Legend of the Invincibles

[jeffgreen]

@gfgtdf Dropping the item when he becomes unable to use it is not the most comfortable way to do it. But without it, it leads to easy exploits. I think that it would be better if it was scripted for these rare occasions that these items are moved into the storage.

Don't the side effects remain? e.g 20% more magic from a staff even if the character has advanced to holding a mace? If the staff was dropped or put into storage instead then those other benefits would be lost.

[Dugi]

Units that could use staves, but can use maces on their maximum level are only Celestial Messengers as far as I remember, and they are allowed to pick up staves anyway (their sprite has one). A better example is Shadow Prince, who could use a mace and a sling, but on level 4, he can use only staves (but he is much stronger from the other side). I think that it would be the most comfortable to make any newly advanced Shadow Prince get his sling and mace moved into the item storage.

[Ultragore]

LotI is one of the few really good non RPG Wesnoth campaigns that exist. I've played nearly every add-on campaign available on the official download server but abandoned most of them due to pure tediousness. The equipment addition makes Wesnoth what I supposed it to be. Very good work!

Although I've just advanced to chapter II it's really good fun collecting gear and find out the suitable character to equip it with. Not even the fact that almost all scenario objectives are 'slay everything' spoilt the game fun which was the main reason to condemn most other add-ons.

Nevertheless there are some things that annoyed me:

1. The first Spearman (by that time equipped with a explosive lance) that advanced, automatically upgraded to a javeliner instead of giving me the choice between javelin man and lance guy.

2. The guy who started with a silver crown at the very beginning disappeared with all the gear I gave him a few scenarios later. Same with Argon later on. What a shame!

3. When the heros became undead, they were much weaker than before (maybe intended by you?).

4. The second 'escape cave' scenario after becoming undead was really tough even on easy mode as the Lich spams skeletons in a ludicrous way. Thank god Efraim had penetration skill and I trained on bats the scenario before. No chance to survive for all the other poor guys who spawn.

5. All the fairies and druids which spawned in chapter I can equip gear but the effects only partly activate. GEARED does not appear in the unit description. Really annoying as I've focused on leveling them up. They are the only healers and magic wielders by that time and now I think I have to dismiss them due to this fact.

Hopefully at least the last mentioned thing can be fixed.

[Dugi]

I am glad you liked it.

The nuisances:
1. This is not supposed to happen. I don't know how could it even happen, because I have changed nothing with Spearmen.
2. I see, it's quite an unpleasant surprise. Maybe I could make you get the gear back when they leave.
3. It was intentional, he became weaker because he was not really used to use his own powers. But he will grow stronger, and will be much stronger than before becoming undead.
4. Okay, I have changed it, decreased his income by 20 that should mean 1.3 skeletons less per turn. Not uploaded it, though, because I have chapter 9 partially written.
5. GEARED is supposed to appear. I will have to have a look at it, it might be some kind of bug (it's a shame to tell it, but there is still a lot of bugs). Shydes advance into other support units, but Sylphs advance into strong offensive magicians.

Do you want the advancement of Shyde to be a offensive unit and not a good support unit as the units she advances from?

[Silux]

Lethalia was more powerful there because she has arcane damage that was quite useful there.
The references to other campaigns were not just references to other campaigns, you shall learn that soon.
Gold macro didn't work? Do you mean that you found a pile of gold and it did not give gold to you?
Did you have the version where Lilith had the meteoric swarms or it is not published yet?
Each chapter is different, so it was quite intentional that one chapter is more linear, one is less linear, one is about defeating enemies, one is about the progression of heroes etc.

Lethalia also had better movement, a better whirlwind attack and a slow attack by default.

The gold macro isn't the one which gets you the gold after finding the pile of gold, but the one that gives you {600 700 450} gold at the start of the level in easy, medium , hard.

I don't remember well the battle but i'm sure Lilith had a meteor swarm attack.

[Dugi]

Movement depends on gear, Efraim has minimal movement cost in forest as well (this was because of chapter 2 mostly), and he has 1 more movement point. But it strongly depends on gear equipped. Efraim and Lethalia's whirlwind attacks have the same damage, just Efraim has it from the start. It was probably influenced by the gear again. Lethalia has slow attack by default, but Efraim can get slow to his main ranged attack and that requires only one advancement. So, in fact, all these inequalities were because of gear. Lethalia possibly obtained more advancements, because she was more effective against undead and that is why she seemed stronger.

The gold macro isn't the one which gets you the gold after finding the pile of gold, but the one that gives you {600 700 450} gold at the start of the level in easy, medium , hard.

I have never seen it fail. There is no visible error in the code (bad usage of macros usually tends to cause crashes on loading), and I have not changed anything with that, the difficulties in LotI are totally standard.

Good to hear that she already had that meteor swarm, because I was afraid that she was very tough even when did not have it yet and that adding it made it impossible to complete.

Thanks for feedback.

[Ultragore]

I am glad you liked it.

The nuisances:
1. This is not supposed to happen. I don't know how could it even happen, because I have changed nothing with Spearmen.
2. I see, it's quite an unpleasant surprise. Maybe I could make you get the gear back when they leave.
3. It was intentional, he became weaker because he was not really used to use his own powers. But he will grow stronger, and will be much stronger than before becoming undead.
4. Okay, I have changed it, decreased his income by 20 that should mean 1.3 skeletons less per turn. Not uploaded it, though, because I have chapter 9 partially written.
5. GEARED is supposed to appear. I will have to have a look at it, it might be some kind of bug (it's a shame to tell it, but there is still a lot of bugs). Shydes advance into other support units, but Sylphs advance into strong offensive magicians.

Do you want the advancement of Shyde to be a offensive unit and not a good support unit as the units she advances from?

1. If I recall correctly, the spearman advanced in enemy's turn. I can only guess that it had something to do with the equipment and the fact that you altered the upgrade choice to the following user turn.

3. Maybe too strong in regard of general gameplay balance. I killed the whole army in 'Infinite Legion' with my two heros. Which made my heroes even stronger of course.

5. Don't get me wrong. The abilities of the shydes and sylphes are just fine. It's just disturbing that these spawned (not recruited) unites do not support the gear feature. It's possible to give them gear but as said before the effects only partly take effect. For example, my Elvish Shyde (lv.4) wields the 'stardust' staff. Although the 'murderlust' ability is activated, the +20% magical damage doesn't work. Also GEARED is not shown in the description. Can't tell about the other effects 'stardust' offers.

6. During the slaughter mentioned under point 3. I've discovered that the 'soul eater' counter only takes account of one kill, even if you defeat a whole bunch of enemy's for example with the explosive fairy fire or whirlwind attacks. The same goes for all 'extra damage' enemies take from other damaging abilities that are not exactly 'real attacks'.

Also I wonder how items actually drop? I mean in regard of drop rate and chance. I'm under the impression that drops are more likely if a lower level unit kills an enemy. Can you tell me how that works or, if you have already, direct me to the section where it's explained?

[etErnALChaOs]

Hi.. Just finished playing the first two chapters of LotI v 2.4.14 on BfW 1.10.6... Absolutely great.. The best campaign, nay, the best turn based strategy I've ever played..

Just a couple of suggestions:

1. Delinah (the Rogue we get at the beginning) just vanished after I lvled her into an Executioner and gave her tons of items. Maybe you could include a warning at the scenario that she's gonna disappear.. If she's not coming back, we can save the items at least..

2. Can you make the custom Unit Information that pops up along with Items option show the updated resistances after modification from items and AMLA? It would be very useful when assigning items, especially rings and trinkets.. If that's possible, you could also make it show the modified resistances of the enemies like Lilith and her worshippers who have high resistances that we can't actually see.. It would help us plan ahead, which is really important in a strategy game..

3. Taking 'Legacy Possessed' option is really a risk without having any idea of what we'd get.. For example, the Efraim's legacy before becoming a Preserved Lich is just 2 more to melee damage.. We can get that simply by choosing saber improvement twice without having to wait for a level.. Maybe you could give an indication of what the legacy is, or, if you want it to remain a mystery, at least make sure it is better than choosing any two other improvements.. Of course, we can easily undo the legacy by going back one turn and changing the last AMLA before advancing.. At least I think that will work.. Anyway the legacies offered must be worth the wait.. Or are there better improvements waiting that I'm unaware of?

Other than this, the campaign is simply great.. I hope the item system and AMLA before an official part of BfW.. Oh, and the increased lvl cap too..

[Dugi]

@Ultragore
1. During the enemy turn, it might be possible. For some reasons, I needed to change the time when the AMLA choice appears so that it asks you about the advancement at the beginning of your turn (I find this change handy, because I really hated when I alt+tab-ed from wesnoth to do something else while the AI does its turn, and when I came back, I realised that one of my units advanced, paused the game till I choose the advancement, and I was waiting uselessly). It was meant to affect only units on maximum level, but it seems something went wrong. I think that I might delay the advancement option for lower level units as well.

3. That is just because the enemies dealt mostly blade and pierce damage, that does not harm them greatly, and were significantly weak against some kinds of damage. It was a good challenge until I added the items. I think that a solution might be making some of them resistant to some kinds of damage and deal more effective kinds of damage, like fire or arcane.

5. That looks like a bug. All attacks describable as related to magic should be affected by that item property. I will have a look at it. As far as I know, faerie fire is affected.

6. Attacks with an area of effect are very destructive, and somehow superior to all other attacks. Because of this, additional targets don't add experience and most benefits of abilities and weapon specials (drain works with whirlwind, but it does not work with explosive damage, abilities murderlust, feeding, foul hunger or soul eater generally don't work).

Your impression about the drops is wrong. Each scenario has a property that determines the overall chance that something will drop from any unit. It ranges from 1% to 10%, in some special scenarios it can be even higher. Units that can recruit usually always drop something. The types of weapons that can drop are also a scenario setting, that makes sure that you will not get a mace or spear you cannot use during the escape from the cave prison.

@etErnALChaOs
1. True, it was discussed a couple of replies above, and I promised to change it that items equipped on her will be moved into the general inventory.

2. You can hover your mouse over the unit's hitpoints to see its resistances. Unit information shows some of its properties you might not see normally. It does not show resistances, because they are already available. Together with the right bar, it shows all properties I could think of.

3. The legacy is completely random and it is intentionally completely unpredictable, if you start playing it again he will probably have a different legacy. He probably had the weakest of them, but it is still not really weak. It increases the melee damage by 2, and after taking several good AMLAs for melee damage, he would normally have only +1 to melee damage advancements. Also, a legacy usually adds like 5 new AMLA advancements, so discovering it is not like spending one advancement to get a random new one. Reloading the game to learn the legacy is not really effective, because it is chosen when the unit is created (that usually means when he's recruited), and when you choose to learn it, you have to wait a level until the advancement windows tells you what it was.

The item system, AMLA nor the increased level cap will never become an official part of wesnoth, the developers have explicitly said they don't want it. The only way to achieve it would be to get this campaign into mainline, but that would need a lot of polishing before (it is incomplete, parts of it cannot be translated, contains too many bugs and its code is very chaotic in some parts).

Spoiler:

You've made me laugh

[Silux]

@Ultragore
The item system, AMLA nor the increased level cap will never become an official part of wesnoth, the developers have explicitly said they don't want it. The only way to achieve it would be to get this campaign into mainline, but that would need a lot of polishing before (it is incomplete, parts of it cannot be translated, contains too many bugs and its code is very chaotic in some parts).

To get better polishing and a better chance to get included in mainline we could make a smaller campaign using this system and concentrate fewer units.
Playing i added some objects here and there and i tweaked gold and units to see what could be more interesting.
Duelist mages are really great against liches and skeletons:D

I like a lot the Wesnoth fantasy flavor, but i was growing a bit tired of fighting always the same skeletons, same orcs.
Fighting against custom corrupted elves and discovering new gear was a great experience!

[Dugi]

Maybe chapter 1 one LotI? It is the best regarding balance and story (and unlike most other parts of the add-on, it meets the requirements for a mainline campaign except the one that it has to be tried by a developer). But separating which resources are needed and which are not would be hard.

If you like custom enemies, you will enjoy chapter 9, there are three smaller new factions.

__________________________________________________
More important information:
I have updated chapter 9 alpha on the add-ons.wesnoth.org:15004 server . It works until you enter the last area on the map, when you enter it, just save and leave, there is nothing to do except killing some enemies.

Regarding overall progress, I think I am in two thirds of the whole thing.

[Silux]

chapter 1 has maybe a better quality than some mainline campaigns for art and story.
Redundant resources are ok, as they grant a legacy for later chapters.
Loot drops, extra advancements and AMLAs could be packed into an era and the campaign be based on it.
This way you could allow others to use loot and gear also in their campaigns and you can understand better if a bug is in the era or the campaign:)

[Dugi]

The problem with resources is that they are not in the final stage. There can still be more items available (design some if you want), some abilities might be added with it, although the general inventory on LotI v2.5.0 alpha lists the items by type, there seem to be some bug, advancing does not work properly on 1.11.1 and 1.11.2 despite my greatest efforts and some more stuff to be done. Once I'll finish it, I will ask about this openly, but not now.

Loot drops, extra advancement and AMLAs have been separated put into an add-on (that is otherwise useless) that lets campaign designers add these into their add-ons very easily, accompanied by an explanation how to use it. It's not much used, though. A problem with an era is that an era based on LotI extra advancements and AMLAs is that there are no units from the Drakes faction in LotI, only one unit from the Northerners faction and from the four remaining factions, two are missing a crucial unit, Wose and Ghoul (I have no idea what could they advance to, and they are not playable in the campaign for some reasons I might tell if you wanted anyway). The lack of spearmen should not annoy anyone.

But that is quite irrelevant. I know even (maybe I said otherwise before, but I figured it out only a few days ago) how to make an add-on that would add all these resources into all SP campaigns (imagine gear and AMLAs in After the Storm...), but aside from a possible and probably resolvable occasional lack of compatibility, there are two big problems. First one is that the drops have to be configured. You have to set which items will drop and which will not (imagine how useful would be spears and axes in An Orcish Incursion), and also how frequently they will drop. The first might be based on some recall list statistics, but the second one is not so easy, maybe it might be based on enemy level. The second big problem is that it would unbalance everything. In LotI, I added 25-40% to the gold resources of all enemies when I was adding items, but it is not as balanced as it was when I wrote it first. Adding some incremental percentages to enemy gold, income and gold per village might partially solve it, it wouldn't be perfect. Especially with enemy units that weren't created by recruiting, like many enemies in Under the Burning Suns. Anyway, if I was to start a project like it, I would better finish the resources and LotI first.

[etErnALChaOs]

@etErnALChaOs
2. You can hover your mouse over the unit's hitpoints to see its resistances. Unit information shows some of its properties you might not see normally. It does not show resistances, because they are already available. Together with the right bar, it shows all properties I could think of.

3. The legacy is completely random and it is intentionally completely unpredictable, if you start playing it again he will probably have a different legacy. He probably had the weakest of them, but it is still not really weak. It increases the melee damage by 2, and after taking several good AMLAs for melee damage, he would normally have only +1 to melee damage advancements. Also, a legacy usually adds like 5 new AMLA advancements, so discovering it is not like spending one advancement to get a random new one. Reloading the game to learn the legacy is not really effective, because it is chosen when the unit is created (that usually means when he's recruited), and when you choose to learn it, you have to wait a level until the advancement windows tells you what it was.

2. Lol, I didn't know that..

3. Oh, just my luck then.. My Swordmaster has a better legacy.. 15% resist to cold, 5% to impact and 1 to melee damage.. And, I was talking about going back and choosing +1 to melee damage twice instead of choosing Legacy (for my Ephiram), but since you say it opens up new advancements, I'd have to choose Legacy itself..

Another little thing I noticed.. I am trying to get Spritiual Transformation for both Lethalia and Ephiram through soul feeding.. I noticed that Health improvement gives them both +10 HP and opens up the Health improvement AMLA, but Regeneration only opens up its AMLA and doesn't increase the current regeneration. Is this intentional? If it is, then it's just a quirk.. But if it's not, please fix it

[Dugi]

Health improvement does NOT give +10 hp. Its AMLAs add 10 to max hp, but the improvement itself adds nothing except unlocking the AMLA.