A Group in a War: 1.18 SP simple RPG campaign

[RainKnight]

Truly a great concept campaign! Congratulations!
Only little suggestions:
1) No way to recruit healers? That will be a great aid in battle.
2) Maybe you can add mechanisms of construction of villages or new roads
3) The main map terrain is truly monotone...
Anyway, great work!

[Tom_Of_Wesnoth]

I agree with RainKnight, healers would be great.

[tamanegi]

@RainKnight @Tom_Of_Wesnoth
Healers are TOO great aid and they could completely change the game balance. So i made healers not recruitable. If the concept is extended to larger scale, they will be recruitable.

2) Maybe you can add mechanisms of construction of villages or new roads

They are possible, but i'm afraid these features do not fit somewhat short war in such small map. If i could extend the current concept to larger scale, those mechanisms work fine. Anyway, I recall civilization or freeciv from those mechanisms. MP (survival?) scenario (in the randomly generated map?) with those mechanisms may also be fun.

And i'm really sorry for the monotone main map...

[Tom_Of_Wesnoth]

What's stopping you expanding the scale? Is it just too difficult?

[tamanegi]

@Tom_Of_Wesnoth
Difficulty and complexity are the main reasons. More features will be required if the scale is expanded, otherwise gameplay becomes further monotone and boring. Adding features is of course difficult, and what is worse is the complexity, conflict, and balancing issue arisen from the combination of features. Checking of them and fixing bugs caused by them are undoubtedly hard. I don't wanna challange to such difficulties in my first campaign. So I made this campaign simple.

Create a minimal playable one, and then extend/expand/flesh-out it will be a basic strategy when creating a camapign. The minimal playable one will tell us many problems we are not aware first, and the playable one will give us the motivation for the further development even though it is minimal. This camapaign is currently close to the minimal playable one, I can still expand the concept. (expanded one may be published as another campaign, though) so i wanna say i am not stopping expansion.

[RainKnight]

Ok. I understand.
(1) But if no healers, maybe you can make a function to create a request (in the general dialog window) for a cart of supplies. It will be interesting to become a escort for a caravan of supplies. A question for this, ¿defeating other troops decrease the number of soldiers in larger battles for the Empire?
(2) In the other hand, is on purpose the great spend of the foods? I mean, I have a 10 men group consuming 24 foods per day. Is dificult to move with that expenses.

Thanks for this addon, I'm playing it right now.

[tamanegi]

@RainKnight
(1) Your two ideas seem to be easy to implement and interesting. I will try. I don't have enough time this month, though. For the question, number of deaths (you can know at the office) is related to the initial gold at larger battles. (It is the reason why the ally side is useless in the HARD difficulty.) But the number of deaths directly related to your troop cannot be so large, because the death number spontaneously increases by more than 10 on average everyday even if you did nothing.

(This death-initial gold relationship might need some more better balancing.)

(2) Big food consumption is intentional. Honestly, foods are added just to limit the number of soldiers in your troop. Somewhat bigger penalty of starving on loyalty (or morale) comes from the same reason. I know this limitation is annoying and not so reasonable. I guess 33 foods/day (15 lvl3 units or 31 lvl1 units) may be the basic limit. You may prepare more soldiers (transiently) for largrer battles.

Thank you for playing & suggestions!

[Dwergar]

Played this campaign. Somewhat fun.
The only question of mine - is there are other sources of gold? Like, is it possible to rob (not) fellow mercenaries from another side, or loot fort for gold used to pay to soldiers?

Also, bug.
Food transport (That is requested from general at outpost, gives +50 to food limit) needs gold. So, when there are no gold, it goes out of the business...
And you still have those +50, without need to actually defend the cart.

[tamanegi]

Thank you for playing.

other sources of gold?

As i recall, if you attack enemy transporter and defeat the leader (always Caravan), you can get some gold. But this is a rare event. Periodical funding at office is the only source of gold, practically. (If you defeat enemy or seize a fort, some bonus is added to the regular funding.)

Food transport needs gold.

Hmm. What you write is true. 100 gold is also required to recruit a food carriage. The cost of 100 gold is already described in the text, but this text is inside parentheses... it can be easily missed. I will update the text of that part.

And you still have those +50, without need to actually defend the cart.

i'm afraid i cannot get the point of this part...
Carts definitely gather attention, you have to guard them from enemies.

[Dwergar]

And you still have those +50, without need to actually defend the cart.

i'm afraid i cannot get the point of this part...
Carts definitely gather attention, you have to guard them from enemies.

Cart goes rogue if unpaid, as any regular unit.
But, if cart was not destroyed but went rogue due to absence of pay, you still have bonus to food capacity while not having cart itself (And, by extension, not needing to pay to it and defend it).

Say, you got a lot of fame, went to general, requested, for example, 6 carts, using all your gold. Then wait week/two, until gold goes out and carts leave your group.
Result - you have lone general (With, presumably, a handful of fired L3 vets), stored supplemental fund at the outpost and ridiculously high food limit of 400.
As an example.

[gfgtdf]

I just tried this campaign and at first impression there are some things that annoy me:

Entering the world map (leaving the first outpost) is quite slow, the game freezes for ~5 seconds after the map is loaded.
When a new day begins there are 4 message boxes that need to be clicked away. It would be better if the information was put into one message box.
The savefiles are very big: 1.7mb compressed, 22 mb uncomporessed

[tamanegi]

@Dwergar
Thanks, I got it. It is definitely a bug. I will fix it in the next version. It is an easy task to fix, but a little bit difficult to find out. Thanks for detailed report.

Actually, the food max is never be recalculated during "day" events. But fortunately, if you go to the office (to get supplemental fund), the food max is recalculated. So keeping the state where high food max without carts may not last long.

@gfgtdf
Took ~5 seconds is actually annoying. The large file size might be closely related to this issue. So my task might be simple.
I fortunately or unfortunately know the problem is due to a repeatedly used huge-sized macro. I will try to fix this issue in the next version. (Piled statistics data can be another cause of large file size, i will remove them from the data)

Merging daily 4 messages into a single box sounds reasonable. I will also try to do it.

Thank you for comment and suggestion.

EDIT:
Version 0.5.7 is submitted to the server.
- The bug reported by Dwergar is fixed.
- First three daily system messages (date, pay money, eat foods) are merged. Merge of other messages is little bit difficult for me...
- Save file size of The Field is reduced by ~65%
- other minor fixes
- I could not remove statistics from the save file Are there any ways?

[gfgtdf]

I just notices that your versioning is wrong: 0.5.61 comes after 0.5.7 becasue 61 is greater than 7. So wesnoth tells me that my local installed version is newer than the one on the server.

[tamanegi]

@gtgtdf
Oh, what a silly mistake... Version number is changed to 0.5.70. Thank you!

[Scaramush]

Hi, here is russian translation.
And thanks for campaign itself, playing ir was real enjoy. =)