The Failing Line

[Dronal-d]

The Failing Line of Farheidt.
Once renowned as a house of great Wesnothian knights, the line of Farheidt has been forced into exile. Lead a once great hero and his family on a journey through perils east of the Estmark Hills in hopes of finding a new land for them and their people.


Hi all, I welcome any feedback on anything about my first campaign: The Failing Line.

Some questions to help you help me...

Would you make it more difficult? How?
Were the characters engaging?
How would you improve the dialogue/story?
Did you find any errors or spelling mistakes?
Did something happen that didn't seem to make any sense?
... and anything else.

Your help is greatly appreciated.

[taptap]

So, I have recently started your campaign (highest difficulty), but did not get very far,

1st scenario is easy enough, you only have to hold long enough after all. Supposing it would end in flight, I fed experience to cavalry (ended with a knight), when I learned to my dismay that flight is by tunnel not by horse.
2nd scenario is fine... the lords sister finished close to L3 and the two Seggers levelled up as well. (You end with a ton of gold here, although the next scenario makes it impossible to use that gold.)
3rd scenario appears impossible to me. I thought the best way should be holding a line by the river and the northern keep, sending a steady stream of "ruffians" and later occasional L1 from the southern keep and kicking out the skeletons from the village area with the mages whenever they make a breakthrough. Alas, I am not able to protect the exposed friendly leader who enjoys bathing in front of skeleton archers and skeletons. Maybe recruiting L1 from the distant keep delays their arrival in the battle too much, but I can't seem to do without permanent recruits either.

The dialogue can be tightened up a lot. E.g. you spend 10 windows to have Bazil insult the dwarf in scenario 2. Some only "Rrrrr." or "..." lines included. It would be more engaging for me when the main characters would act a bit less oafish.

[DeCoolest_Cat]

Played the first bit of the campaign, and I'm really liking it. Just a few things. 1: In Lord Carnaby's first dialouge section he says "Wbesnoth". 2: Another thing, and this may be down to me sucking at the game, but the second troll leader in scenario 2 is hard to get to. His trolls can stuff up the bottleneck just south of his keep, and I couldn't get through. It was especially hard since I only had pierce weapons, and the 3 mages (not the white mage, he was for healing). The seggers couldn't kill the trolls either, as they would regenerate next turn, and since they have so few health.

But either way, very good campaign. Looking forward to making it past scenario 2 !

[taptap]

Played the first bit of the campaign, and I'm really liking it. Just a few things. 1: In Lord Carnaby's first dialouge section he says "Wbesnoth". 2: Another thing, and this may be down to me sucking at the game, but the second troll leader in scenario 2 is hard to get to. His trolls can stuff up the bottleneck just south of his keep, and I couldn't get through. It was especially hard since I only had pierce weapons, and the 3 mages (not the white mage, he was for healing). The seggers couldn't kill the trolls either, as they would regenerate next turn, and since they have so few health.

But either way, very good campaign. Looking forward to making it past scenario 2 !

You can rotate mages and occasionally another unit while they heal and give leadership. At some point the seggers should level up. (You have a very generous turn limit so you can fight slowly until you levelled up your units, not the most glorious way, but it worked for me.) I fought at the place where you have somewhat reasonable terrain and opponent sits on two flat tiles. This is close enough to occasionally draw out the leader, so I ended up killing the leader while I had still plenty of whelps to take care of (took me another ten turns).

[Snarkus]

Hi there,

first:- I like the characters in the campaign, good to play some morally grey characters for a change with misanthropic banter between them.

Then, an unusual bug to report - an one stage on scenario 'The Swamp of Dread' I managed to get one of my camp follower allied units, one of the children, to kill an undead revenant (it only had 1 HP) - this gave the unit enough XP to advance, but the game then exited with an error message, something like "Unit advancement tl_youth not found."

On difficulty/scenarios:- agree with poster above that the third scenario about defeating the undead in the North is very difficult as your allied Village Elder unit does indeed very frequently attack foolishly the undead near the villages you're defending and get himself killed. I found after a lot of trial and error I had to micro-manage leaving an appropriate gap in my lines for him to attack a unit in, and sometimes sacrifice e.g. a youth to take a spot I didn't want him to attack in. Suggestion is:- I've played another campaign where AI-controlled leaders can be set not to leave their keep to attack, maybe you should activate that flag here?

Then:- playing Medium difficulty, I found the Level 4 scenario the Swamp of Dread _very_ difficult. I won't claim to be a master player but have completed pretty much all mainline campaigns on medium difficulty and several add-ons. I went into it with my two seggers leveled to L2 white daggers, most of the hero units level 3, but the rest all level 1, one about to advance and a few others about half way - and not a lot of gold. It's very difficult with this force to take on waves of seemingly about 10 level 2 undead at a time, many with high mobility over swamps. It took a _lot_ of saveloading to experiment a strategy that allowed all key units to survive. This involved using the Farheidht brother assassin on the right of the map to lure off a good section of the first enemy force into the top corner to gradually wear them down with the help of any allies (which is how the aforementioned bug got caused when a child unit managed to kill a revenant). I chuckled when I read the Child's unit description, that "only a monster would use them in battle" - well, either a monster or a very desperate and outgunned player ).

When I finally managed to survive the main waves and level some units I see that Spearmen->Clubmen which actually do damage undead, and likewise archers go to much more useful guys with slings. And White Daggers, which are actually pretty ineffective at L2 against undead, get some great arcane attacks at L3. So perhaps in terms of difficulty you assume players go into that level with at least 3-4 upgraded clubmen/slingers, and at least one of the white daggers already upgraded to spymaster? Maybe I didn't play the first few levels that well, I remember losing one L2 unit, but it does feel a bit hard at the moment, more like medium difficulty is perhaps Hard.

Oh and another bug on that Swamp level - it says losing the Village Elder is a loss condition, but he died in my game and it didn't cause a loss. Which was fortunate as there is no way I could have won while keeping him alive, at one stage I had to bunker down almost all my army in his keep to survive.

Oh and lastly - really like the interesting AMLA options your hero units start getting mid-way through.

[white_haired_uncle]

S2: My allies killed the second troll leader with no help from my team. Then there's dialog between my units congratulating each other for how well they fought. And then I got within a certain range of where the troll leader used to be, and got a message about hearing things that I probably shouldn't get since he's dead.

S3: Objectives lists death of village elder twice.

Segner's knife AMLAs (precision) don't seem to do anything (expected marksman and magical?).

S7b: Objectives incorrect.

S8: Objectives incorrect (defeat all enemies > leaders).

Also, a bunch of missing images...

'blackwater-port.png'
'data/add-ons/The_Failing_Line/tfl_images/story/elf_forest.jpg'
'data/add-ons/The_Failing_Line/tfl_images/story/lord_brakwurst-large.jpg'
'data/add-ons/The_Failing_Line/tfl_images/story/swampy-wesnoth.jpg'
'data/add-ons/The_Failing_Line/tfl_images/units/slinger-melee-avalanche.png'
'data/core/wesnoth-icon.png'
'images/portraits/saurians/transparent/skirmisher.png'
'misc/ellipse-hero-leader-bottom.png'
'misc/ellipse-hero-leader-selected-bottom.png'
'misc/ellipse-hero-leader-selected-top.png'
'misc/ellipse-hero-leader-top.png'
'misc/schedule-indoors.png'
'story/escape.png'
'story/the-mountains.png'
'units/SwampSkeleton/swamp-skeleton-die2-1.png'
'units/SwampSkeleton/swamp-skeleton-die2-2.png'
'units/SwampSkeleton/swamp-skeleton-die2-3.png'
'units/SwampSkeleton/swamp-skeleton-die2-4.png'
'units/SwampSkeleton/swamp-skeleton-die2-5.png'
'units/SwampSkeleton/swamp-skeleton-die2-6.png'
'units/SwampSkeleton/swamp-skeleton-die2-7.png'

[Argesilao2]

I am not the maintainer of the campaign, but since I have decided to ported it for BfW 1.16 I assume I have some responsibility in this regard, at least for the minor issue.

S2: My allies killed the second troll leader with no help from my team. Then there's dialog between my units congratulating each other for how well they fought. And then I got within a certain range of where the troll leader used to be, and got a message about hearing things that I probably shouldn't get since he's dead.

S3: Objectives lists death of village elder twice.

fixed in version 1.0.1a

Segner's knife AMLAs (precision) don't seem to do anything (expected marksman and magical?).

Theoretically, looking at the code, it should add marksman ability to knife attacks

S7b: Objectives incorrect.

Sorry, my fault! I should have added at least one warning
Scenario S7b is incomplete; the author simply deployed the troops, and then did nothing more; theoretically it is still playable by eliminating all enemy leaders, but only because there is the victory_when_enemies_defeated=yes option.
in version 1.0.1a I deactivated the possibility to access, in the previous scenario, this scenario; a possible future maintener will take care of the thing.

S8: Objectives incorrect (defeat all enemies > leaders).

fixed in 1.0.1a

Also, a bunch of missing images...

about this:

'blackwater-port.png' ->The image does not exist
'data/add-ons/The_Failing_Line/tfl_images/story/elf_forest.jpg' ->The image does not exist
'data/add-ons/The_Failing_Line/tfl_images/story/lord_brakwurst-large.jpg' ->The image does not exist
'data/add-ons/The_Failing_Line/tfl_images/story/swampy-wesnoth.jpg' ->The image does not exist
'data/add-ons/The_Failing_Line/tfl_images/units/slinger-melee-avalanche.png' -> fixed
'data/core/wesnoth-icon.png' -> fixed
'images/portraits/saurians/transparent/skirmisher.png' -> fixed

'misc/ellipse-hero-leader-bottom.png'
'misc/ellipse-hero-leader-selected-bottom.png'
'misc/ellipse-hero-leader-selected-top.png'
'misc/ellipse-hero-leader-top.png'

I have not found anywhere in the campaign's code where these images are called

'misc/schedule-indoors.png' -> fixed
'story/escape.png' -> fixed (it's a .jpg file, not a png)
'story/the-mountains.png' ->The image does not exist

'units/SwampSkeleton/swamp-skeleton-die2-1.png'
'units/SwampSkeleton/swamp-skeleton-die2-2.png'
'units/SwampSkeleton/swamp-skeleton-die2-3.png'
'units/SwampSkeleton/swamp-skeleton-die2-4.png'
'units/SwampSkeleton/swamp-skeleton-die2-5.png'
'units/SwampSkeleton/swamp-skeleton-die2-6.png'
'units/SwampSkeleton/swamp-skeleton-die2-7.png'

I have not found anywhere in the campaign's code where these images are called, I think they refer to some other add-on, because I have not found swamp skeleton in this campaign

Unfortunately the original author disappeared from this forum shortly after the campaign was published, and left many things unfinished, despite the fact that the campaign is still playable until the end.

[white_haired_uncle]

Sorry, swamp skeleton issues were from "The Undead Rising". I forgot there were multiple campaigns in the same log.

The ellipse issues are referenced in a recent post on the vghetto port thread.

[Vennex]

I see that this thread is really old, is anyone still playing or maintaining this?
I started playing the campaign on the hardest difficulty and have gotten to understand just how little balancing was intended for that mode so I wanted to share what I saw and ask for tips.

So far I have barely reached scenario 4. I played till scenario 3 and realised very quickly that it was, quite frankly, undoable on this difficulty. I have started making some adjustments to make them slightly more enjoyable while not intruding in major ways. I will describe those below each scenario, hopefully someone who played on lower difficulty can tell me your experiences as well.

The first scenario actually seems fine. The enemy seems to have the exact same setup for any difficulty (which probably saves its balancing in this case). Finding out that you lose the heavy infantrymen and horsemen is neat storywise and if you really messed up your unit composition, restarting this short scenario is not a hassle. Personally I used this to get a fearless spearman which proved great in later scenarios so it is a tradeoff which I don't hate. There are some inconsistencies that I would like to comment on:
If you manage to feed your spearmen two kills you keep your swordsmen and pikemen for future recalls. I have not yet tried the javelineer but im assuming its the same. Your bowmen become slingers though, which is not that bad but feels weird. If the idea was that over time they lose access to arrowheads or their bows break I get it but you keep the shiny royal guardsmen if they survive long enough - how do they get their armour if the other lvl 3 unit you have has to use treebark for armour? Personally I love having variety in my unit roster so I would love to keep my 0-2 upgraded archers but that's just me. Also if you bothered to level up your Heavy Infantry don't be too dissapointed to see them become lvl 1 spearmen in the recall list next scenario. Im guessing that this happens with any horseriders that survive as well. But hey, they do keep their traits and unused xp!
Once I knew what was going to happen later I changed this scenario a little bit. On the map I simply added a few deep water tiles in the southmost area of the lake before the swamp. This way the western flank trickled in a bit slower so you are able to grab a bit more xp and maybe one more lvl up before the next lvl. Useful if you want to keep your pikemen and spearmen. I also noticed that you transfer very little gold to the next scenario so i tweaked the starting gold from 600/450/300 to 600/500/400. This all translated to roughly one more recall on the start of the next scenario in my run.


Second scenario was the most enjoyable one to me so far. The bats are annoying in classic Wesnoth fashion but short enough to not overstay their welcome. The trolls are a nice way to gain some serious xp as well as to test out your new units. The lack of space means that your few powerful units can wreak HAAAAAAAVOOOOOC (I loved that bit) and you can circle out injured troops safely. However the only really frustrating part of this scenario is the random dwarvish guardsmen who decide they want to very unhelpfully join your little adventure as well as the women and children. This leads to either dwarves stealing a bunch of xp (which you will desperately need for future scenarios) from already meager sources or both the follower factions clogging up the rear forcing you to circle your units BEHIND THEM and possibly endangering your frontline units which now don't have room to move out of battle and heal. This tended to be the most frustrating part to me after I knew that I was heading for a slaughter on the next map.
On this map I found that you really have very little to no gold for recall and upkeep which is fine if the idea was to force you to focus on your main cast. It however did not exactly feel like that was the plan so I added two dwarvish villages easily reachable by your units in the first 2 turns.
I tried to modify the dwarves to not move where they are not supposed to go but my WML coding skills are nonexistent. My last attempt was to give them the guardian trait from the skeleton guards in the northern rebirth campaign. However it didn't work so if anyone has ideas before I decide to devote my life to Wesnoth modding I would love to hear them. The women and children are not that much of a problem since they mostly just soak hits before dying and you do not actually need to save them. If I had the skills, I would actually change it so them dying or not has some sort of mechanical effect but then also I would not make them rush into the unknown on this or future scenarios.

Third scenario was, in my first attempts, infuriating. Enemy starting with 800 gp, six recruit slots and ghosts against my ~280 gp, two lvl 0 recruits per turn for the first 15 turns and a suicidal ally. I believe that the level is objectively nigh impossible independent of player ability. After some tests on the third scenario I managed to conclude that:

• Rushing to take as much ground as you can leads to you losing units faster than you can replenish them because the enemy has number and lvl advantage as well as advantageous time of day (the night lasts for 12 turns on hardest difficulty). The run ends either from your leaders dying in battle or ghosts and skeleton archers overwhelming the allied leader.

• Holding a defensive line on the river seems more feasible for the first 8-10 turns. Lvl 1 recalls and units are recruitable on round 9. Lvl 2 on round 14-15 not exactly sure. You can technically hold the villages in ways other commenters have described but the main problem is that at some point you have to also break through to your ally because he once again gets overwhelmed by highly mobile ghosts. Several attempts and many savescums end when, as taptap described:

  I am not able to protect the exposed friendly leader who enjoys bathing in front of skeleton archers and skeletons.

If someone is masochistic enough there are alternate options I have not tried that could theoretically make a differnce - the most intuitive being to try and beef up your leader units to lvl 3 and trying to beat them with mages and lvl 3 leadership.
After editing the map to make the camp from which you recruit have 4 recruitable slots I managed to defeat the scenario on turn 23/25. I ran out of gold exactly after managing to recall my lvl 2 units but it was just enough to survive. I did lose most of my Youths and any of them who leveled up but at least the literally unnamed vilage elder who will never be important again survived.

So far I have only reached scenario 4. It starts out okay and seems to have the classic problem of amateurish map design where most of the map is a single biome with almost zero turn to turn tactical considerations on it. I don't mind it per se, if the scenario wasn't then set up to completely destroy you for trying to achieve anything in it. So it is mostly swamp with sparse patches of grass. Great for your saurian unit, misery for anything else you have. But at least the skeletons are equally bad on it so you can still farm some xp if you are willing to risk some of your units multiple banebow volleys. Or it would be if the undead didn't spawn 4 shadows on turn 2 and 4 nightgaunts on turn 9. Say goodbye to anyone within their effective range (which is wherever you decide to advance) if it is nighttime (which it is). So unless your plan is to stay next to your starting castle and wait until turn 11 when the nightgaunts are close enough for you to blast them with mages and not get them killed. And the enemy starts recruiting lvl 3 units on turn 9, in case you were managing the chocobones, deathblades and skeleton archers. Also just a bug/typo, even though the scenario description says that you lose if the village elder dies it is not scripted, so if you lose him the game continues normally. I lost my leader on the same turn so I didn't run into any other problems with its coding but either the scripting or the scenario description should be changed slightly.

I have decided to make this post before changing anything from this point on. I will try a couple more times this fourth scenario as well, a different tactic using a bunch of youths and zero or few recalls would probably make it work a lot smoother.
The main problem I have with this campaign is that it seems so interesting but I have repeatedly been boggled with constant frustration not from my bad decision making (although I don't deny there is always some of that) but with mistakes that are obvious or easily fixed if someone had thought of just checking. I get that I can just play it on a lower difficulty, and I will probably do that rather than hitting my head on the same wall but the nightmarish difficulty is neither advertised nor sensible. I have played many campaigns on the hardest difficulty and even though I experienced frustration It was very rarely to the extent I got here.
I was actually really invested into the characters from the first few interactions they had. It has an interesting premise that has been done well by Affably Evil for example, and I think the unique units are a fun addition (though I have a few potential notes as well) so I'm sorry to see it ruined by something that should not be that big of an issue. If I do solve it on a lower difficulty I would love to make a fork of this addon for the newer version of Wesnoth with maps tweaked for better balancing, tighter storywriting and a more rounded overall finish since I would love to follow through on this campaign. Now I just have to learn WML coding...