Mage of Runes

Discussion and development of scenarios and campaigns for the game.

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Sledge
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Joined: September 17th, 2014, 9:21 pm

Mage of Runes

Post by Sledge »

Hello this is the entry of my first addon. Its name is Mage Of Runes.

The two protagonists are called Alyra and Laron. Both of them are rune mages. By using runes they can cast special spells to support themselves or their allies.
Both lived peacefully for a long time in a small village in the north. Being mostly ignored by the kingdom the village has no large defenses or military resources. Therefore, their magical skills were really welcome to the villagers.
Lately, however, the king has seemed to possess fear of rune mages. He accused them of conspiracies and the like. This resulted in a very dark day for Alyra her friend and the villagers...

This campaign includes a rune spell system. All Rune Mages in this campaign have their own rune inventory which allows them to use spells on themselves or allied units they are linked with. These spells only last or a few turns and should therefore be used with caution.
The campaign is in an early stage of development and it includes three level of difficulty (easy, normal and hard). So far 30 Scenarios are playable including five story scenario.
As English is not my mother tongue, I am sure that there will be some linguistic mistakes which I would like to apologize for.

I'm looking forward to any kind of feedback.
Last edited by Sledge on April 24th, 2021, 10:03 am, edited 12 times in total.
Trossknecht
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Re: Mage of Runes

Post by Trossknecht »

Please allow me to start by congratulating Sledge on the creation of this splendid campaign, and for all of the work involved in making it available to players.

In playing the ninth scenario (A confrontation with oneself) I encountered something that may be a glitch of some sort. Both the initial dialogue and the victory conditions suggest that the main character (Laron) should be accompanied by some of the heroes of the campaign. (These are listed in the following screen shot.)


However, these heroes do not appear, and Laron must deal with an extraordinarily challenging situation without any help.

Screen Shot 2019-06-14 at 7.55.29 PM.png
I have attached the first turn of the scenario.

[attachment=1]
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Sledge
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Re: Mage of Runes

Post by Sledge »

Thank you very much for your feedback.

About the ninth scenario. Well yes its kind of both. The description is wrong by telling that Alyra and Alba are with him. The other depend on how you link your units and that is why they might be there and could be killed. But you should have at least the normal units of you that are linked with Laron.

Regarding not having any support units:
I checked your recall list and figured out its almost empty... without units from a previous scenario (Scenario 6) that are linked with him, he will have no support here (and yes for sure no chance to win this). But I think I should create a back up team for him if you have not enough units left to be able to win this scenario.)

Regarding the difficulty I want to ask if you have lost all your units before scenario 6 or did they got lost by a bug?
If so, I will definitly create a back up team for all heros in their tests which they will get If you do not have enough units.
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Sledge
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Re: Mage of Runes

Post by Sledge »

I found the idea of a back up team for the case that all units are beeing lost really good. So I decided to include it already and uploaded it to the addon server. There is also now a scenario and map for scenario 14 but its not completely done but will follow soon :).
In order for you to get the support units you will have to load at least the beginning of the scenario. But I recommend to even go back to scenario 6 as the other two also will now have a back up team if they do not have any units linked with them.
These support teams will be very weak so in any case it would be better to have some units left from previous scenario.
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Sledge
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Re: Mage of Runes

Post by Sledge »

I added Scenario 14 and 15 now, so the campagin has no 15 playable scenarios with two story only scenarios.
Trossknecht
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Re: Mage of Runes

Post by Trossknecht »

Thank you so much for your quick reply.

I think that, in previous scenarios, I failed to link any units to Laron.
white_haired_uncle
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Re: Mage of Runes

Post by white_haired_uncle »

A question before I get too far in, what is "Bonuserfahrung", and how do I get it? I'm concerned that I might allocate it to the wrong units or something like that.

Pretty cool so far. Some thoughts:

S1: Might be a little tight on the turn limit. I had a couple to spare, but if I had, as usually happens, a couple turns where I just couldn't hit anyone, I'd have been cooked.

S2: Very tight on turns. I finished at 25/25.

S4: Up until this point, I'd say the difficulty level is "easy", and I saw very little use for runes, besides protecting my level 0s initially. This one was very much harder than the first three scenarios.. First, I had just about every unit still with me, so the initial fight was tough as I had little room to position my units properly. Also, the opponents were tough enough to easily take out any unit in one turn. Then, a few turns later I encountered probably half of the undead, including 3-4 deathblades per turn. When I finally got through that, I walked through about half the map picking off one unit at a time. I suspect the units aren't initially positioned the way you want them or something. The boss was also kind of obnoxious, in that if my slow attack failed he could easily slaughter my hero in one attack.



It's hard to tell which unit is linked to whom. I can see the icons, on most terrain (certainly not mushrooms), but I think some people will have problems with that. I was thinking of renaming my units when I link them.

AMLA (at least for one unit, and I forgot to record which one) lists +20% XP for only one choice, but it seems to apply to all.

I'll give the whole campaign a good proofreading when I'm done if you like, but here are some things that I see regularly misspelled:

onse > once
lets > let's
beeing > being
effekt > effect
Keine > cancel/exit
deth > death
undeads > undead
Speak softly, and carry Doombringer.
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Sledge
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Re: Mage of Runes

Post by Sledge »

Thank you very much for your feedback. Regarding your first question:
white_haired_uncle wrote: June 21st, 2019, 12:07 am A question before I get too far in, what is "Bonuserfahrung", and how do I get it? I'm concerned that I might allocate it to the wrong units or something like that.
I forgot to translate this a macro from a smaller campaign I did for myself in the past. It should be called 'bonus exp' and you gain it when killing a buffed unit. Starting with scenario 4, the enemy units are often slightly buffed and therefore stronger than usual. When killing such a buffed unit the unit who kills it gains the 'bonus exp' additional to the normal exp that you gain for killing a unit of a respective level.
Exactly this buff might be the reason for the high difficulty of this scenario. I think I have to weaken this buff.

Regarding difficult I think I should try to do the easy difficulty first. Therefore I think I should rebalance some scenarios after scenario 4 as some of them might be really hard. Therefore I'm really appreciating feedback regarding the difficulty :).

Yeah about the icons for the links: I think I should also create an additional way to show who a unit is connected to.
About the Amlas, the one that is showing the additional exp is the default amla but all amlas will increase the max exp. I left in out for my amlas in the descriptions because sometimes I want to have more space for amlas with a longer description needed.

Regarding the turn limits I think I will increase the two you mention a little bit.
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Sledge
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Re: Mage of Runes

Post by Sledge »

Ok, I already tried to fix some of the problems.
I changed the position of the link overlays. Now they shouldn't be cut off by an adjacent unit and should always be visible now.
I also increased the turn numbers of scenario 1 and 2 and decreased the attack buff for the units in scenario 4. But it still needs some adjustments. And also the 'Bonuserfahrung' is now called 'bonus exp' ;).
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Sledge
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Re: Mage of Runes

Post by Sledge »

Now the Campaign supports 3 diffculties Easy, Normal and Hard. Older saves will be treated as the normal difficulty now.
white_haired_uncle
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Re: Mage of Runes

Post by white_haired_uncle »

Just finished the campaign (so far, I assume). The linking and runes thing is pretty cool, and adds a somewhat unique aspect to the gameplay. Seems to me the lack of recruiting could lead to a problem if you have a bad scenario, especially early on, and lose several units then you'll be weak in the next scenario and therefore likely to lose more units than normal, etc, etc. I suppose the additional allies that come along will help offset this, but it still may an issue.

I'd like to see a "back" option in the runes menus. Sometimes, for example, I just want to see what spells are available, but to do so I have to keep going back and restarting the menu. Also, perhaps I could go directly to the linked unit and enter the runes menu instead of having to click on the mage and the target unit?

I'm not sure about not being able to change linking. It kind of took awhile to understand which types of units/moves/attacks worked well with which mage, etc, and by the time I had a decent understanding about how I might like to group my units it was already too late.

I found the later scenarios more in line with the difficulty of the first three (S15 in particular was really easy). I think a big part of that is our team really sucks against undead.

informations > information

S8: Finished on turn 45/45. BTW, should I be able to recall Laron and/or others? It seemed odd that I had a partial recall list that included Laron but not the other rune mage.

S9: WTF? Evil dude has tons of hitpoints, summons strong units, and opens portals (the latter two happening so often I couldn't even think about the bad guy). One of those three things would be reasonable, but all three at once is just too much. [Maybe this could be the difference between easy/normal/hard - one, two, or three of these elements included?]. There's another scenario that's very similar late in the campaign, but I forgot which.

S11: Allied leader died on turn 7. I can't even get units up there to help in 7 turns. Other than that, this is about the only fight against undead that really seemed reasonably fair. In general (not just this scenario), I didn't find the allies to be much help.
Speak softly, and carry Doombringer.
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Sledge
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Re: Mage of Runes

Post by Sledge »

First of all thanks for the detailed feedback :)
About the lack of recruiting: I agree that it makes scenarios very hard to be made in a fitting difficulty. To come up with this I firstly thought about placing additional units for the player when he has only a few units left. But this teams are still far to weak and will be placed to late. The reason why I wanted to leave out recruiting is that at the beginning I wanted to place some kind of rune shops more often. And they would also need gold. But for now they player gets a dencent amount of gold at the only scenario where he can buy runes. So I might change the whole thing and will allow recall and recruiting (or at least will place additional units a lot earlier).

The back option for the rune menus is a very good idea and I will try to work on that. Besides, you're right and selecting the rune mage first should be unnecessary. However, it should be difficult to change this for running saves but maybe I will change it as it also would be less confusing with having less menu items.

Yeah about chaning the linking I'm also not sure... At the moment I'm thinking about to allow to unlink a unit within the first turn. but if I'm going to do this I also have to dissalow the rune magic at least for the linked units (not the mage himself) for the first turn as otherwise you could for example boost up the speed of one unit with all three mages allowing it to reach an enemy leader within one turn... But most of the time a spell is not needed in the first time so I might change this in the near future (But again this might not work on already running saved games).

S8: I used a map from a previous scenario and forget to remove the keep... And guess I will increase the turn number here as having a bit of bad luck will consume a lot of time within the small tunnels.

S9: At least for the easy mode I was thinking about adding some breaks were the boss will do nothing, so you have more often the time to attack him directly. (Regarding the stron units beeing summoned, I hope you didn't let him summon the lichs from the circles, because this really one should prevent by moving a unit in the purple circles)

S11: Yeah I gave the ally far to less gold. I will change that immediatly. I guess I will increase in general the strength of the allies.
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Sledge
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Re: Mage of Runes

Post by Sledge »

Ok I already uploaded a newer version with some minor things changed.
I mostly increased the strength of some 'back up teams' you will get when having only a few units left in some scenarios.
I removed the ability to recall in scenario 8 and increased the strength of the allies in general.
For the boss fights I added some breaks so it should be a bit easier to attack the boss unit.
Konrad2
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Re: Mage of Runes

Post by Konrad2 »

Campagin description:
Despite the normal -> Aside from
into crystalls. A -> crystals
not anly for -> only

S1
support alies with -> allies
but nead special -> need
Alyra her friend and -> Alyra, her friend, and
use here skills -> her
forced here to -> her
suppoer alies which -> allies
Be carefull in -> careful
it can not be -> cannot

Status Table:
enemys -> Enemies
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EarthCake
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Re: Mage of Runes

Post by EarthCake »

Intro:
containing -> that contain
Alyras -> Alyra's

1 scenario:
Alyra thanks... -> Alyra, thank you
King -> king
happend -> happened
quite a few -> quite a lot
...handle it -> handle them
to be link... -> to be linked
ones -> once
...rune magic. Right... -> rune magic, right
Tipp -> Tip
wont -> won't
an eye an... -> an eye on
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