Infection Era

General feedback and discussion of the game.

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Atreides
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Infection Era

Post by Atreides »

Just tried this and first impression is that it's pretty cool and nifty. The art is swell and it even has anims! The theme is also interesting, I still have to play more to get a better picture. It does seem to be a variation of the (now) classic zombie plague. But all praise aside I do have to complain about the missing sprites. Not sure if they're just broken links to the existing art (the usual case) or not. One faction is pretty hard hit with almost half affected.

P.S. The helicopter and ambulance really look great. I mean the whirlybird even has whirling blades. Nice.
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T_BaneBlade
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Re: Infection Era

Post by T_BaneBlade »

Hi Atreides,

I'm the author of the mod in question. Thanks for trying out my work in progress and I'm glad you enjoyed it. I'm open to any feedback, but it's still in active development, with additional art and balance patches planned.

I am concerned though when you say that there are some missing sprites. I've been balancing and debugging it w/ a small group of friends, and we didn't have any issues with sprites displaying improperly when playing online. The sprites are present, so it must be broken references somewhere. Do you recall which units, or even which faction was having the issue on your end? (I hope a quick fix goes a long way in improving your enjoyment of the mod!)
"If I have seen further, it is because I have stood on the shoulders of giants." ~Isaac Newton
-Creator of the Infection Era
gnombat
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Re: Infection Era

Post by gnombat »

T_BaneBlade wrote: May 17th, 2022, 4:20 am I am concerned though when you say that there are some missing sprites. I've been balancing and debugging it w/ a small group of friends, and we didn't have any issues with sprites displaying improperly when playing online.
It is probably an issue which only appears on case-sensitive filesystems (e.g., Linux) but not on case-insensitive ones (e.g., Windows).

For example: the WML code contains:

survivors/tactician/tactician-defense/tactician-d.png

... but the actual file path is:

survivors/Tactician/tactician-defense/tactician-d.png

That will work on a case-insensitive system but will probably fail on Linux.
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Atreides
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Re: Infection Era

Post by Atreides »

Mega Corpus, Moloch, ATV Trooper and almost half the Survivors faction leaders. That's from looking at leader choices, in game I also noticed a unit Immolator (?) as well as several enemy units (Survivor faction?) with no sprites.

P.S. I am playing under Linux so Gnombat's suggestion is quite likely it.
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T_BaneBlade
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Re: Infection Era

Post by T_BaneBlade »

Thanks gnombat, Atreides,

The missing sprites were consistent with my (inconsistent) use of capitalization.

I believe that I have tracked down all the issues (fingers crossed), and just uploaded Infection Era v0.8.0d to the server which should now display properly across machines.
"If I have seen further, it is because I have stood on the shoulders of giants." ~Isaac Newton
-Creator of the Infection Era
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Atreides
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Re: Infection Era

Post by Atreides »

Just finished a game I'd started with this era. The graphics all work now. No problems to report. Balance seems good too. A few units did seem very powerful but they were on the AI sides so for all I know they are expensive also. Naturally needs lots more playing to get any meaningful feel for balance.

Oh wait, there was a teensy thing I noticed that the level 2 chopper unit has no sounds.
MaxLyncher
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Re: Infection Era

Post by MaxLyncher »

Preface

I played the Infection Era at first in 2012 or earlier. It had only three factions and something resembling stone gargoyles instead of infected birds.
However, I liked the addon in its infancy because it didn't fail to meet my expectations. It was indeed very much about infection (and I was a fan of the classic undead faction from which zombies and ghouls are transparent parallels to infected creatures) and the whole era was pretty compact.
So I played it a bit, published a short description of it on another Wesnoth forum and also imagined its adaption to some another game.

The next time I re-visited the era, it had 2 new factions. Honestly, I didn't get the idea of these factions at first: Beta Strain seemed to be a second Infected faction and Dragoons felt like the import of classic Drakes. For me they didn't fit well in the post-apocalyptic world, being too "pure".

I remember how in some old thread (which I can't find) the author said he probably won't have time to finish this addon because of his college. But luckily, in these years the work had much progress. Now the era feels more complete and polished.

I know that it is not finished yet and I have no idea what is the author final vision, it should be left to him. Instead, I can share my feedback and thus show what this era means to me cause obviously I feel somehow connected to it.
This weekend I re-visited the era again and played more than 20 games with much more games seen simulated (AI vs AI).
There are no campaigns or custom maps for this era, so I used the standard MP maps. In the first simulation tournament all factions (lead by AI) played with each other in the round-robin. In the second tournament I created my own custom vision of the world with 10 regions where each faction had many armies. This time not all factions were lead by AI, I chose to play Survivors (to have some fun and return the pre-fall world). It was relatively easy so I won over other factions and the Survivors should be excluded from the final standing for they were unfairly lead by a human (but they can also be normalized and it was also done by me).

These small tournaments would show if the era is balanced. I know it is unbalanced due to ongoing development but the precise question was asked of how much it is unbalanced now. If the results of factions in two tournaments were equal or random, the era would seem to be in balance. However, the standings were straightforward and the same in both instances. This means that there are the first, the second, ... the sixth faction in strength. Lately I will try to give some detailed commentary on each of the factions sorted from the weakest to the most powerful.
MaxLyncher
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Re: Infection Era

Post by MaxLyncher »

6. Dragoons

I mentioned that the Dragoons feel a bit like Drakes from the Default Era. There is a reason for this that probably has something to do with their many defeats against other factions I witnessed. Their units are good, they are as good as units of other factions. But it feels that there are too few of them. All other factions have at least one unit to spam with, a cheap one of the level 0 or 1 (even seemingly expensive Pax spams without any shame with helicopters like a psycho). And Dragoons, exactly like classic Drakes, don't spam at all, recruiting balanced quantities of their first level units. And if high price of Drakes is fair because of their unit-level power, Dragoons units are just good, just at the level. And literally every faction can easily outspam them using their unit of choice, win by quantity and cheapness. It's only my view based on AI performance, cause I didn't play any faction except of Survivors but it seems to be close to the truth.

I like that the faction has a female branch, cause these are rare in the era (the only one another is in the Beta Infected faction) and male-only men (in conditions when everyone who is able to hold some weaponry is the warrior and even civils are battle units) lead to the conclusion that women were perharps to weak to survive the Long Night which is a bit sad.

There are no specific Dragoon units that I can discuss in details, I had an opportunity to play with them just 2 times (and had no specific problems), cause they were early destroyed by other factions. Still, they are not hopeless with few victories that seem to be quite random (over Infected, Pax and Raiders).

In summary, they feel like a standard balanced faction (and incredibely attractive in appearance) with exactly the unit types you would expect from any Wesnoth faction. Other factions are quite unique in one or some aspects. Perhaps, these are the keys to their success.
MaxLyncher
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Re: Infection Era

Post by MaxLyncher »

5. Pax Militarum

This is another weak faction but the structure of unit types is completely different. There are some good level 1 units I didn't find an effective strategy to deal with (robots and tanks) but they are quite expensive and AI basically limits itself to produce just two units:
1) Scout Chopper - range-only quick scout helicopters with LOTS of HP that have absolutely no melee attack
2) Enforcer - melee-only infrantry to support helicopters having absolutely no range attack

This combination could be a dangerous one because helicopters have a good range weapons and enforcers are quite good in melee combat. However, it was never a problem to deal with them because these two almost never go together due to the difference in MP and the scout nature of the first ones. Enforcers were always an easy target for my range units, helicopters were a bit problematic due to their 48 HP so they needed to be cleverly managed one by one. However, this faction was my favourite to play against (even comparing to Dragoons) because of the straightforward strategy to deal with them. Sometimes appearing tanks and robots of course were bringing some fear to me but they didn't inflict much damage. Specifically, the tank has a week attack and is very slow so it can be even ignored and left behind (while destroying is time-consuming).

In conclusion, AI certainly doesn't know how to play this faction, just spamming helicopters and desperately sending with them one type of infantry as a support. It has some potential but feels very unbalanced in itself with nearly useless tanks but good-appearing robots that perhaps die to fast to see their beauty.

These two factions can be called weak and the next two factions perform in battles more like "average Wesnoth factions".
MaxLyncher
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Re: Infection Era

Post by MaxLyncher »

4. Raiders

And now we begin with something really strong. The basic unit here is level 1 Raider. And oh yes, it is effective. Cheap, fast with good melee attack it can access weakened enemies, kill them and became a level 2 Marauder relatively fast. And the second level version of it is just two times better in everything.

The key to success is to use Raiders for skirmishing and very good Heavy Troopers as tanks. The third unit type is Looter which is the mirror of Survivor's Hunter, effective as well.

Raiders also have different vehicles and (useless except of taking empty villages) drones but they just support the mighty infantry set.
MaxLyncher
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Re: Infection Era

Post by MaxLyncher »

3. Survivors (and their dogs)

I did enjoyed playing this faction because it has many good units. And probably my the most astonishing discovery was that of dogs. They are the best scouts of the era with many different possible usages.
Very cheap and fast, they look like typical scouts that you send to take empty villages at the game start and possibly skirmish enemy scouts. However, when you position a dog in a village it becames a fortress. It's not a joke, it feels like this. Typically scouts on flanks oppose 1-2 enemies at the time. These enemies are not always scouts but could be also regular battle enemy units that lost its way to the main battle scene. Usually your scout is at great risk when it calmly awaits any enemy even in an occupied village. This is the case with most of era scouts as well. If there is a helicopter or a small spider in the village, you just take any unit that has some melee attack and destroy the enemy in 1-2 turns. But dogs are not like that.
They have relatively good avoidance of enemy strikes so are striked rarely. And often these damages are completely healed the other turn because they regenerate +12 (for village, no move and default +2 just because they are cool). Moreover, if the enemy attacker is killed which is often the case because comparing to other scouts they have pretty good melee, they completely heal themselves to 100% HP! With just 29 XP and such excellent characteristics they can become a wolf-like Guard Dog that is an actual war machine (the second option is the faster Forerunner but because this level-up always occurs in the middle of some battle and why do you need runners in the game end I never opted for that). There are three many awesome things about dogs:
- they have 2 different appearances, didn't find any other unit with such feature
- they are immune to infection (this can be really helpful so you can send dogs to fight zombies never afraid of multiplying the enemy number)
- they ... can be used as regular battle units, not only as scouts
I know because I used them as such quite effectively. The only lowpoint is their low HP but their melee attack and deffence are solid to send them where you typically send your another melee unit (Commando). And when there is a break in an enemy line and you have a possibility to capture a distant enemy village (something that is a 100% suicide in most cases) is a win-win with a dog because enemy will need to retreat and collect more than one unit to capture such a village, remember how these dogs stick to their houses. I also often just recruited only dogs in the latter stages of the game when your gold is limited and felt as if I were cheating on my enemy, how powerful they were, scout and an effective skirmisher in one cheap unit!

But another cheap unit, a Survivor itself is of no use. It has an ability to earn 1 XP each turn. There are was a strange thing that in some games this ability was called Hard time and in other Civil, I don't know why it just changes its name back and forth but it's useless. And yes, I tried to exploit it somehow. The idea of XP for survived turns is not new for me, I used it in my insects project for eggs and such eggs had very low needed XP to level up. So in this case I also left some eggs of people at the game start with the hope that they will grow up so it's basically a level 1 unit at a half-price. And there are three problems why I stopped doing this:
1) the needed XP is huge
with my eggs I proposed 4 at max
and here it's 16
not each game had 16 turns
2) when they level up, they have 50% of HP
so you either lead them half-alive to the battle or need MORE turns to heal them
3) when they are level 0 they are useless contrary to all other level 0 units in the era
you just can't do anything with them, they will instantly die fighting with anyone if no under some fantastic luck
MaxLyncher
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Re: Infection Era

Post by MaxLyncher »

Survivors infantry is just as good as that of Raiders (and sometimes precisely mirrors them) so there is no much to talk about.
I used hunters & militia to fight melee enemy units and I used commandos & ... yes, megapower dogs to fight range enemy units.
All was effective.

Doctors could be used as range units as well, their +4 level 1 healing is basically nothing, you won't pay them salary just for doing this and actively engaging them in fighting to gain level 2 and become true doctors can be sometimes painful but well these medics make your army look more solid after all.

There is a rich branch of tacticians, level 1 is a classic leader and levels 2-3 have their bonuses. I didn't use them much for the same reason as doctors but when I had level 2 Tactician: Aggressor I enjoyed it very well. It was giving enormous bonus to the attack so I always moved it with the army and it was effective. I like this idea with different leader types.

In conclusion, Survivors seem very balanced and attractive to play, I didn't regret I took them.
MaxLyncher
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Re: Infection Era

Post by MaxLyncher »

2. Beta Strain

This infected feel are not as dangerous as the Alpha strain but I absolutely hated playing against them :D
The faction way of playing is very unique among different countless Wesnoth eras and factions. And the key to its understanding are level 0 Swarmers. This is the cheatiest unit in the whole era that gives the faction the ultimate bonus. When Survivor is an egg for a half-alive one level unit, Swarmer is an egg for 2 full-prepared one level units, costing less. These are perfect skirmishers and when they kill a pray they (10 XP that often becomes <= 8 XP depending on XP multiplyer in Multiplayer) instantly turn into a level one spider which is a good battle unit and the killed pray becomes a Beta strain version of zombie which is a VERY DIFFICULT to deal with cause it has some great resistance. With this ability, the Beta Strain Horde easily mupltiplies its counts with almost no effort, money and time and makes battles with the faction quite long. Other spiders are just good. Spurhorses have great range attack but are easily killed in melee, Abominations are the most troublesome ones but can be dealt also.

I had no big problems dealing with Beta Strain (comparing to Alpha Strain which has more dangerous units) but the battles were always so much time-consuming and spider-everywhere-filled.
MaxLyncher
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Re: Infection Era

Post by MaxLyncher »

1. Infected

And by far the strongest faction in the Infection is the Infection itself.
Armored and Dark Rider were especially painful to deal with.
With charge units it's always the same, you can't predict the attack outcome and it makes you nervous, I even lost my leader to the Dark Rider once when nothing seemed to be in danger.
Other units are just good and cheap so the faction key to success is number that could be multiplied by the infection spread (however, surprisingly few units are able to do this).
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T_BaneBlade
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Re: Infection Era

Post by T_BaneBlade »

Hi MaxLyncher,

Thanks for all this fantastic feedback! I'm surprised you remember the early version of the add-on and am glad that it still holds up now. The faction-wise breakdown is also quite valuable.

Ensuring each faction has a purpose and forms part of a cohesive whole is important to me. It could be helpful if I describe a bit of the inspiration. Originally, I had started writing a campaign to go along with the add-on but I think this is a bit beyond the scope of what I can commit to currently. The general lore behind the Infection Era is as follows:

(Warning: Long)
Plot Synopsis
Once, humanity cowered in the shadows of great and terrible beasts kept at bay only through wizardry and magecraft. Above all these threats reigned the ferocious and seemingly-immortal dragons, whose great wings blotted out the sun. But even in the dark, the ingenious human mind innovated and the human spirit remained indominable. With sufficient resolve and sacrifice, even the mighty could be brought low.

In the far future, humanity has become the uncontested rulers of the world through desperate advancement in science and technology. A long era of peace followed, and humanity flourished under the one-world Pax governance, enforced by the Militarium. Yet despite these accomplishments, the human form remained weak and vulnerable, ravaged by disease and mortality: The indefatigable march of entropy would ultimately exact its toll, and eventually all evidence of humanity would fade. All creatures, save for the immortal dragons, were subject to this fatal curse. To secure an eternal legacy, to extend the limits fate had placed on the species, Pax returned to the grisly trophies of the ancient war, seeking to extract the secret of immortality from the dragon’s flesh, and the genetic material within. What heights awaited if baseline humanity could be improved with such knowledge?

Unopposed, Pax spared no financial or ethical expense to further these goals. Although it started with animal experiments, eventually vulnerable and ‘undesirable’ citizens were secretly abducted from the population and made into test subjects for injected constructs of mutagenic viral vectors spliced with the draconic genetic material. Such vectors were unstable, designed to rapidly propagate and mutate, allowing for rapid evolution of new strains and heterogenous effects, even within subjects. Results were often unexpectedly volatile, with gross and rapid alterations of flesh, usually comorbid with death or insanity.

Through hundreds of painful iterations, a stable Alpha vector emerged (which was not acutely fatal to the subject), conferring ‘desirable’ morphological traits reminiscent of the legendary dragons. These often-unwilling re-engineered human were coined as ‘Dragoons’. Immune to disease, resilient to injury, superhumanly strong, and potentially immortal, these Dragoons had apparently achieved the desired transcendence of the flesh.

Given the apparent success with the Dragoons, Pax fostered even grander aspirations: Apotheosis of the entire species. How exactly these goals corresponded to a premature release of an aerosolized variant of the vector is not known. But on the Long Night, the consequences of such hubris became apparent. Around 10% of the population reacted violently to the aerosolized vector, exhibiting all the worst symptoms of the infection thought to be eradicated in testing: Aggression, violence, and rapid uncontrolled mutation of the flesh. Worse further, the bodies of the infected further replicated and concentrated the vector, resulting in a more potent capacity to infection to be spread by physical contact to individuals with compromised constitutions. Overnight, society crashed from its golden age into a struggle for survival.

What remained of Pax’s forces sought to restore control over military bases, civilian infrastructure, and governmental buildings. However, the Militarium was neither willing nor able to support the hordes of civilians seeking shelter and governance. Unprepared and abandoned, countless died. Those who remained found that what they had acquired in strength and grit, they had lost in their humanity. Such Survivors seek to rebuild what was lost, even if they could never again return to their state of innocence.

For others, the collapse of any system of meaning or morality, and a requisite affinity for violence was a liberation. The stark contrast of the prior order with the present chaos fostered a philosophy of absurdism: If life carried no meaning, and premature death was all but assured, then all that remained was the indulgence of the present. The ‘Raiders’, as they would come to be called, did not create nor build, living instead in nomadic caravans without destination. They took what they required indiscriminately, looting ruins or raiding survivor settlements. Disinhibited by anarchy, Raiders often sought out bombastic violence as both entertainment and culture. As such they were a scourge to humans and infected alike.

When Pax had purged their installations of infected and reestablished a defensive perimeter, they focused their efforts on a means to eliminate the vector directly. However, the infection vector was designed to rapidly evolve and differentiate itself: A static construct would be ineffective. Instead, a secondary dynamic ‘killswitch’ viral construct, containing the same rapidly-evolving mutagenic base as the infection vector, was constructed against the vector as a direct target. The infection vector would seek to mutate the host to preserve itself, while the killswitch vector would mutate itself to kill the infection vector. Cautious testing in healthy volunteers showed that the killswitch vector had no adverse effects, but administration to the infected would cause a self-perpetuating war between the original and killswitch strains, leading to expiry of the host. By technology had humanity been damned, and by humanity would it be saved again.

At first, the killswitch vector showed great promise, cutting down the infected at it overwhelmed the mutagenic potential of the first vector. However, within the crucible of selection grew adaptation. One particularly unstable strain of the (first) vector was able to match the rapid evolution of the killswitch vector. The vector mutated and modified cells within the host organism just as the killswitch vector adapted to destroy it. The result of this brutal stalemate was the complete dissolution of the original organismal complexity: Instead, the highly mutated cells were resorted to something of an immortalized syncytial organic mass. Through both cellular specializations and incorporation of inorganic skeletal components, new bioforms of the ‘Beta Strain’ emerged. As with other rudimentary entities, the primary biological imperative remained: To survive and reproduce. The consumption and incorporation of additional biomass accomplished both goals simultaneously. ‘Infected’ flesh or healthy mattered not: Both satisfied the Hunger, if but temporarily.
"If I have seen further, it is because I have stood on the shoulders of giants." ~Isaac Newton
-Creator of the Infection Era
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