Scenario Review - EI 5 - The Northern Outpost

Feedback for the mainline campaign Eastern Invasion.

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DEAD-HEAD
Posts: 16
Joined: July 31st, 2019, 2:11 pm

Re: Scenario Review - EI 5 - The Northern Outpost

Post by DEAD-HEAD »

Content Feedback wrote: March 10th, 2006, 12:57 am (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?
1)Easy and 1.14.7

2)2

3)Clear

4)Perfect

5)Finding Assassin

6)9 due to Assassin is random find

7)Allow recruitment of Fencer and also for Owaec as they can somewhat match speed of Horseman and ain't available in other player Campaigns
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Xindage
Posts: 21
Joined: August 2nd, 2018, 12:56 am
Location: Brazil

Re: Scenario Review - EI 5 - The Northern Outpost

Post by Xindage »

(1) What difficulty levels have you played the scenario on?
1.15.7, Normal (Normal - Swordsman)
305 gold

(2) How difficult did you find the scenario? (1-10)
4

(3) How clear did you find the scenario objectives?
Clear.

(5) What were your major challenges in meeting the objectives of the scenario?
None.

(6) How fun do you think the scenario is? (1-10)
6

(7) What, if any, are changes you would have made to the scenario to make it more fun?
Just force the bandit leader wont run to my keep to recruit nothing.

(8) Was there any event that caused you to lose the game and forced you to reload or restart the scenario?
Maybe I could restart to wont lose that Shock trooper but nah.

(9) About the replay.
Almost lose the holy horseman. Aside it there's not much to see here.
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mal_shubertal
Posts: 93
Joined: December 1st, 2018, 6:58 pm

Re: Scenario Review - EI 5 - The Northern Outpost

Post by mal_shubertal »

(1) What difficulty levels and game versions have you played the scenario on?
1.16.6 Hardest
(2) How difficult did you find the scenario? (1-10)
2. ridiculously easy.
(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?
Like everyone else, I agree that this dialogue/setup is sort of preposterous. If you come from Mal Ravanal's Capital, you just had to flee from a horde of mostly lvl 2 undead, after stealing some high profile prisoners out from under their noses AND revealing Dacyn to Ravanal. So you would expect a massive army to be pursuing you. But instead you get this absolutely pitiful trickle of units that owaec can almost handle on his own, it is very anticlimactic. It also doesn't make much sense that Dacyn, a white mage whose magical abilities so far are limited to arcane blasts, just randomly knows a very specific magic spell that reveals bandits in villages, with no explanation whatsoever?
(5) What were your major challenges in meeting the objectives of the scenario?
Making sure I had a big enough force with me when I triggered the bandit leader, not spreading out too much
(6) How fun do you think the scenario is? (1-10)
2. Way too easy. I actually like the change of pace of searching for one enemy while simultaneously holding off another, but the difficulty was way off so it wasn't much fun.
(7) What, if any, are changes you would have made to the scenario to make it more fun?
The main change would be making the undead MUCH MUCH stronger. Story-wise, it's supposed to be an army so obviously unstoppable that it would convince Owaec the soldier to abandon his post, evacuate a huge geographical area that he's been assigned to defend, and embark on a wild goose chase for a magical super weapon rather than guarding the refugees. You could do this by either greatly increasing the undead starting gold, and/or by having increasing numbers of lvl 2 undead appear at the southeast corner of the map every few turns, perhaps with some dialogue to the effect of "their numbers are endless, we must flee before we're overwhelmed!".

This would also mean you would remove the victory condition of defeating the undead leader, since now you're just trying to hold off the undead long enough to find the bandit leader and escape.

I would also change around the dialogue in a couple places so it holds together better. It seems sort of silly to be faced with a necromantic apocalypse and still prioritize hunting random bandits for several days BEFORE evacuating. But this makes more sense if you consider that all the villagers are about to become a refugee train travelling perhaps for many days through the wilderness before getting to Weldyn. In such a situation, if there are a bunch of known bandits menacing them then Owaec and his troops would be duty-bound to guard the refugees rather than joining Gweddry on his quest. So if there was some dialogue of Owaec explaining the situation in this way, then Dacyn could advise Gweddry that they need the help of Owaec and his horsemen in the Northlands, and so they need to wipe out the bandits so that the refugees can travel safely without guards. This would also offer an opportunity to develop Owaec's character more and show his priorities, and perhaps flesh out the dynamic between Dacyn and Gweddry, with them butting heads over decisions but coming to respect each other over time or something like that.

I honestly like the mechanic of bandits hiding in villages, and I'm even fine with Dacyn needing to drop out of the fight to do some big-picture wizard stuff. It continues the theme from the first scenario of him being like Gandalf in the Hobbit, always annoyingly busy elsewhere when the fighting is toughest. 90% of the magic that mages do in this game is mechanically the fantasy equivalent of a missile launcher, so I like every opportunity to show a bit more versatile magic. So how to explain why a mage of light somehow has the magical ability to locate bandits? I think the dialogue should offer at least SOME effort to justify this ability. One way to do this would be to say that at the start of the scenario all the villagers have just evacuated and headed west, but Owaec suspects the bandits are hiding somewhere in the now-abandoned villages. Then, since white mages are all about healing/life, you could say that Dacyn has some kind of spell that interacts with life-force in such a way that all living creatures in a given area start to glow like a lighthouse, so the bandits' hiding places would be obvious once you were within the same village as them, since the only living people left in the villages are bandits. Maybe there is some better way to explain this magical ability, but I prefer ANY explanation to NO explanation.
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