The Dark Rising

[Paskovski]

The Dark Rising is an add-on single-player undead campaign, where player follows the story of Syrus, who was banished from Wesnoth for using studying dark magic. This add-on has fourteen playable scenarios (two of them depends on player’s choice).

Please report all errors and bugs to this topic. There will be a lot of grammar errors so please report them as well.

[Anekron]

Hey! Downloaded it but when I try to play (on Medium difficulty) I get an error. Something wrong with utils.cfg. I would look further into it but I have to get to sleep right about now.

[Paskovski]

Thank you, it is fixed now.

[Lord-Knightmare]

Okay, first things first...
Add-on has no icon.

Anyways starting this on the maxed difficulty.
Let's see how it is.

Scenario 1:

• My first thought was this is the first scenario map of The Dark Hordes
• Is this campaign, the re-telling of the dark hordes? (since the original was unfinished and the unoff version was lame)
• the initial engagement vs loyalists was fun but the rest of the scenario became uneventful
• Scenario name has the same name of one of the locations in GRRM's A Song of Ice and Fire. You might wanna change that.

Scenario 2:

• Holding the enemy at the bridge was very challenging during the day time. I liked it.
• Good scenario. Perfect XP farming.

I will resume later. Time to sleep.

[Lord-Knightmare]

Continuation:

Scenario 3 - Northerners

• The turn limits of this scenario could really use an increment of like 5 or 7. I barely finished on turn 30 on Dark Lord difficulty.
• Map needs some embellishments. Looks very plain.
• Nice touch with Lyonel the Lost General
• Chose the Iron Front path, with my reason: Only braindead idiot would go clash vs elves and woses in their forests
• Where are my Ghoul recruits?

Scenario 4B - the Iron Front

• Map seems very dull. Needs more terrain palette variety
• This was fairly challenging pushing through the orcs and loyalists
• It was a relief knowing the enemy sides were not recruiting Merfolk and Naga.
• Map gives good usage of Submerge ability
• Where are my Ghoul recruits?

Scenario 5 - Orcish Fortress

• Third "defeat all enemy leaders" in a row?
• Map seemed copy-pasted from SotBE
• Assailing the Barag-Gor was the main challenge here
• Another challenge was the occasional AI pairing of Pillagers and a Troll Hero.
• Where are my Ghoul recruits?

Catacombs of the Ancients

• Map seems well done, but the catacomb cave wells could use some sconces here and there. Some stone/trash/remains embellishments here and there.
• Scenario felt like a drag. Most of the turns went by pulling the backliner units
• Where are my Ghoul recruits?
• The rewards were just gold. Give some variety. Quite dull.
• I guess the poison melee bonus and the cold melee bonus items aren't really worth it here since undead have high cold resistance. I suppose the next scenario would make it worth my while.

[Lord-Knightmare]

Replays Part 3 of 3

Scenario 7 - Unexpected Encounter

• Standard Loyalists vs Undead match up
• Scenario lacked flavor as in no extra map interaction events
• The Death Rider Hero has really faulty stats and made him rather well...useless in the follow up scenarios
• I found it weird that the Loyalist AI was recruiting Pikemen, Javelineers and Spearmen...which the worst vs the Undead

Scenario 8 - The Dwarven Gates

• The dwarves were quite resistant to the Northerners assault.
• Dwarven defences collapsed rather easily to Liches and the Dread Lich
• I still dont see why Ghouls aren't available as recruits

Scenario 9 - Borstep Mines

• The Dread Rider hero was useless here.
• Instead of recruiting Dwarven Steelclads, Dwarven Runesmiths and Ulfserkers...the enemy AI tossed Dwarven Guardsmen and Dwarven Thunderers at me...which are like the worst possible units to use vs Skeletons, Ghosts and whatnot. Felt very one-sided.
• Having "defeat all enemy leaders" as an objective over and over sort of makes the campaign feel bad now.

Scenario 10 - The Chamber

• This scenario's map seem rather dull...just 3-4 terrain types. Could use more "flat" terrain.
• Seems optimised to recall only Wraiths and Spectres and some Nightgaunts
• The undead-mounted units are rather....well...I think I should never even use them.
• the hero Necromancer's possessed portrait has a white background
• Not enough monster variety

Scenario 11 - Escaping from the...

• This scenario felt very stupid.
• and it has a bug where ALL the player units are killed.
• I patched it and moved forward. Didnt bother to finished with the patch. Just skipped to next scenario.

Scenario 12 - Showdown by Borstep

• Scenario felt like a rip-off of Against the World of Secrets of the Ancients
• Nothing is stopping player units from ambushing the dwarven leader and sniping him
• Scenario didn't entertain much. Felt rather dull.

Scenario 13 - Shadow Battle

• Final scenario makes all skeleton type undead advancements feel undesired. Should have just sunk every XP for Spectres, Liches and Nightgaunts
• Map was rather tedious. Way too much cave hexes.
• Final boss was a bit entertaining due to his overwhelming attack power but got reduced by Liches and Spectres.
• Ghasts and Necrophages would have been nice here since they are quite nice to have in Undead vs Undead match-ups (grade A-).
• The Dread Rider hero proved to be useless as usual

Feedback Summary

• After playing from start to end, I could tell that this was what the Dark Hordes was supposed to be like. Only exceptions are that the campaign was built from the ground up, the protagonist was renamed to Syrus and some other stuff like no orcs as recruits anymore. Compared to the original unfinished TDH, this is certainly an improvement, and it gave a somewhat ending. (with some hints of a follow-up).
• Despite that, it still needs more updates, refinements, rebalancing, etc as the scenarios did not have a positive impact.

Additionally, someone from the discord server played the campaign but they dont have a forum account so I am posting their feedback here as well.

Feedback from Norcen23

Feedback for Dark Rising:
Advance notice: I only played up through scenario 3 cause I lost interest so I cannot judge anything beyond scenario 3
★ Maps:
S1: Felt rather long for a straightforward journey, I ran into humans right away and after killing them never ran into anything else for the rest of the map (there was 1 troll in the corner but overall pretty empty
S2: This one had the same issue but extended, there were many areas I saw that looked interesting but upon arriving turned out to be just odd spots and nothing more. There was no strategic reason to use any parts of the map, it was just an open field except for the edges
S3: Again the issue of open maps, this one also felt boring due to the forest and river being placed like straight lines and boxes rather than having the natural breakage and diversity of real world land.
★ Units:
Why do I have dark adepts? They were never explained and I don't remember if I had them in S1 as well but it makes no sense
Why no ghouls? Jokes aside ghouls are like a staple of undead and usually if all the undead are available ghouls are too
Leader unit doesn't really make sense, why is he the only unique unit in the campaign? And not unique as in a special name and a slight difference, he's a totally different styled unit from all the others and sticks out like a sore thumb
★ Enemies:
The ai barely recruits any archers, you can literally just spam archers and easily win, ai recruitment can and should be adjusted to ensure they recruit in a way that makes sense lore and combat wise
The ai runs out of gold after only a few turns of recruiting and due to the huge open maps can easily be sniped with a few shadows or nightgaunts, the enemy should either have a guard, have better income and less starting gold, or not be on such a large map
★ Art:
The art isn't bad but it also isn't wesnoth style, I think it'd immerse me more if all the art was the same style
★ Story:
Story images should be higher quality or just not exist, having to look in the top corner at a sprite really makes it feel awkward
Story also didn't really pull me in enough to justify other issues although I did only go through the first 3 scenarios so I don't know if it was really interesting later on, I'd suggest working on the other issues first and then it can be seen whether the story needs work or not

[hermestrismi]

Okay, first things first...
Add-on has no icon.

[*] Is this campaign, the re-telling of the dark hordes? (since the original was unfinished and the unoff version was lame)

Just note, the unofficial version just had been reworked few days ago. you can try it again and tell me if it still looks bad

[Paskovski]

Thank you for your feedback Lord Knightmare, I appreciate it. I took some inspiration from The Dark Hordes, but wanted to make an original story. I'll be posting updates from this campaign. (By the way, Lyonel isn't the lost general from HttT, Lionel is.)

[Paskovski]

New update! Version 1.0.1a:
-Added dark adept lore
-Added one hero unit
-Added ghouls
-Redone rewards in scenario 6
-Changed objectives in some scenarios
-Some maps changed and polished
-Portrait fixes
-Bug fixes
-General balancing, (gold, income, turns, and so on)

[Lord-Knightmare]

There is no icon for the addon on the addons manager. Observed with 1.16.3

[Paskovski]

There is no icon for the addon on the addons manager. Observed with 1.16.3

Interesting..... Apparently the icon file has to be standard wesnoth file, am I right? I'll fix that in some point.

[Paskovski]

There is no icon for the addon on the addons manager. Observed with 1.16.3

Fixed.

[Paskovski]

Version 1.0.1c:
-Fixed some macros
-Fixed the dialogue for dwarves in scenario 9

[Paskovski]

Version 1.0.1d:
-Unit type changes
-Dialogue improvements
-Balancing
-Map tweaks

[plantpaladin]

Ok Campaign, a bit too easy for Intermediate rating, some surprises but not harder than baseline novice. Played on medium and will try hard.

Bugs
S5 Orcish Fortress Got error messages that AI couldnt recruit Heavy or Infantry.
Probably just a typo.

Once you get going you tend to snowball. Getting some quick liches makes caves rather easy with some ghosts as scouts and support.
Ai is not good at recruiting good counter units.
Also not enough leveled enemies overall for later scenarios.

S11 Fresh idea but the quality of dwarfes should be higher. Ulfserkers would make for a real challenge for such a small area.
S12 Some leveled enemies and I was low on gold. Still won wtih spam recalls. Move the human and orcs to the northeastern part of the map so they dont attack elves as much. Elves are almost an asset as they slow down the humans and orcs.
S13 Final battle, could be harder but not bad overall.