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.