Grnk the Mighty: Parts 1 & 2 now on 1.12 and 1.14 server

[mattsc]

Hi blackjack,

Thank you! As for 'Converted', you are right, it is supposed to be quite difficult, although, as with other scenarios, it is meant to be a bit "tricky" to figure out (not sure if that's exactly the right word here) more so that outright difficult. Not surprisingly, you mention exactly the two things that Grnk is supposed to figure out here, working without healing from villages against a time limit that does not let you sit back near the keep and wait out the onrush of the enemies.

Specifically for this scenario this means:

Spoiler:

You need to play this somewhat aggressively, but you cannot just storm forward, there are too many enemies for this. So you need to move forward and hit hard at night, and hold back and use terrain and the natural resistances of skeletons during the day. As for healing, use rest healing if possible, but much more so, it is really important to get some level-ups as quickly as possible. Once you have 2 or 3 L2s, you pretty much have the scenario won (well, you still need to proceed carefully, but you know what I mean).

If you want to see how I did that, I have attached one of my more recent replays in which I finish on turn 21 here (also on medium; note that the turn limit then was 30, while it is now 24, but obviously I made it within those 24 with a few to spare). I've played this scenario many times while balancing it, this is quite typical for how I did it. Meaning, it's not specifically lucky or anything.

Btw, this scenario and the next are meant as the mid-campaign "highlights," so they are supposed to be hard/tricky. After that it gets a little easier again (briefly).

Hope this helps and thank you very much for the feedback!

[blackjack]

I'm going to avoid looking at your spoiler and try and figure it out for myself… maybe the solution is to do an assassination run with a couple of ghouls or use submerged skeletons.

[mattsc]

I'm going to avoid looking at your spoiler and try and figure it out for myself…

Cool!

maybe the solution is to do an assassination run with a couple of ghouls or use submerged skeletons.

Well, let me know if that works, and I will see what I can do to prevent it from being possible. No seriously, while I don't specifically make things like leader assassination impossible (I do try to make them difficult to achieve though), those are not the "tricks" that I meant. I try not to use those in setting up my campaigns. I rather mean things like careful unit placement in small or medium scale battles, trying to figure out when to play defensively and when one has to switch to offensive mode in order to beat the time limit, using rest or level-up healing, how many units need to be "sacrificed" (including leveled-up units) in order to achieve the overall goal and that sort of thing.

That's why I said that "tricky" is maybe not the best word here (I don't mean it in the sense of "trickery"), but I can't come up with a better one right now.

One more spoiler:

Spoiler:

How many units you end this scenario with, and what level they are, makes very little difference to the difficulty of the next one.

[blackjack]

I did manage to beat it on my first try using a sub-optimal form of the skeleton assassination squad.

Basically, send about 8 skeletons south on the first two turns, but they go for the water on the west side instead of engaging. Not all of them will get submerged, but about 4 skeletons (possibly damaged will get submerged in the middle of the river).

Meanwhile, you won't have many units left, but they will all be defending the island you start on. So you draw the main army towards you, and they will kill almost all of your defensive units. When things look bad, Grnk runs for safety into one of the mountain hexes with where he can only get attacked from one hex.

Once the main army is past you, the submerged units head back for shore. They draw out the first guard... and I also got lucky that the commander got drawn out of his starting castle, so I got a few hits on him. Then when he returned, I finished him off around turn 20. The heavy infantry wrecked my skeletons though.

[mattsc]

Hi blackjack. I see, that's quite inventive. One of the things I like about Wesnoth is that there are often very different ways of playing a scenario. And in Grnk specificially, players have more than once surprised me by coming up with strategies that I would have never even thought of.

So, while this would be very easy to make impossible (it would take about 6 lines in the WML code setting the AI parameters), I am not going to do so, especially since it doesn't seem to give you a huge advantage or disadvantage for the next scenarios. Good on you for finding this and thanks for letting me know!

[Wenplg]

Does anyone have a replay for Flight (first scenario of part one of Grnk the Mighty) to show how they beat it?

I can't seem to defend the valley long enough for Grnk to get on the gryphon.

[mattsc]

Wenplg: Attached is the replay from my last play-through of Grnk (I think). It's from 1.12.2 and it gives me out-of-sync error messages in 1.12.5, but if you just click on 'ignore all' it plays through just fine.

This one is not particularly well played (If I remember correctly, I was just going for the bare minimum that time), but it should demonstrate how to do it in general. Essentially the trick is to set up a defensive formation on strong terrain, attack only at a range the enemy cannot answer or is very weak, preferentially get rid of the enemies' L2s and assassins, and try to get a couple of your own units leveled up. And don't lose units that are almost leveled up like I did.

Hope this helps!

[Wenplg]

Thanks! Finally managed to beat the level.

[mattsc]

Thanks! Finally managed to beat the level.

Great! Good to hear that it helped and I hope you'll have fun with the rest of Grnk.

[moozer]

hi

I have just finished playing grnk the mighty. It was one of those campaign that got me hooked...
I really like the low predictability - and it kept me amazed of what happened next. It was quite enjoyable.

Spoiler:

On thing I did guess was the fact that when playing one side, and getting some good L2 or L3 units - that came back later to work against you.
That was a nice twist

In the campaign comments, you mention that it might be hard. That is true
I find it balanced, but you don't finish all scenarios the first time - I think that is a good thing.

In the game, there are some comments about crashing. I had no problems at all on Debian linux, wesnoth vesion 1.10.7 (it is from debian/testing) and grnk version 1.0.7.

Thank you for a very cool campaign. I am looking forward to the sequel.

[mattsc]

Hi moozer,

Thank you for the feedback, that's very much appreciated. The things you mentioned are exactly what I was going for, so it's great to know that that worked for you. They are also the same things that some other people don't like at all — which really is fine. One of the great things about Wesnoth, in my opinion, is that it can cater to so many different tastes.

Thanks for the comment on (not) crashing. Good to hear that that's not an issue. In fact, I think in Wesnoth 1.12 it's been resolved and I removed that warning.

wesnoth vesion 1.10.7 (it is from debian/testing) and grnk version 1.0.7.

Thank you for a very cool campaign. I am looking forward to the sequel.

I assume you mean Part 2 of Grnk, rather than Galuldur (which is a sequel, of sorts, to Part 2, but in reality it's the other way around: Grnk is a prequel to Galuldur)? I'm afraid that you will have to update to Wesnoth 1.12 for that. It contains a lot of things (most notably a number of custom AIs) that are not doable in 1.10, so it is not going to be back-ported to 1.10. Also, be aware that there are some minor differences in Part 1 between Wesnoth 1.10 and 1.12. However, the overall story remains the same, so there's no need for you to replay Part 1 when you upgrade to 1.12.

Part 2 has a somewhat different feel to it and, quite honestly, I personally like Part 1 a bit better, but hopefully it will still be enjoyable for you.

Oh, and welcome to the forums. Thanks for signing up to write this review!

Cheers,
mattsc

[Snarkus]

I also really liked both campaigns. Great effort with the story, characterisations. Also the AI:- things like the collecting the animal level where the animals have various nice little behaviour routines, and the level with the 'experimental' AI (the one in part 2 where Vanak isn't allowed to move more than 3 hexes from start position) the computer seemed to play far more strategically. I.E. instead of just tempting it to rush in to try to damage my units regardless of consequences, it seemed to have much more of an idea of positional play and trying to force me into a bad position - more like chess.

Just re the Converted scenario discussed above - I did manage a leader assasination approach on my 3rd go, as I was also finding it difficult. Sent 3 archers + a regular skeleton down the south edge of the map, then came up through the mountains. Getting past the Javelineer was a bit tricky, but see the attached screenshot, I sacrificed a skeleton to get the rest of the force through. Of course, if I'd have instead used those 4 units in my main battle, I might have won it earlier and been able to win the regular way.

Sneaking past on Converted level.

Also just a bug to report - on the 2nd last level of part 2, the one where I have to kill the lich in the water - I had several of my Grnk goblin units get teleported to the west edge of the map just before I finished him off. There was no message, so it didn't seem like this was a deliberate defensive trick by the computer.

[mattsc]

Hi Snarkus, thank you for the comments and feedback. I sometimes wonder if I overdid it with the custom AIs in Part 2, so great to hear that you liked it!

Just re the Converted scenario discussed above - I did manage a leader assasination approach on my 3rd go, as I was also finding it difficult. Sent 3 archers + a regular skeleton down the south edge of the map, then came up through the mountains. Getting past the Javelineer was a bit tricky, but see the attached screenshot, I sacrificed a skeleton to get the rest of the force through. Of course, if I'd have instead used those 4 units in my main battle, I might have won it earlier and been able to win the regular way.

Nice. As I said above, I never thought of this option when I set up the scenario, but since it does not seem to make it trivial (or the rest of the the campaign a lot easier or harder), I don't see a reason to make it impossible.

Also just a bug to report - on the 2nd last level of part 2, the one where I have to kill the lich in the water - I had several of my Grnk goblin units get teleported to the west edge of the map just before I finished him off. There was no message, so it didn't seem like this was a deliberate defensive trick by the computer.

Hmm, yeah, that is strange. It's definitely not supposed to happen and I don't see what in the scenario would cause this. Do you have a save from just before it happened or a replay so that I can try to figure it out? Thanks.

[Snarkus]

Also just a bug to report - on the 2nd last level of part 2, the one where I have to kill the lich in the water - I had several of my Grnk goblin units get teleported to the west edge of the map just before I finished him off. There was no message, so it didn't seem like this was a deliberate defensive trick by the computer.

Hmm, yeah, that is strange. It's definitely not supposed to happen and I don't see what in the scenario would cause this. Do you have a save from just before it happened or a replay so that I can try to figure it out? Thanks.

No problems, uploading a replay where it happened now. Turn 33/34 I think, right near the end.

I'm playing Wesnoth v 1.12.5, on Mac Os X 10.8 .

[mattsc]

Thanks for the replay, Snarkus. It took me a while to figure this one out, but in the end it turns out that the fix will be simple. In case you're curious about the details:

Spoiler:

You probably noticed that during the second part of the scenario (when you're playing Vanak), the moves of Grnk's goblins in the overlapping part of the map from the first part are replayed. Due to on oversight, the code recording and replaying those moves is also active at the end of the scenario and it just happened to be moving those units right during your last turn.

Since this could potentially break the scenario for someone, I will upload v2.0.4 with the fix later today in a couple days (as I want to make a few other little changes also). Thanks again!


EDIT: v2.0.4 is now on the add-ons server.