Defenders of the Crown (First beta ready)

[Turuk]

set up camp in a truly impressive natural fortress that the Orcs had foolishly ignored.

This is the one part that stood out to me in reading through it all, as it seems a bit of a stretch that there is this excellent fortress that the Orcs somehow overlooked and foolishly ignored. You could note that they never inhabited it because it was so far inside their territory that they had never needed to, that they never thought anyone would make it far enough for the fortress to be worth the manpower needed to occupy it.

[RaustBD]

set up camp in a truly impressive natural fortress that the Orcs had foolishly ignored.

This is the one part that stood out to me in reading through it all, as it seems a bit of a stretch that there is this excellent fortress that the Orcs somehow overlooked and foolishly ignored. You could note that they never inhabited it because it was so far inside their territory that they had never needed to, that they never thought anyone would make it far enough for the fortress to be worth the manpower needed to occupy it.

Yeah, I felt that was rather iffy myself. Your suggestion is better.

Edit: And now it's fixed.

[RaustBD]

Alright I sent this to Turuk, but I'm also going to put it in the thread here as per his suggestion, my current design for the map for scenario 1.

Lemme know what you think!

[Turuk]

I think you managed to convey the rapid tree growth overtaking the farms/village very well. The parts where it seems to be stretched out to the last few farm emphasizes this particularly well. The only variation I might add would be to have some of the farms that are mostly engulfed have a bit more forest bursting out of fences to the west and east, currently they seem to uniformly be moving to the northeast. This makes sense as the growth is supposedly deliberate and malicious so it's being driven that direction, but just a thought.


Current:

Slight Changes:

[RaustBD]

- forging a temporary alliance with orcs/drakes/saurians/trolls to help each other with common enemy

I just read the bio for Trolls and this suddenly seems far more plausible. Trolls aren't actually evil, turns out, they just get manipulated by the Orcs into having horrible PR. But Drakes/Orcs would be far more useful and worth allying with, what with their ready access to fire attacks.

[RaustBD]

And I have scenario 1 complete! Special thanks to Turuk for his map corrections and Zookeeper for his awesome job creating the orcscar and Eskard for the world map!

I'll release it for download here once I complete it myself once to see if everything works.

[RaustBD]

Alright, here's the first sample, with scenario 1 complete. Let me know your thoughts regarding difficulty, quality of writing, fun, etc.

Just unzip that into your add-ons folder, and if the resulting folder has the "_beta1-1" at the end, get rid of that so it's just "Defenders_Of_The_Crown".

Enjoy!

EDIT: One more thing, this campaign is for version 1.11+.

[Paulomat4]

just played through it. I have to say that your writing style is really enjoyable. Gameplay-wise it was a bit easy, I think the elves could use at least one more recruit at the start.

[Turuk]

I have to say that your writing style is really enjoyable

Agreed, it's much better than what is normally seen in UMC campaigns, and it helps to invest the player in the story.

Gameplay-wise it was a bit easy, I think the elves could use at least one more recruit at the start.

I found this to be true as well, I just kept my peasant army on the farmland and let the elves come out of the woods to maul them while I finished the elves off with the spearmen, HI and mage. It took only 11/40 turns and I ended with 129 gold.

[RaustBD]

I have to say that your writing style is really enjoyable

Agreed, it's much better than what is normally seen in UMC campaigns, and it helps to invest the player in the story.

Aw, shucks

Gameplay-wise it was a bit easy, I think the elves could use at least one more recruit at the start.

I found this to be true as well, I just kept my peasant army on the farmland and let the elves come out of the woods to maul them while I finished the elves off with the spearmen, HI and mage. It took only 11/40 turns and I ended with 129 gold.

Shoot, that's a good point. Any suggestions for how to make it more challenging?

[Turuk]

Shoot, that's a good point. Any suggestions for how to make it more challenging?

You could do a variety of things. Giving the elf leader more gold to recruit is an obvious one, but you could always have him send out sub-commanders to set up camps to the east and west to make the player have to kill three leaders. You could have him give a dialogue hint that he's calling his scouts back in now that he's found some humans, and early enough that it doesn't throw the player's strategy out the window (tomato surprises are the worst). A few scouts could appear from the mountains at the top of the map and the forests at the easy, making sure the player accounts for them. You could throw in a limit to the number of peasants that can be recruited, noting that the village can only support x number of peasants.

There are possibilities.

[RaustBD]

You could throw in a limit to the number of peasants that can be recruited, noting that the village can only support x number of peasants.

That sounds like the best option, and thankfully I already know how to do that. It's just a matter of working out what the limit should be. How many peasants did you wind up recruiting? And what difficulty were you on?

[Turuk]

You could throw in a limit to the number of peasants that can be recruited, noting that the village can only support x number of peasants.

That sounds like the best option, and thankfully I already know how to do that. It's just a matter of working out what the limit should be. How many peasants did you wind up recruiting? And what difficulty were you on?

I played through on medium, and I know that hard/expert is more my skill level, but initial balancing should be done at a base line. The easy and hard modes can be adjusted from there. If you want it to be a normal campaign, you might say that easy is 3, medium is 5, and hard is a 7 (on a scale of 1-10). Those might shift 1-2 up or down depending on if you want it overall to be harder or easier, respectively. You can also limit the difficulties to just one or two choices, as I have found that generally only one difficulty setting on a UMC campaign is truly balanced, and the others are guesses.

Hmm, I'm not at my computer to look at my replay, but I probably had 10-12 peasants.

[RaustBD]

Hm... I'll experiment more, taking your strategy into account, see what a good limit would be.

[RaustBD]

It suddenly occurred to me that with the new 1.11 graphics, Erba looks WAAAAAAAY more captain-y than Rol. Think I Should switch their classes?