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.