Tales from Glerum

[MasterofGlerum]

Hello,
This is the thread for my campaign, 'Tales from Glerum'. The first chapter is complete, with 11 scenarios. At the moment, the dialogue and art are pretty bad, and the scenarios are still being balanced. Any suggestions on how to improve it will be greatly appreciated.

(Note: Believe it or not, I did not realize that some of the scenario names were identical to those of a couple mainline campaigns until I was halfway through. It was entirely unintentional.)

Version 0.0.2 changes:

Spoiler:

Made the maps to Hostile Mountains and Spring's End less time consuming. Fixed the problem with allied Saurian dying in Lizard Swamp.

-MasterofGlerum

[Velensk]

My suggestion would be that you don't upload it one scenario at a time. It gets frustrating to test and retest scenarios with each new release. Do it in large chunks and do preliminary testing yourself so that it has quality enough that other people are more willing to stick to it and test it for you.

[Lord-Knightmare]

My suggestion would be to use smaller or medium size maps not super big ones. The big ones cause boredom and sometimes frustration.

[luxury]

I agree with Lord-Knightmare
All your maps are oversized... its confusing and not necessary to have such big maps..

I play the on hardest level ...
The Scenario Lizard Swap ends always after a few rounds with the death of the allied lizard...
There is no Hint about the way to win the scenario....

[MasterofGlerum]

I agree with Lord-Knightmare
All your maps are oversized... its confusing and not necessary to have such big maps..

I play the on hardest level ...
The Scenario Lizard Swap ends always after a few rounds with the death of the allied lizard...
There is no Hint about the way to win the scenario....

Sorry about the oversized maps. I can understand Hostile Mountains being oversized, but I don't remember An Unexpected Encounter or Two Roads being overly large. I meant for Lizard Swamp to be large. How is the allied saurian being killed? Is he throwing himself into danger, or are the enemies just too strong?

[luxury]

Excuse, i meant not all maps oversized but the first and lizard swamp could be smaller...

In scenario ,lizard swamp' i don't see what happen to the allied saurian because of the shroud

[MasterofGlerum]

Excuse, i meant not all maps oversized but the first and lizard swamp could be smaller...

In scenario ,lizard swamp' i don't see what happen to the allied saurian because of the shroud

Fixed.

[Velensk]

I misunderstood what you were saying, I was under the impression that you had only one scenario released.

I played through a few of them and I don't have much to say. I found them kind of bland, and you might want to make it so that the second one does not give a gold bonus considering the infinite turn limit thing.

[MasterofGlerum]

I played through a few of them and I don't have much to say. I found them kind of bland, and you might want to make it so that the second one does not give a gold bonus considering the infinite turn limit thing.

Do you have any suggestions on how to make them better?

[Velensk]

Depends on how you define 'better'. I could offer suggestions for what you could do to help it appeal to me more but these changes would require you to redesign your campaign and I like to assume that you've tested it and are content with it but if you want an example:

I didn't enjoy the first scenario. It was low unit count skirmishing the whole way through followed by an encounter with a level 3 elf in a forest. In general I prefer there to be a decent number of units on the field (at least 10 per side) as it allows for certain kinds of tactics and help minimise the effects of luck. The enemy will recruit a unit per turn except the first (where it will disperse units who will return at periodic intervals) which gives you the effect that you will have no trouble defeating the enemies however, because of the limited villages near the combat area, attrition become an issue. Because it is not easy to push into the woods to fight a level 3 elf with an army of weakened units who will not be recovering quickly one has to sit back at the caslte waiting for income and experiance points to trickle in to the point where you can finally get enough forces to push into the forest and win despite the disavantages and hope he does not kill too many of your valueable units (he can kill most mages with retaliation in one round if you're unlucky, your dwarven scouts get no cover from the woods and are relatively fragile without it, spearmen take heafy retailation, bowmen don't do a ton of damage even at day, and cavalry have a hard time fighting in the woods). Not particuarly hard, not tactically interesting, but long, and annoying because it is tempting to be impatient as you watch your gold bonus dwindle away, not that you need to worry about that because in the next scenario you'll have an opportunity to make as much gold as you want (though you would not know this)

On top of that the story of 'I need to generate conflict and so people are going through someplace and the people in that someplace won't have any of it and so both groups slaughter each other despite having no real reason to do so' is not one I particuarly appreciate and feel is somewhat overused in Wesnoth. About the only reason I want the enemy leader dead is because he's sending his men off to their death one at a time with no real chance to win and will keep doing so every single turn because it is far too much pain to attempt to take away all his income with it buried in the woods.

I would suggest that you find some other reason for this conflict if possible. Setting the scenario up so that the enemy leader gets more units at once but fewer in reinforcement would not be strategically interesting due to the terrain but you might be able to rework the terrain to make it more so. Making the enemy leader a hero rather than a champion might help speed along the 'this battle is over but I don't have the juice to take down the enemy leader without losing my valueable units' effect (incidentally if you're going to use custom art do it right, the enemy leader switches back to the mainline art for animations and it still says he's using a great sword despite showing him with dual daggers otherwise).

But more again, this comes down to how you want the campaign to play. I don't especially want to redesign your entire campaign for you and would hope that you enjoy your own campaign if you released it.

[MasterofGlerum]

Depends on how you define 'better'. I could offer suggestions for what you could do to help it appeal to me more but these changes would require you to redesign your campaign and I like to assume that you've tested it and are content with it but if you want an example:

I didn't enjoy the first scenario. It was low unit count skirmishing the whole way through followed by an encounter with a level 3 elf in a forest. In general I prefer there to be a decent number of units on the field (at least 10 per side) as it allows for certain kinds of tactics and help minimise the effects of luck. The enemy will recruit a unit per turn except the first (where it will disperse units who will return at periodic intervals) which gives you the effect that you will have no trouble defeating the enemies however, because of the limited villages near the combat area, attrition become an issue. Because it is not easy to push into the woods to fight a level 3 elf with an army of weakened units who will not be recovering quickly one has to sit back at the caslte waiting for income and experiance points to trickle in to the point where you can finally get enough forces to push into the forest and win despite the disavantages and hope he does not kill too many of your valueable units (he can kill most mages with retaliation in one round if you're unlucky, your dwarven scouts get no cover from the woods and are relatively fragile without it, spearmen take heafy retailation, bowmen don't do a ton of damage even at day, and cavalry have a hard time fighting in the woods). Not particuarly hard, not tactically interesting, but long, and annoying because it is tempting to be impatient as you watch your gold bonus dwindle away, not that you need to worry about that because in the next scenario you'll have an opportunity to make as much gold as you want (though you would not know this)

On top of that the story of 'I need to generate conflict and so people are going through someplace and the people in that someplace won't have any of it and so both groups slaughter each other despite having no real reason to do so' is not one I particuarly appreciate and feel is somewhat overused in Wesnoth. About the only reason I want the enemy leader dead is because he's sending his men off to their death one at a time with no real chance to win and will keep doing so every single turn because it is far too much pain to attempt to take away all his income with it buried in the woods.

I would suggest that you find some other reason for this conflict if possible. Setting the scenario up so that the enemy leader gets more units at once but fewer in reinforcement would not be strategically interesting due to the terrain but you might be able to rework the terrain to make it more so. Making the enemy leader a hero rather than a champion might help speed along the 'this battle is over but I don't have the juice to take down the enemy leader without losing my valueable units' effect (incidentally if you're going to use custom art do it right, the enemy leader switches back to the mainline art for animations and it still says he's using a great sword despite showing him with dual daggers otherwise).

But more again, this comes down to how you want the campaign to play. I don't especially want to redesign your entire campaign for you and would hope that you enjoy your own campaign if you released it.

Thank you. I've been thinking for a while that the first scenario didn't entirely work. The dialogue and story throughout the whole campaign needs serious work, and I'm thankful for any suggestions on how to improve it.

[UK1]

I thought the story-line would be exciting from the title/description, but it's really the story-line of a glorified World Conquest campaign. And the idea seems to be the same. Throw a huge whack o' enemies at a small whack o' heroes and watch the enemies get butchered. That is until I got to Revenge of Spring or whatever it's called. Don't know why, maybe I didn't save up enough gold (?), maybe I was missing a strategy that should have been hitting me in the face, but after several attempts I couldn't beat it. I'm leaning towards not accruing enough gold because it just seemed like I was massively outnumbered. But if that's the case it doesn't really matter because the campaign doesn't really make me want to go back and try to do better. It just doesn't. Ten percent of that lack of desire was the presence of grammar and spelling errors throughout the portion I played. A poor execution of the English language frustrates me and hampers my ability to "get into" a story or whatever it is I'm reading. Although that seems pandemic in Wesnoth campaigns and, sadly, a cure has not presented itself. And if you do go back and fix the grammar mistakes, you might as well add more story-line... A bit of flavor goes a long way towards making a bowl of hot water into soup.

[Kurt_Aust]

Currently playing through "Lizard Swamp".

My God, this has to be the most boring scenario I've yet come across:

1. Super large map (151*79) on which most of your units can all too often only move one hex per turn - according to the AI a standard 5 MP unit will take 65 turns to cross the map.

2. Huge numbers of allied and enemy units going for each other over which you have no control - close to 200 of them at the peak - making for exceedingly long waits between turns (over 5 minutes).

I ended up turning off all sound except the turn bell and throwing in a DVD of Castle to watch while waiting, I'm currently on my 4th episode.