Of Pearls and Pirates

[Dalas120]

---- Of Pearls and Pirates ----

A sleepy fishing village on Wesnoth’s west coast finds itself suddenly beset by corsairs. With requests for royal aid falling on deaf ears, the villagers must join forces with the local merfolk and bring the fight to the pirates!

(Novice level, 5 scenarios.)

This upcoming mainline campaign is a follow-up to the tutorial, intended for new players and placed between TSG and TDG in the timeline. Available on the ***1.19 add-on server ONLY***.

(main character's portrait from BMR, and is a placeholder pending a new portrait from doofus)

[KinglerMew]

Played first three scenarios. Overall so far:

- Really like the character movement during story narration. Helps the map feel alive. Campaign feels more cinematic than usual not sure what it is.
- Like the map design and split land/water movement.
- The tactics tips (like wait to amass a force in scenario 1) seem cautious, tuned to the hardest difficulty.
- Good variety between the maps and objectives.

Scenario 2 (bug?): The northern naga camp did not move out of their castle until turn 6, when I had captured both sandbar villages. I was expecting a two-front battle and got a much easier one-front battle.

[Dalas120]

I'm glad you're liking the campaign so far!

I'm not sure what's best with the various hints. On one hand, I agree that you or I can win playing more aggressively, especially on the lower difficulties. On the other hand, this campaign is meant to be the first thing new players play after the TSG tutorial - in which case they may not be able to win without following the hints. For now I'll wait and see what others think.

I'll take a look at that scenario 2 AI thing, thanks.

What did you think about the overall difficulty? I'd intended "Normal" to doable by a new player who's just completed the tutorial, but it's hard to judge.

[KinglerMew]

I'm a pretty mediocre player tbh, struggle mightily with any intermediate/normal campaigns. This felt like an intro campaign in a good way.

I had to restart scenario 3 ("Lee Shore") after my initial push fizzled out. Using what I learned (about relative enemy strengths, and how cages work, and how you can farm cages for xp) I restarted the map and then won pretty solidly. The learning curve felt good.

I've restarted scenario 4 ("Lady Maudie") twice now. First attempt send a squad of high level mermen around the island to assassinate Maudie, but it's really really dangerous fighting corsairs in the water and got wiped. Second attempt sent a combined land/sea force down the middle of the map, but struggled against constant harass and scouts struggled to hold remote villages (again against corsairs). For the third attempt, I'm planning to take out the north bandit leader and claim a good amount of villages before attempting to fight Maude.

I like the map design. Feels like there's multiple strategies to approach each scenario.

[KinglerMew]

Beat the Lady Maudie scenario. What really helped was making a beeline for the north bandit with high level ground troops, as well as using mermen to distract the pirate skiffs by taking coastal villages and then running away.

I dislike the fire ship deteriorate combined with no turn limit. It's mostly a "wait an extra 8ish turns for these enemies to expire".

(bug?) Pirate Skiff looks like there's an extra delay at the end of the "take damage" animation.

Overall fun campaign, good maps. Are you planning to add extra scenarios?

[Dalas120]

I appreciate the feedback about the Fireship. Not sure I can change the Fireships themselves - they have "deteriorate" in core - but I'll see what I can do to make that fight more engaging.

I'll fix that Pirate Skiff bug, thanks! Looks like it's an issue with the core Skiff too.

Glad you liked the campaign overall, and I'm glad the difficulty felt appropriate! I wasn't planning to add more scenarios - do you think the campaign would benefit from additions?

[redbeard2]

I liked this one, relatively short and direct, another chance for the merfolk to shine which is always good. A few comments:

Firstly, I played on normal

On scenario 1, the messenger from the king asks for free men who hold land. I feel that historically, few would own their own land, and the leader says most men have this much. A slightly more egalitarian slice of Wesnoth I suppose...the mention of free men interested me, as it insinuates there are non-free men. Not sure if you meant anything by it, but I wonder, are there officially slaves in Wesnoth? Or are we referring more to serfs, bound to the land. I'm probably reading too much into it, but still an interesting question.

Scenario 4 was perhaps the most tricky, enemy reinforcements were rather constant and that made freeing prisoners and especially healing my merfolk hard. I think it'd be a bit easier with a water village or two for merfolk to heal in, going into the land villages they are so, so vulnerable to being sniped by naga who were very hard to exclude as I had so few units to work with. A bit more gold to work with would be welcome, I think.

Scenario 5 was quite fun, it took a few tries to figure out how to spread out my units properly, I had to be careful not to let ships steal my villages coming from the north, letting them do that and focusing too much on the south resulted in me being overwhelmed.

And i general seeing Garard's stupidity in attacking the orcs so aggressively having consequences for these people is a good tie-in.

I'm not good at putting screenshots in, but when I was fighting with enemies on scenarios 4 and 5 I would sometimes get a long error message, so something was going wrong there.

[Dalas120]

On scenario 1, the messenger from the king asks for free men who hold land. I feel that historically, few would own their own land, and the leader says most men have this much.

I'm certainly not an expert, but I'd tried to use numbers from this reddit thread, among others. Particularly these sections:

- "who were the Englishmen who fought for the early Anglo-Norman kings? They were, undoubtedly, free men, and this puts something of a limit on who could fight. Much of England's peasantry were, technically, unfree and were bound to their land."

- "around 40% were classed as villani (serfs), who typically held 15 acres or more, with another 30% who were classed as cottagers, who typically held 5 acres or less" <- not free men, but if over half of serfs hold 15 acres, the average free man must be similar.

- "Generally speaking, the less densely populated an area was, the more land individuals held"

- "15 acres was enough to sustain a family"

Wesnoth doesn't get a whole lot into the kingdom's political system, but since the bay of pearls folk are described as new settlers on virgin land, I figured they'd on average hold an above-average amount of land and be free men (there's no lord of the province AFAIK).

the mention of free men interested me, as it insinuates there are non-free men. Not sure if you meant anything by it, but I wonder, are there officially slaves in Wesnoth? Or are we referring more to serfs, bound to the land. I'm probably reading too much into it, but still an interesting question.

I was thinking serfs, yeah. But I didn't want to lean too heavily into that here, since there's no mention of serfs in other mainline campaigns AFAIK.

I'm not good at putting screenshots in, but when I was fighting with enemies on scenarios 4 and 5 I would sometimes get a long error message, so something was going wrong there.

That's not good! I'll see if I can figure out what was causing that, thanks.

[octalot]

Playing the version that's now in the master branch (e96340040fc3a3fa375b384857ad816750ee1b0a).

I'm out of practice, but even on the default difficulty this seems to have strong a "you lost the campaign on S01 or the first turn of S02, but it's going to be 13 turns into S02 before you know that" feeling. That at least one of the experienced units would leave was predictable, losing two is a heavy expectation of xp management in a novice campaign.

The player is told to expect reinforcements on turn 13, but so far events have had characters instantly move across the whole map when the narration says they will. That doesn't apply to the reinforcements, so there have been several turns where I knew I was going to lose a lot of units, only to find out that the calculation of how long I need to last is wrong. Turn 12 even hints that the reinforcements will arrive in an hour.

From the hints, I'm assuming that I was expected to hold 3 of the 5 northern-eastern villages. However, the enemy's L1 units have a chance of killing any L0 that attacks them with the (retaliation + own turn) damage, and are joined by an L2 unit which can kill any near-levelling L0 unit in a single turn with its 12x2 attack.

Turn 8 I'm fighting nagas on the coast, but the decisions on that turn seem the right ones, getting the kill while I can.

Turn 9 I think I've lost if I give up the castle because I need to recruit, but also lost if I try to hold it. After that, I'm just seeing how many reinforcements I'll get on turn 13.

[Dalas120]

The player is told to expect reinforcements on turn 13, but so far events have had characters instantly move across the whole map when the narration says they will. That doesn't apply to the reinforcements, so there have been several turns where I knew I was going to lose a lot of units, only to find out that the calculation of how long I need to last is wrong. Turn 12 even hints that the reinforcements will arrive in an hour.

Thanks for letting me know that this wasn't clear for you. I'll change the initial objectives to read "Survive until reinforcements arrive at the east edge of the map on turn 13" plus "Then, defeat the enemy leaders." I hope that will be more clear about exactly where and when your allies will arrive.

even on the default difficulty this seems to have strong a "you lost the campaign on S01 or the first turn of S02, but it's going to be 13 turns into S02 before you know that" feeling. That at least one of the experienced units would leave was predictable, losing two is a heavy expectation of xp management in a novice campaign.

I'm sorry to hear the scenario came off as too challenging. I definitely hadn't intended it to be - I hadn't meant for players to need any XP management whatsoever, for example.

So far I've only ran through PaP with one new player. While that particular playtester had no issue completing the scenario, he was also a veteran of similar-ish games like Fire Emblem - so maybe not a representative sample. I'll try and get one or two more new players to try it out and see if their experiences align with yours.

Loading your save, it looks like you're in a fairly dominant position - I had no problem continuing the fight and winning a few turns later. Did the scenario overall feel too difficult for you, or was the biggest issue the unpleasantness of being surprised by your reinforcements?

[Ford]

Hi, just finished the campaign on the 1.19.21 dev version and thought I would drop quick feedback.

Overall the campaign is quite fun. The story is not very elaborate but engaging enough. I liked how it deals with a relatively minor local conflict instead of continent-changing events. Although after seeing the pirates allied with naga (who are often associated with orcs), and given that it takes place during a war with orcs, I fully expected that the pirates would turn out to be in league with the orcs somehow and the story would then tie to the greater war, but I guess the campaign would have to be much longer for that.

The gameplay was fun too, though I was surprised how hard it was. I did play on Hard, so really I only have myself to blame, but usually the second-hardest difficulty level is just right for me, and this is supposed to be a beginner campaign, so I didn't expect to have as much trouble as I did. But I haven't played Wesnoth in a long time so maybe I'm just rusty. And the scenarios are not very long so having to restart wasn't that much of an issue.

Pirates! was very easy, which lulled me into a false sense of security. Then Swimming with Serpents hit me like a truck and I had to start the campaign over, making sure to save more gold and waste less exp on the father and brother. It was hard to find the balance between staying away from the sea and keeping a tight formation for tactical advantage and holding on to villages for strategic advantage. Sending a single peasant south to grab villages and distract (maybe even kill) some naga seems very helpful here.

Desolation I restarted once, because at first I made a mistake of trying to hold territory around the castle, which made my tiny army stretched too thin. The second time I just rushed all humans to the east boat and a merfolk squad to the west boat, and didn't bother stopping the wolves from grabbing my villages. Less gold, but every turn that a wolf spends grabbing villages it does not spend eating my people.

Lee Shore was a bit more managable, I restarted an earlier turn a couple times when I made mistake but didn't have to completely change strategy. Defeating the first outlaw leader took me longer than I hoped, and then I got stuck for a long time trying to approach the other. Had to constantly juggle my merfolk between holding off the naga and helping with the outlaws. Not having a healer really hurts here, there's a lot of ground to cover with very few units and only so many villages. But at least here I wasn't rushed by the turn limit so I could afford to play it slow. Not sure if I should have timed releasing the slaves better to overwhelm the enemies, I kinda freed them whenever I had nothing better to do with my units and immediately used as living shields. Most were dead by the end, but at least they aren't slaves anymore, right?

Lady Maudie is where I have the most interesting feedback, as I wonder if my strategy was intended/anticipated. I basically didn't recruit/recall a single human, only merfolk. Had the merfolk destroy the early wave of aquatic enemies in the souther basin, assasinate the southern leader, then swim around the main island to the southwest and assasinate Maudie (with fireships hot (heh) on their tail). I thought I was lost when my merfolk were blocked at the strait exit by the naga guards and harassed by thief mob from the east, but fortunately Maudie has very poor survival instinct. And all that time Thea was defending the starting island all alone. By the end she was surrounded by over a dozen outlaws, but they were too scared to attack her at day (and she survived the night before thanks to a timely AMLA). She also sunk a ship that was trying to dislodge her, again all by herself. Absolutely ridiculous strategy, but also lot of fun, and if it's stupid but works than it's not stupid I guess?

Minor nitpick - the final scenario has "Turns run out" as a defeat condition, but there is no turn limit.

Overall a fun campaign, more difficult than I expected especially the second scenario, but probably I should just git gud (or stick to Normal).

[DuncanDill]

The whole play through on normal difficulty took me just under an hour.

Overall, I quite liked this campaign; it reminded me a lot of A Tale of Two Brothers (maybe you can give that some love next ). A good, simple campaign for beginners.

Scenario 1 : Pirates!
The first scenario was (in my opinion) the most boring, but that's not really anything bad, it was a very good introductory scenario - and I do love playing peasants. However, with the first scenario, came my first slight qualm. If I understand correctly, the main character is meant to be a girl. So, it struck me a bit odd to call her a bowman instead of bow woman (now I'm typing it out though, I can see how that name is a bit hard to read). Other then that, I think this was a good scenario.

PaP-Pirates! replay 20260331-230306.gz

(26.76 KiB) Downloaded 2 times

Story : 3.5/5 (helps introduce the campaign)
Gameplay : 3/5 [i(]although it had the idea of a peasant "uprising" i found that the javelineer and bowman carried a bit, but that makes sense because its designed for beginners)[/i]
Map design : 4/5 (good map, though there was a lot of empty space)
Overall : 3.5/5

Scenario 2 : Swimming with Serpents
This scenario was good. I like the mermaid character, shes very fun to play and feels slightly better developed than the main character (but i think the portrait might be the only reason). The achievement also seems like a fun challenge if I felt like trying it. With both the Javelineer and Bowman gone I liked the gameplay much more, holding out until the mermen arrived.

PaP-Swimming with Serpents replay 20260331-231636.gz

(30.09 KiB) Downloaded 3 times

Story : 4/5 (The appearance of the villian for the first time really helped propel the story forward)
Gameplay : 4.5/5 (I really loved the feel of holding out for a hero)
Map design : 4/5 (Nice reoccurring map)
Overall : 4/5

Scenario 3 : Desolation
Probably my least favourite scenario, it felt out of place, and a lot like filler. I probably didn't read the story properly, but it felt like I was just playing through a cut scene of getting the boats. Even worse, the fact that the boats where allied units had me hopeful I could do something with them. The wolves were a very none threat. Overall, it felt a bit lackluster - but I'm not really sure how I would improve it.

PaP-Desolation replay 20260331-232423.gz

(24.47 KiB) Downloaded 1 time

Story : 2.5/5
Gameplay : 1/5 (It just felt very boring)
Map design : 2/5
Overall : 2/5

Scenario 4 : Lee Shore
This was a wild contrast to the previous scenario. Freeing the slaves felt very fun, and I wish there would be a bit more of that sort of thing. The enemy leaders getting progressively harder as you went through the island was nice too. My one and only issue was with the magical attacks of the mermaid. When attacking the cage, all other units hit 100% of the time, however due to the magical attacks of the mermaid they only hit 70% of the time, which was very annoying. Other than that, this was definitely my favourite scenario of the whole campaign.

Story : 4/5
Gameplay : 5/5
Map design : 5/5
Overall : 5/5

PaP-Lee Shore replay 20260331-233720.gz

(39.48 KiB) Downloaded 2 times

Scenario 5 : Lady Maudie
So this is what the whole campaign led up to. It was an alright scenario, but felt a bit empty. There was alot of land, alot of leaders but not a whole lot of fighting. Personally, I would've changed the gameplay to require you to wipe out the other two leaders before you could attack the main one. The burning boats what a pleasant suprise, but overall this scenario just felt a bit empty for an ending one.

PaP-Lady Maudie replay 20260401-125515.gz

(37.96 KiB) Downloaded 2 times

Story : 4/5
Gameplay : 3/5
Map design : 3/5
Overall : 3/5


I really liked this campaign, and I think it has some very good potential. I might try and get the achievements if I do it again. Or I might try and beat it without recruits. Overall, it was a good campaign 3.5/5