of experience thrown at the player somewhat + would make the initial gold of the player in the next scenario better controllable. Or make a completely new cave scenario, with some real fighting in larger caves again better not longer than 40 turns.
Last edited by taptap on July 8th, 2012, 11:33 pm, edited 4 times in total.
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