The South Guard (Revised)

[ZIM]

Hello, I want to report two minor bug, the first one is Minister Hylas had two copies of resilient trait, and in The Athenwood, when killing the outlaw leader, it there's an error that says ''[sound] missing required name= atrribute''.

[DuncanDill]

Just played through it and I have a couple of suggestions/bugs:

In scenario 3 it is possible to just end before talking to Gerrick, which if funny but it's strange to just have him appear

Mari is an alright character, but I find her slightly annoying... It's the constant whinging I think. I think she has also overtaken the story, replacing Gerrick and alot of Deoran. Maybe share the dialogue out and stop her from recruiting. Talking about her dialogue it's a bit too jarringly modern.

Is it intentional for M'brin to just be a lich? As far as I know he has a portrait right?

Also even though the ending has been changed, its still strange

Finally (and a bit over the top) a campaign about Mari would be a nice thing for future updates along with Angel of the Ashes and so... Maybe about how she lost her arm?

[ForestDragon]

Mari is an alright character, but I find her slightly annoying... It's the constant whinging I think. I think she has also overtaken the story, replacing Gerrick and alot of Deoran. Maybe share the dialogue out and stop her from recruiting. Talking about her dialogue it's a bit too jarringly modern.

100% agreed, you summed up the problems with the character really well. And her modern-ness also looks even more absurd when in S1 garard has very exaggerated archaic speech so the dialog manages to be worst of both worlds.

Is it intentional for M'brin to just be a lich? As far as I know he has a portrait right?

He definitely needs to get his portrait back.

Also even though the ending has been changed, its

It looks you hit send before finishing typing here, or did I misread?

[DuncanDill]

I hit send early lol

[holypaladin]

Another a bit frustrating thing is total removal of one of rare in mainline examples of human-troll cooperation. In TSG was very well written and I liked it a lot.

[xer]

I already gave some feedback, but I forgot to send the times! This is the total time the scenarios (that I played) took me, including carefully reading all the text. (version 1.0 and following on challenging difficulty, although I didn't notice a big difference to easy v1.3)

7 min | Tutorial
25 min | Raising the Banner
15 min | Westin
32 min | The Aethenwood
56 min | Vale of Tears
1h58min | Blight

Most of it comes down to Wesnoth's poor UI/UX design, it felt already quite fast to compared to other campaigns, most of the enemies stop recruiting quite soon and are easily defeated.

What felt slow was the movement through the Aethenwood. With the enemy quickly defeated, it takes quite a few turns still to get Deoran to the finish line, in which there's no threat left (but you still need to heal your army and bring some troops because you don't know if there's an elven ambush waiting for you or not). I recommend adding a forest path to speed that up.

I also wonder if it would make sense to delay the recruiting/recalling/upkeep/income tutorial. In Raising the Banner I feel those concepts are introduced in the wrong order. First upkeep (while having no troops to pay for) and healing (with no damaged units), then recruiting (of units we don't know) and recalling (without a prior fight) and then we actually learn how to fight in Wesnoth. Please consider giving the player a selection of bow/spearmen when they move to the keep, then teaching them about villages after the first combat, and save recruiting/recalling for the Aethenwood

(Also for anyone with thoughts on M'Brin I'll link this thread)

[Konrad2]

Just adding my replays.

[sine_nomine]

I gave the revised south guard a try (add-on 1.04 on 1.18.0). Went in with fairly high expectations because I enjoyed the new Eastern Invasion and I don't like AToTB (imo HttT should return to its rightful place). Unfortunately I'm sad to say I found this campaign extremely offputting, especially if it's intended as an introduction to the game. I hope you don't mind a bit of negativity because I just want to see Battle for Wesnoth become better.

The first thing a player encounters when starting the campaign is Garand II, king of Wesnoth, sitting on his horse. His weapons are "sword,longsword" and "lance,lance". As a lawful unit he is inexplicably experiencing a 40% damage penalty. I recognize him as the valiant but overconfident king who played a major role in Delfador's Memoirs and was ultimately betrayed by his treacherous wife and son prior to HttT. Elsewhere, his daughter Lisar is described as having "inherited much of her father's nobility and sense of honor". But to a new player, he is simply a clown. He seems like a complete idiot and the exaggerated faux-archaic speech is very abnormal. He does not give a good first impression of the game.
The second character the new player is introduced to is the new protagonist of the campaign, Captain Mari. Like Garand she is unlikeable and feels out-of-place but in a different way, she seems modern and has a snarky attitude. She is the first unit the player is able to examine, so a new player will be introduced to the ability "protection" before learning about any ability seen in other campaigns. Aside from this skill, Mari has similar resistances to a swordsman and gains even better resistances after reaching level three. But unlike a swordsman or royal guard, Mari does not carry a shield; she is missing an arm. Rather than a defensive unit (Sir Gerrik fills that role) she would make more sense as a master at arm. Although she does appear to be bigger than other units so maybe her resistances are because she's actually an ogre or something. She is treated like a human by other characters so I assume that's unintentional.

Deoran is no longer the grandson of Haldiel. Nor is he a young hero, he's a dopey kid that Mari needs to look after. Having a kid paired with a veteran is a good way to structure a tutorial but as a campaign this works better with one character. In this version sometimes you are given the option to move either character to a location, but there is a designated character that will speak from across the map if you move the 'wrong' one. Anyway this random kid barges in on his horse and interrupts the king, then meets Mari for the first time. I don't know why he is being sent on this mission, maybe the king is actually paying close attention to the squires in his army and personally pairs them with appropriate mentors?
I'm trying to picture the effect of moving this campaign earlier in the timeline, are the elves in this campaign going to replace several of the ones in HttT? And then humans&elves will maintain friendly relations afterwards?

Moving on, I think the tutorial part explains the game mechanics pretty well other than a typo or two. The tutorials that come up in the dialogue window when you click on a unit are particularly effective because they're easy to read and directly correspond to what the player is doing. The white text that covers half the screen (on pixel multiplier 2) also generally offers good information but doesn't always match up to what is happening, is harder to read especially when there is also white text in the middle of the screen, and makes it harder to see the rest of the game. There's also some character dialogue about game mechanics which can be less helpful e.g. I don't think the player should be told to think of the families of the soldiers in a game where you are meant to regularly sacrifice cannon fodder. Overall tutorials are fine, though if this is meant as an introduction for brand-new players it might benefit from more things being explained.

A combat-less scenario where you read tons of dialogue is a reasonable idea for a campaign, but not in an introductory campaign as it gives the wrong idea of what to expect from the game and all the text will be overwhelming for new players that aren't already familiar with the world of wesnoth. If you're brand new to the game you don't have a sense of what is and what isn't important, so players will feel obligated to read it all. Having the characters comment about there being too much text doesn't make it better. There's also too much about ashviere and her family (speaking of which I remember her father being an esteemed mage who turns into a lich in DM). It's usually cool to see a cameo or a reference to another campaign but every campaign should be able to stand on its own, while it seems like the primary purpose of the new south guard is to provide exposition for ashviere. And I don't see the point of the silver mage character. She can't even serve as a teleportation tutorial because she can't leave the castle in the final scenario.
It looks like you restored Sir Gerrik and Minister Hylas back because people missed them, but now there are a ton of unimportant characters crammed into a campaign with barely any fighting. Plus the title "the south guard" doesn't really fit the new version. The obvious solution is to have one campaign for Deoran, Gerrik, Hylas, etc. and put all the new characters in a separate campaign.

As for the later scenarios it's mostly a downgraded version of an already unremarkable campaign, but I do appreciate the effort to introduce game mechanics. I assume it's currently still in early stages because it feels like two stories stapled together, I can easily tell whether a line comes from the old version or is newly added. Previously the route split and subsequent scenarios were the most memorable parts of the campaign and now all the good parts are gone. Now you get a choice to spare the bandits or not (the descriptions for each choice are too long now, I shouldn't have to scroll to read the whole thing), but the elves remain allies and in the last scenario your shyde ally acts as if you slaughtered the bandits even though they were never punished. After the choice you fight skeletons with ineffective weaponry, this would work better as a resistance tutorial if they didn't resist all the units you can recruit. Next you kill the lich without needing to venture into a cave scenario. The undead turn out to be more of a novelty rather than a genuine threat.
The following scenario is gimmicky, which is fine in order to introduce new players to this type of map. Then the last scenario is similar to the old version of the elf path. The tutorial talks about objectives so there should be something in the objectives about moving the protagonist to the castle.
There's barely any combat in the campaign now. Then there's an epilogue to hammer in the fact that this campaign is really about ashviere, in case a new player somehow missed it.

Overall the revised south guard is worse than the old version and would give new players a poor impression of the game. I like the idea of adding tutorials, but the tutorial windows could be added to the old south guard without changing everything else. And if you want a campaign about Captain Mari and Ashviere you can do that without sacrificing TSG.

The existing tutorial featuring Konrad and Delfador remains a good option for players who want a brief introduction to the game before jumping into HttT. I understand that some players may want to play a short tutorial campaign instead of going from there to HttT and the irrelevant exposition dumps in the revised South Guard are an attempt to tie the two together. Fortunately there is a much better solution that fits perfectly and doesn't require TSG to be butchered: the future campaign featuring princess Lisar. It would be easy to fit in tutorials of game mechanics, with maps specifically designed to teach players rather than repurposed from another campaign. As a princess it won't be strange for Lisar to learn a bit about the politial climate during her journey and she won't be completely overshadowed by her mentor. It would be close in the timeline to HttT so characters can reappear. And most importantly (?), the dark queen Ashviere can play a role without being out of place. New players could go from Konrad's tutorial -> Lisar's tutorial campaign -> HttT and it would connect together naturally.

[ForestDragon]

Very good review, sine_nomine, I agree with your points

[octalot]

Deoran's movement cost for shallow water seems too high. It's 4, the same as a regular L1 Horseman, but the regular Horseman has 8 MP compared to Deoran's 6.

Scenario 2 seems to start too slowly, needing 2 turns just to reach the keep. Despite the bandit leader activating before the player gets control on the player's second turn, the bandits don't recruit for another turn.

Instead of "newly recruited units are lazy", "newly recruited units have spent that turn preparing" would sound a lot more positive.

What is the player expected to learn from the hint about traits? It mentions quick (although it will be followed by a hint about staying north of the river), and intelligent (before we've talked about experience), and it appears several turns before the first combat. Yes, it's the same text as the original tutorial, but in the original it appears at the same time as "attack the quintain with your elves", and a player who takes time to follow the hint will find the strong or dexterous trait, and the next step in the original tutorial will have the attack dialog pop up, asking whether to use the sword or the bow. The original tutorial gives a immediate reward to a player who followed the hint, the new one feels more like "this was a time when this text could be squeezed in".

There's a hint that Thugs are "vulnerable" to archers, but "vulnerable" should be reserved for discussion of resistance. Could instead say that they're unable to counterattack.

On the turn that Urza first uses necromancy, he can also recruit living units. What's happened would be clearer if he only recruited undead that turn.

[Dalas120]

FYI, I'm working on a re-revised version of TSG. Have been reading the feedback posted on here.

[redbeard2]

Finished the campaign and have a few points, some of which have already been mentioned but I'll give my impressions anyway:

In general it seems odd to have horseback riders in buildings, there is a King of Wesnoth sprite, it would make more sense to use that for indoor scenes.

For The Aethenwood, when I killed the leader an error message popped up ([sound] missing required name=attribute), and it says we get gold for killing him, I don't think I got any...

One thing that never sat well with me before or now is why do we get cavalrymen in this campaign at all? What role/niche are they filling? They're sort of useful against the walking corpses, a bit against Ghouls, but after that you are facing largely elves and skeletons, which have a fair amount of piercing damage, and in the case of skeletons, greatly resist their damage. In the ending scenario their speed isn't very useful, and they get mauled by the elvish archers. I feel getting rid of them will only help.
-On a similar note in Vengeance, it bugged me previously and now, that there isn't a real clear role for merfolk here. Unless the elves position themselves in a very specific way, they are superfluous and it's kind of disappointing to have worked on leveling these units up, and then they mostly just sit around or wait for a very specific moment when they can attack. I feel a final scenario should be all inclusive in making the different unit types you can recruit feel useful. As it stands now the merfolk are pretty useless, or at least what they do can be done much more directly by your other units.

The Long March, it just seems comical to be fighting skeletons and a lich, and then have to prove yourself against dragonfiles and piglets...

Garard's old/archaic speech seems jarring compared to everyone else's, and is more distracting than anything I feel. Speaking of him, are we supposed to dislike just him? Or all of Wesnoth is a bunch of jerks, or is this a depiction that royalty/aristocrats are generally awful? Previously we got pictures of more idealized kings who were generally caring/didn't have glaring flaws, are we going to get rid of this in general? Showing Haldric I falling under the ruby's influence during the RoW would fit into this, if that's ever going to get revamped and we're showing people's bad sides...

[redbeard2]

2 other notes:

-Ending Elvish dialogue implies that you killed the bandits, so there should be a dialogue adjustment if you spare them.
-When you are talking with Mebrin and if the bandit leader is still alive, maybe include some kind of extra dialogue regarding him reacting to Mebrin's torture account.

[ForestDragon]

Garard's old/archaic speech seems jarring compared to everyone else's, and is more distracting than anything I feel. Speaking of him, are we supposed to dislike just him? Or all of Wesnoth is a bunch of jerks, or is this a depiction that royalty/aristocrats are generally awful? Previously we got pictures of more idealized kings who were generally caring/didn't have glaring flaws, are we going to get rid of this in general? Showing Haldric I falling under the ruby's influence during the RoW would fit into this, if that's ever going to get revamped and we're showing people's bad sides...

Yumi completely ruined Garard in her attempt to make Asheviere more likeable

[holypaladin]

On a similar note in Vengeance, it bugged me previously and now, that there isn't a real clear role for merfolk here

Merfolk never had big role in The South Guard (thing to improve) but I much more liked how they were in old version than here. Despite of being undeveloped they had some interesting points.