1. Eastern Invasion

[Content Feedback]

(1) What difficulty levels and game versions have you played the scenario on?
(2) How difficult did you find the scenario? (1-10)
(3) How clear did you find the scenario objectives?
(4) How clear and interesting did you find the dialog and storyline of the scenario?
(5) What were your major challenges in meeting the objectives of the scenario?
(6) How fun do you think the scenario is? (1-10)
(7) What, if any, are changes you would have made to the scenario to make it more fun?

[Xindage]

Xindage here again, after a long time without playing this game I decided to come back, most after noticing that this campaign get updated.
(1) What difficulty levels and game versions have you played the scenario on?
1.18.0 - Incursion - Biased RNG
(2) How difficult did you find the scenario? (1-10)
5 For just to survive.
8 If I consider trying to farm xp.
You see defending the first wave and trying to level up some units is not that hard, still I had to sacrifice few units in order to get better ones.
(3) How clear did you find the scenario objectives?
Its ok.
(4) How clear and interesting did you find the dialog and storyline of the scenario?
The start is fine, there's 3 enemies nearby and we have to get ready to the fight, but I must admit that having Mal-Ravanal coming into the scenario to summon more foes is just the cherry of the cake, it added much personality to the first scenario and I loved that.
(5) What were your major challenges in meeting the objectives of the scenario?
Thinking in what I could do to get some extra XP and trying to avoid losing important units.
(6) How fun do you think the scenario is? (1-10)
7 - Its better than the previous version indeed, and you can really fell pressured to escape now, unfortunately I miss being able to kick one of my enemies butt.
(7) What, if any, are changes you would have made to the scenario to make it more fun?
Allow the player to gain some ground before dumping the map with an impossible number of foes, that forced me to leave too fast.
(8) Replay/Other notes.
I finished this scenario with a low number of units but having 2 mages already evolved really worth.
Worth mentioning as well that the appearance of the scenario is way better as well, thumbs up for the devs.

[Vendrick]

(1) Invasion
(2) 6
(3) Clear
(4) Good
(5) Earning experience for L1 mages without getting them killed
(6) 8
(7) No real notes: it's a solid improvement on the older scenario. Strategy here was to push forwards and score some kills before falling back to the keep and deploying chaff to slow the undead advance down. Shoutout to my incompetent mages and their 55.9% hit rate, great work boys.

[sine_nomine]

Played the new version of EI on invasion, 1.18.0. It's good!

For the most part the maps have received total overhauls for the better while preserving many concepts from the old version. There are still gimmicky scenarios that aren't so much fun but the old EI had some of those as well. I enjoyed some newly added maps, too, and the removed maps aren't greatly missed (though I don't mind a couple standard fights in a campaign). I liked the concept of an arc with a gold-farming map -> scenarios where you need to avoid wasting money -> end of the arc where you go negative.
Many scenarios in this campaign greatly reward having future knowledge, sometimes because of surprise events and often because scenarios revolve around specific AI behavior. Sometimes it's helpful to redistribute items for the next scenario as well.

Unit-wise, Gweddry is useful for leadership and his fire crossbow doesn't change much. He is now resilient, however his unique class has the HP values of the old general&grand marshal at lvl3&4, which have been changed in 1.18 - should his HP be increased as well? Owaec has been upgraded to lvl4, has a powerful ability and weapon special. Nice to see Grug the ogre join as a loyal unit that can reach lvl4. The loyal paladin returns with a new fire attack, which is cool. I'm glad the nameless engineer is gone. I see there's an option to get the khalifate mercenaries instead of Terraent+knights and I suppose that could add replay value. I also see the alternate route split choices designated as the "easy route" result in different loyal characters, which is a good way to have variety without crowding the campaign with a ton of loyal units that you're always forced to use. However from what I can tell you not only get worse loyal units you miss out on powerful non-loyal troops, and don't get the plague staff, Yannic and Gaennell later on. IMO the player that chooses the designated "easy route" should have an easier time in the campaign.
Other than special units I think mages and paladins are the only units worth leveling, plus maybe one duelist early on. Iron maulers don't get the opportunity to shine as much as they used to but I still used a reasonable amount of heavy infantry, especially with the sentinel shield. Fencers are a great addition to the army for their mobility and for using the baneblade. The new corpse&soulless variations are cool and they are often valuable for flight, plague, resistances, chaotic impact attacks, no upkeep, immune to freezing in that one scenario, immune to poison, etc. But it feels wrong for undead units to be encouraged in a loyalist campaign. I didn't use the poacher and thief from 'captured' but I think that's a good way to enable the use of out-of-faction units in a campaign like this. The possibility is there for the sake of variety, they might have niche uses, but the deserter trait encourages you to use other units instead (whereas the survivors in 'spoils of war' are the opposite). I wonder if peasants could be an option for players who want to recruit lvl0 units without having access to the plague staff, but they might end up powerful with the baneblade + sentinel shield, so maybe not.
It's cool to see units retain their colors from before they joined the team, it makes them more memorable.

From what I can tell the AMLA options are always +8hp, +melee damage, or +ranged damage (currently they sometimes are listed twice, but I think that's been fixed). I don't mind the standard +3hp AMLA so I felt like the AMLA upgrades are very significant here. But it ends up being alright because it closes the gap between your lvl3 units and lvl4s. And you're still encouraged to use a healthy mix of fresh recruits rather than recalling exclusively and building an army of superhumans. If I think of the AMLA bonus as if the unit is obtaining the resilient/strong/dextrous trait it seems more reasonable. I guess this makes the 'quick' trait extra important because it can't be compensated with AMLA. Still, I don't want to see this become the standard for all campaigns.

The new item system is another big change and some of the new items are incredibly powerful. The ability to pick up and drop items freely and reuse items after death is nice because it means you can collect the item with any unit and transfer to a more useful unit rather than needing to move the important unit across the map. It also means that you're incentivized to shuffle your items around frequently and redistribute for each situation. Or simply drop an item in the middle of your turn when you don't want to experience its effects. At the end of a scenario you usually want to put the items on one of your loyal units, so you don't need to recall a unit to transfer his item to someone else. As for the items themselves:
The crystal of illumination is very useful for buffing your attacks and for debuffing enemies. Sure you have mages of light, but the more the better. Often used on Gweddry to combine with leadership or someone on the front lines. Supposedly it also has some effect on ranged attacks but that seems trivial compared to illumination (still nice for the sake of variety, maybe some people really want to use bowmen).
The holy amulet is pretty standard, it gives units arcane attacks.
The plague staff is useful as a way to allow units to benefit from chaotic alignment, offers a decent attack for lvl1 units, can create walking corpses with plague, and the ability to recruit corpses&soulless is very useful, despite being inappropriate in a campaign where you fight undead. It feels like many scenarios are designed to encourage the use of undead units.
The shield of the sentinel is super overpowered and its existence completely reshapes your strategy. Part of this is because the AI doesn't recognize it and attempts to use attacks that are resisted by the protector, but even putting that aside it's an extremely useful item. You can use it to divert several attacks on your turn then drop the shield and pick it up with another unit to use on enemy phase. It uses the evasion of the unit being attacked combined with the resistances of the unit holding the shield (also the attacks are affected by the time of day of the shieldbearer rather than the attacker, but this should be fixed soon). It even prevents enemies from draining HP.
The yetiburger and red potion are both good. I think Grug in particular benefits from steadfast, though I gave it to the wrong unit. Steadfast takes effect when using the shield of the sentinel so it should be given to someone who often holds the shield and has decent resistances. The yetiburger doubles HP and provides 100% cold resistance so it might not be ideal on Grug, as he already has cold resistance. But the HP boost is valuable regardless.
The baneblade is another strong item. 6x4 arcane damage is already pretty impressive with berserk, plus it can be given to a highly mobile unit that can easily target enemies that have weak melee attacks. And the damage can be boosted by strong, survivor, AMLA, and especially lvl4 leadership to become an incredibly powerful weapon (or give to owaec and use with vanguard, but he has enough gimmicks of his own). There's one more combination that makes the baneblane even more deadly: the shield of the sentinel. You can benefit from a fencer's high evasion while allowing a tank unit to endure any attacks that make it through. This makes the baneblade a guaranteed kill on pretty much everything.
The skirmisher/nightstalk ring is a useful tool, though I probably didn't get the most value out of it. I mainly used it to provide leadership for more units but it could be used for aggressive leader assassination strategies.
By the way I think the statistics the game records doesn't track sentinel shield damage correctly. And units killed through sentinel shield damage transfer are not listed as "losses". And skipping through replays is annoying because the game pauses to show every bit of sentinel damage. The baneblade might also lead to inaccurate statistics.

Storywise the campaign has been nicely upgraded. The antagonist has much more presence so he's become an actual character rather than merely an objective to destroy. The orcish leader has also been fleshed out, and the conflict within the orc army explains why it's less of a threat at the end of the campaign.
The main protagonist of the campaign, Dacyn, is now a lot more memorable. His personality is clearly defined and he has more interactions with the antagonist. The supporting character Owaec is good to have as a foil. There's also an unimportant side character that often starts on the keep. (I don't mind the story being told from the perspective of Dacyn's sidekick, it allows Dacyn to gradually reveal information to the player)

Scenario 1:
Played on Invasion, 1.18.0 with save loading throughout this campaign. I wasn't trying to force favorable outcomes every turn, I was testing various strategies to find a better approach that I can use if I play the campaign properly next time. Sometimes when I got a string of good luck I would reload to see if the strategy still worked without luck, so the statistics are slightly skewed.
So far I've only played one branch of the campaign, recruiting Terraent and Grug. I don't feel like rating everything 1-10 so I'm going to post some rambling thoughts instead.

I think the first scenario is more difficult that it used to be, which is good because it makes the antagonist and his undead army seem more imposing. Especially because he personally summons a bunch of undead and has a cool shadow aura.
I appreciate the dialogue indication when the enemy switches to defensive AI. It feels like the unusual AI behavior is one of the biggest differences between this campaign and others. You're often rewarded for attacking in ways that would be reckless in normal circumstances. Though the defensive AI seems more restrained in this scenario.
Also, an enemy skeleton strangely attacked my heavy infantry instead of finishing off a mage.

The first thing you see when you start the campaign is the difficulty selection. The added clarity might be helpful but it makes it seem like the campaign wasn't designed around the hardest difficulty setting.
Next is the content warning. Hope this doesn't become a standard thing.

The visual design of the map in this scenario (and many others) looks way better. The elevation differences in terrain are a big contributing factor. However at the same time, it's hard to get used to seeing a ridge and know that the terrain on either side is identical. My first thought is always that I can't pass through without going around, or that I should position my units on the high ground for an advantage.
The objective in this scenario is to "survive", which may lead a player with no advance knowledge to flee across the river as the turn limit approaches. Then the player is screwed because he can't reach the trapdoor. I think the old EI had "defend the outpost" as the objective, which was technically inaccurate but doesn't encourage cowardly tactics as much. Another way to hint toward the later objective would be for Gweddry to say something more specific about the outpost when Dacyn leaves.

[Dalas120]

> Many scenarios in this campaign greatly reward having future knowledge, sometimes because of surprise events and often because scenarios revolve around specific AI behavior. Sometimes it's helpful to redistribute items for the next scenario as well.

Yeah, I agree this is an issue. I don't want to reward foreknowledge; I see that as a very bad thing. But I also wanted to make the AI more interesting than the usual "run blindly at the player". Ideally the AI would both be intelligent but also unpredictable, like a real human opponent.

To some extent I think some bits of this can't be fixed - e.g. in S04c you're explicitly told you're being toyed with and I want to represent that in-game - but I do think aspects of this can be improved. I'm currently working on a micro_ai that might help with this: that's a tentative goal for 1.20, but no guarantees.

And items of course are hard to fix, unless I have some "choose which units get which items" panel at the beginning of each scenario, and I feel that would be seriously overcomplicating things.


> however his unique class has the HP values of the old general&grand marshal at lvl3&4, which have been changed in 1.18 - should his HP be increased as well?
Will fix!


> I also see the alternate route split choices designated as the "easy route" result in different loyal characters, which is a good way to have variety without crowding the campaign with a ton of loyal units that you're always forced to use. However from what I can tell you not only get worse loyal units you miss out on powerful non-loyal troops, and don't get the plague staff, Yannic and Gaennell later on. IMO the player that chooses the designated "easy route" should have an easier time in the campaign.

You do get rewards from the easier paths - a loyal Outlaw and Dwarf - but they're not as powerful as Hahid/Terraent/Yannic. I feel like players generally expect to be rewarded for completing harder scenarios; if the scenarios are both harder and less rewarding, why would a player try them out?

The intent is that a player who takes the easy route early-on or is otherwise struggling may have a harder time with their bonus objectives in the middle/later section, but that's OK because they're just bonus objectives. The campaign's 100% winnable even if you run out of gold in Dark Sanctuary.


> But it feels wrong for undead units to be encouraged in a loyalist campaign.
> immune to freezing in that one scenario
I think I'll change this. Undead aren't normally immune to cold damage, and the plague staff is too powerful already. And when (if) I get around to reworking Drowned Plains, undead will become a lot less powerful there as well.

Would it also help if I remove the option to recruit Walking Corpses, so you have to use the 1-upkeep Soulless? Or do you feel that would be too extreme.


> Still, I don't want to see this become the standard for all campaigns.
Because you feel the AMLAs are overly-powerful, or for other reasons? At the moment I have the same AMLAs in both TDG and HttT - my goal was to make purple XP feel less wasteful, not to make AMLAs a significant part of your overall strategy.

> And skipping through replays is annoying because the game pauses to show every bit of sentinel damage.
Should be fixed in 1.18.1


> The first thing you see when you start the campaign is the difficulty selection. The added clarity might be helpful but it makes it seem like the campaign wasn't designed around the hardest difficulty setting.
My goal here was to not make players feel bad for playing on easy. Playing on 20% enemies sounds like you're a wuss, playing on 1x enemies just sounds normal. Do you feel this should be changed?


> The objective in this scenario is to "survive"
Ugh, someone must have changed this. The add-on version specified "Survive until turns run out, then move any unit to the hex at (10,15)". I'll change that back again (or do something like that) in 1.18.2.

[sine_nomine]

>undead
I found lvl0 walking(/flying) corpses mainly useful in 'castle in the ice' and in 'the drowned plains'. A flying scout is nice to have in castle in the ice, especially as a first-time player, but once they take cold damage they won't be as impactful as before. And their utility will fall in the drowned plains if that scenario is changed. So I don't think you need to remove walking corpses.
I used a large number of soulless in 'dark sanctuary' and 'eleventh hour'. In dark sanctuary they are ideal for fighting off the orcs. In eleventh hour they were my primary fodder units on the right side of the map for many reasons. But I've only played the campaign once so I could be overestimating how strong soulless are compared to the alternatives.
One idea is to give undead recruited by the plague staff the "weak" trait. Even with this nerf I think soulless would be quite strong. This could be justified by the plague staff users being untrained in necromancy. It might be cool to make an exception for Gaennell, but that would lead back to the "soulless spam is encouraged" situation.
Another idea is to make undead simply cost the player more to recruit, if that's possible.

>AMLA
My preference is for purple exp to be mostly wasteful. Even with the +3HP system there's some merit to giving exp to a loyal over a random unit you might never recall, and it's not unusual to end up with +9hp on a mage of light, but system generally favors training new units. My concern with stronger AMLAs is that campaigns may encourage players to continue pouring exp into a static team of super-powerful units. This is just my personal preference, I realize that powering up units can be appealing in its own way but it's not what I expect from battle for wesnoth.

>difficulty
Might be better to find players that sometimes play on different difficulties and ask their opinion. I think '1x' will lead more players to choose that setting, with the expectation that it is more finely tuned, but it didn't stop me from playing on '5x'.

[Dalas120]

I used a large number of soulless in 'dark sanctuary' and 'eleventh hour'. In dark sanctuary they are ideal for fighting off the orcs. In eleventh hour they were my primary fodder units on the right side of the map for many reasons.

That's interesting. Personally in my playthroughs I found the L0s useful in 'castle in the ice' and 'the drowned plains' exactly like you, but never found a great use for soulless. I intended the plague staff as more of a utility item than a "completely changes the way you play" item like the Sentinel Shield or Baneblade.

I'd rather not give them unusual traits just for this campaign (though your justification seems very reasonable), but I could easily remove Soulless from the recruit list entirely?

Another idea is to make undead simply cost the player more to recruit, if that's possible.

I would be down for this, if it's necessary.

My concern with stronger AMLAs is that campaigns may encourage players to continue pouring exp into a static team of super-powerful units. This is just my personal preference, I realize that powering up units can be appealing in its own way but it's not what I expect from battle for wesnoth.

Ah, gotchya. Yes I 100% agree, and in EI at least I tried to design things so that even in the last few scenarios you'd hopefully be recruiting new units (though I don't know if that's actually the case for a majority of players).

Generally, I like to give players the option to play how they want. If AMLAs allow players to use handful of super-units, great. If AMLAs mean that it's OPTIMAL to only use a handful of super-units, then that's a problem and I'd like to fix it.

[fredbobsmith2]

(1) What difficulty levels and game versions have you played the scenario on? Invasion (Difficult) 1.18.4
(2) How difficult did you find the scenario? (1-10) 5
(3) How clear did you find the scenario objectives? Clear
(4) How clear and interesting did you find the dialog and storyline of the scenario? Good, builds up the mystery behind Dacyn, and the frustration of working with him. I strongly like the overall redo of this campaign.
(5) What were your major challenges in meeting the objectives of the scenario? Being comfortable with losing units that have some exp is necessary for this scenario (and this campaign). I sent 2 HIs north and 2 south, and 2 spearmen east, while 2 mages backed everyone up and tried to get exp. The south HIs with Dacyn had alot of success against the L2 skeletons, and one managed to level up (that shock trooper continued to be really lucky the entire scenario actually). I pressed aggressively during the second morning, knowing the enemy would retreat, and also got some exp for one of my mages and spearmen. The second night was entirely retreating action, as I sacrificed several spearmen and HIs to protect units with more exp. Ended with 2 shock troopers and a white mage, and everyone backed up around the keep.
Replayed this later to get 2 white mages and 1 experienced heavy infantry, to prepare for S4c.
(6) How fun do you think the scenario is? (1-10) 7
(7) What, if any, are changes you would have made to the scenario to make it more fun? None