8. Xenophobia

[Content Feedback]

(1) What difficulty levels and game versions have you played the scenario on?
(2) How difficult did you find the scenario? (1-10)
(3) How clear did you find the scenario objectives?
(4) How clear and interesting did you find the dialog and storyline of the scenario?
(5) What were your major challenges in meeting the objectives of the scenario?
(6) How fun do you think the scenario is? (1-10)
(7) What, if any, are changes you would have made to the scenario to make it more fun?

[Xindage]

(1) What difficulty levels and game versions have you played the scenario on?
1.18.0 - Incursion - Biased RNG
213 Starting Gold.
(2) How difficult did you find the scenario? (1-10)
4 Kinda easy, saved a lot of gold and prevented anyone from diening.
(3) How clear did you find the scenario objectives?
Pretty clear.
(4) How clear and interesting did you find the dialog and storyline of the scenario?
This scenario had a good dialogue during the scenario, I like it.
(5) What were your major challenges in meeting the objectives of the scenario?
Mostly when I was trying to cross the bridge into the Orc's territory.
(6) How fun do you think the scenario is? (1-10)
7
(7) What, if any, are changes you would have made to the scenario to make it more fun?
Make the scenario start with some units already fighting each other, seems like that what caused the war to happen in there was our presence.
Everything was calm and peaceful, as soon the human race put their feet on these lands the war started.
(8) Replay/Other notes.
I had some close call moments and restarted just once, i did some bets on luck and i was blessed

[Vendrick]

(1) Invasion, 1.18
(2) 6
(3) Clear
(4) Dialogue continues to be good.
(5) Assaulting the Orc Warlord's keep is dangerous; retrieving the Sentinel Shield and killing the Dwarf Lord is also dangerous if other Dwarf units can intervene.
(6) 7
(7) I like the touches to the default AI: the guard posts and the ability to switch to a more aggressive stance.

I also like three-way fights, with the added complexity of positioning my units, and damaging the Orc units enough so that the Dwarves prefer to target them.

I thought this was close to the best outcome for Xenophobia, finishing without losses and 529 gold but the replay above got 622(!) gold, so evidently not.

This scenario has probably the strongest item in the campaign, the Sentinel Shield. It transfers hits from adjacent allies to the bearer. The AI can't see this and will use off-type attacks and take enormous retaliation damage trying for kills it can't get.

Strategy was to send an assassination squad to kill the Dwarf leader, while the bulk of my forces attack the orcs, aided by the Dwarves. The Arcane knight seems to frighten the Dwarves into moving through the mountains, leaving them closer to the orcs rather than the player - I didn't event think the AI responded to threats to non-leader units.
The Dwarf Lord is so powerful that it isn't even safe to attack him in melee at all since he can kill any of the assassination squad in two attacks if he's lucky so the Archmage has to do all the work.

There's a huge blunder with Owaec, when I attack an L2 Thunderer in melee and Owaec. He takes full retaliation, leaving it so the L2 Thunderer can can kill him in one hit. I clearly didn't notice this at all or thought it was a L1 Thunderer or something, because I could have killed it with low risk using my other non-essential units.

The AI behaved strangely with the knight - I didn't think the AI would commit to an attack that could kill their leader (4/4 hits at 40% less the odds of hitting 3/3 at 60%: ~2% chance), so the AI had a modest chance of killing him.

I don't care for Silver mages but at least one is very useful for a scenario later in the campaign.

I transfer a bunch of items so I can bring them into the next scenario without recalling extra units.

Dacyn gets the first AMLA of the campaign. The campaign's default AMLAs are either +8 HP or + 1 melee/ranged damage (depending on number of strikes). +8 HP seems much better than +1 range damage considering Dacyn's essential status and meagre 47 HP.

[sine_nomine]

Invasion, 1.18.0
Recruited a bunch of corpses to keep upkeep low. Nice to see some new variations. I mostly used corpses to protect my units.
Took me a while to realize how overpowered the sentinel shield is.
The enemies have special defensive AI so they bunch up their units and stand around idly for much of the time, rather than engaging in a continuous battle. I had to wait for the northeast orc to move his army toward the naga before I could safely attack him. Then finally the naga.
I like the idea of a gold farming map + avoid wasting gold in the next few maps + spend it all in one map.

[fredbobsmith2]

(1) What difficulty levels and game versions have you played the scenario on? Invasion (Difficult) 1.18.4
(2) How difficult did you find the scenario? (1-10) 9, many tries to get the beginning right
(3) How clear did you find the scenario objectives? Clear
(4) How clear and interesting did you find the dialog and storyline of the scenario? Very good
(5) What were your major challenges in meeting the objectives of the scenario? To save on upkeep I only recalled one keep of units, a spearman, 3 mages and 2 horses. The horse units, spear, Gweddry and Dacyn took the central plains to skirmish with the orcs so that they couldn't get the upper hand against the dwarves, but not so much that the dwarves won. The other mages and Grug went west, but the difficult part was parking them far away enough that the dwarf troops would leave their area, before moving in to assassinate the leader. Many failed attempts involved either too many dwarves coming back and killing that team, or if I played too passively with the east team then the orcs would win and become too numerous. Eventually I assassinated both leaders and cleaned up their troops, then simple push east then south. 500g carryover. On a side note I think one of the arch mages should probably be a silver mage to help the east team sooner, but I really appreciated the arch mage's damage here against the dwarf leader.
(6) How fun do you think the scenario is? (1-10) 6, feel like I spent too much effort trying to manipulate the AI
(7) What, if any, are changes you would have made to the scenario to make it more fun? Not sure... make the AI less defensive?