1.18 SP Campaign - Bad Moon Rising

Discussion and development of scenarios and campaigns for the game.

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lostnumber
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Re: 1.9/1.10 SP Campaign - Bad Moon Rising

Post by lostnumber »

The optional mission at Mirror pond (If tried before Mount Tien) is nearly impossible to activate due to the aforementioned problems with the random encounter system. It takes two turn to move there through forests, and one will encounter an incredibly massive orcish horde that will crush whatever you bring
Last edited by lostnumber on September 1st, 2010, 9:42 pm, edited 1 time in total.
lostnumber
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Re: 1.9/1.10 SP Campaign - Bad Moon Rising

Post by lostnumber »

Dog training is listed as a trait for Ukian Commandos but does not work.

On the mission "Mount Tien" the lack of villages combined with the large number of units the player needs to summon to achieve victory is likely to result in a guaranteed negative gold amount at the end of the mission. This could be balanced by adding 4-8 starting villages for the player in the bottom right corner.


Edit: Just realized I'm multi-posting. If a mod wants to consolidate these thats fine
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doofus-01
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Re: 1.9/1.10 SP Campaign - Bad Moon Rising

Post by doofus-01 »

lostnumber wrote:If the "Fright" ghost unit levels up then Wesnoth crashes
This appears to be a mainline bug, same thing happens if you level a soulless or javelineer. It doesn't happen in multiplayer, only campaign mode.
lostnumber wrote:The optional mission at Mirror pond (If tried before Mount Tien) is nearly impossible to activate due to the aforementioned problems with the random encounter system. It takes two turn to move there through forests, and one will encounter an incredibly massive orcish horde that will crush whatever you bring
The enemy strength, if the thing is working correctly (I think it is, but...), is determined by player's gold, recall list, and number of skirmishes played for that scenario. I think I'm going to get rid of the last item. If the player is mining for gold or experience the first two ought to be enough to cool that down.

Thanks.
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lostnumber
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Re: 1.9/1.10 SP Campaign - Bad Moon Rising

Post by lostnumber »

doofus-01 wrote:
lostnumber wrote:If the "Fright" ghost unit levels up then Wesnoth crashes
This appears to be a mainline bug, same thing happens if you level a soulless or javelineer. It doesn't happen in multiplayer, only campaign mode.
lostnumber wrote:The optional mission at Mirror pond (If tried before Mount Tien) is nearly impossible to activate due to the aforementioned problems with the random encounter system. It takes two turn to move there through forests, and one will encounter an incredibly massive orcish horde that will crush whatever you bring
The enemy strength, if the thing is working correctly (I think it is, but...), is determined by player's gold, recall list, and number of skirmishes played for that scenario. I think I'm going to get rid of the last item. If the player is mining for gold or experience the first two ought to be enough to cool that down.

Thanks.
The thing is though, that skirmishes are not meant to be a full fledged campaign level, so I think the entire system is pretty flawed. You have built in constraints on what units can be recruited/recalled, so scaling it to gold and recall list might not be optimal either. It doesnt matter if I have 20 level 3 units on my recall list if I cant recall them all due to the exponential growth in recall expense each time.

More importantly, you skirmish to win gold and level up units, thus most of the time you wont be summoning your leveled up veterans like you would in a true scenario, but rather level 1 and 2 units that you want to level. This is impossible if the enemy forces are too strong.

The original system you had in place of allowing the player to farm infinite exp/gold as long as he put the time in wasn't perfect but it was far better then this imo.

I think the correct balancing technique is to scale back the rewards rather then scale up the difficulty. Much like in say an RPG, you can often fight as many monsters as you want before solving the next quest, but as you gain levels the experience and items they give you are less and less valuable relative to your character. The battles dont get any harder-- they get easier in fact, but you get less out of them the more of them you do. I think that is a much better way to balance things, especially since there are areas like the aforementioned bonus scenario where its impossible to avoid a random encounter.

For example, you could set a limit on the amount of gold a player can acquire from skirmishes, or you could limit the amount of skirmishes a player can do between missions. Or you could scale back the gold won per skirmish as the number of skirmishes fought goes up.

Alternatively you could go back to the old system of not putting any limitations on skirmishes at all, and counting on the difficulty of many of the scenarios to counterbalance the ease of gold farming (I play on the hard difficulty and some of them are quite challenging). All of these options are preferable to fighting a massive horde of generic orcs every time you step off the path.


Edit: Also those factors are clearly not adding up correctly, as in my current game I have done 0 skirmishes for this particular scenario, have the minimum starting gold of 100, and am faced with a massive horde of primevals that I could not possibly defeat
Last edited by lostnumber on September 2nd, 2010, 8:12 pm, edited 1 time in total.
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Re: 1.9/1.10 SP Campaign - Bad Moon Rising

Post by lostnumber »

after you exit from Mount Tien its suggested that the player can go one of two ways, east towards mirror pond, or west along the path. However after the "Seeking Shelter" mission, which is an unavoidable encounter as far as I can tell, the player is forced to go west. This should be much clearer, as I wasted a bunch of time and fought a bunch of annoying random encounters to go east only to have to turn back

In the mission "Snowblind" there is an invalid WML error. "Terrain image 'terrain/storm-1' misses the '.png' extension
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Re: 1.9/1.10 SP Campaign - Bad Moon Rising

Post by doofus-01 »

Skirmish things: I am trying to avoid having the player march through the campaign with billions of gold and a horde of level 2 & 3, but I also want to avoid forcing the player to go back and replay several scenarios if they reach a difficult scenario without enough resources. I agree that what is in place now is not good.

Part of the reason for scaling the enemy to recall list, despite the fact that not everyone will be recalled, is to go easy on the player who is just starting out but still discourage farming. So I think I should keep that. The scaling with gold is similar, though that probably changes more quickly, especially if shops (limited as they are at the moment) are used.

I think this can work, but it needs to be decelerated further. I'll also change the recalling, maybe give the player a right click menu on the worldmap to chose a small entourage who are present in the skirmish start. Something like that.
lostnumber wrote:after you exit from Mount Tien its suggested that the player can go one of two ways, east towards mirror pond, or west along the path.
I got rid of the scrolling to the east, hopefully that takes care of that.
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lostnumber
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Re: 1.9/1.10 SP Campaign - Bad Moon Rising

Post by lostnumber »

In general one thing I've noticed about part 2 of your campaign is that the storyline is quite interesting and many of the scenarios are good but it lacks a lot in the polish department. Things like game balance, properly detailing objectives, the skirmish system, ect, all could use a lot of work in comparison to Part 1

For example, "All Dreams Die Part II" is a pretty cool and unique mission, but the dialogue, item placement, and quest objectives all could use a lot of refinement. I was really unsure where to go for most of the mission and the items seemed like a weird design choice since they are not very useful on a unit that is super-powered already like Rhaenna, and the fact that this faction is only played in the last few scenarios means you have few units that you care about or have leveled up highly.

I also thought I was supposed to use the shiny sword of doom that I randomly picked up on Echnida, and when I did so it triggered the long sequence of dialogue only to make me lose after it had finished which kind of disrupted the flow of the story.

These aren't specific bugs I'm pointing out as much as indications of a more general problem that some of the scenarios suffer from. If you'd be interested I'd be happy to get in touch with you on Aim/Steam/IRC and share my thoughts on some scenario design and campaign storyline issues.
sandmanvt
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Re: 1.9/1.10 SP Campaign - Bad Moon Rising

Post by sandmanvt »

All the skirmishes seem to not give my units experience, but reset their experience after the level is over. Thus It's a negative experience for my party.
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doofus-01
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Re: 1.9/1.10 SP Campaign - Bad Moon Rising

Post by doofus-01 »

sandmanvt wrote:All the skirmishes seem to not give my units experience, but reset their experience after the level is over. Thus It's a negative experience for my party.
Does it still do that in 1.1.1? I thought I'd fixed that...
lostnumber wrote:Things like game balance, properly detailing objectives, the skirmish system, ect, all could use a lot of work in comparison to Part 1
Shorter campaigns are much easier to polish. Part 1 is especially easy because it is so quick to play through. Parts 2 & 3 would take me a month or more to get through, if I didn't stop to edit things and start over. Maybe that means the campaign is too long, but I liked playing long campaigns if they were not too repetitive. (As an aside: I made the mistake of playing Legend of Wesmere after playing Heir to the Throne. I couldn't finish it and 3-4 years later I still hate elves).

It's taken three years to get to this point, the problems it still has won't get solved overnight. But they will get ironed out eventually. Bug reports and feedback about things like confusing objectives are helpful in making that faster. The forums don't make for a good bug-tracker and things can get buried, so my apologies if someone reported something and I didn't do anything with it.
lostnumber wrote:These aren't specific bugs I'm pointing out as much as indications of a more general problem that some of the scenarios suffer from. If you'd be interested I'd be happy to get in touch with you on Aim/Steam/IRC and share my thoughts on some scenario design and campaign storyline issues.
I'll send you a PM about that later.
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lostnumber
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Re: 1.9/1.10 SP Campaign - Bad Moon Rising

Post by lostnumber »

By part one I meant part 2, sorry. I forgot about the very first part with the necromancer.

I've also had issues with units not gaining experience properly from skirmishes and being reduced to 0
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Re: 1.9/1.10 SP Campaign - Bad Moon Rising

Post by doofus-01 »

doofus-01 wrote:sandmanvt wrote:
All the skirmishes seem to not give my units experience, but reset their experience after the level is over. Thus It's a negative experience for my party.
Does it still do that in 1.1.1? I thought I'd fixed that...
This does appear to be fixed in 1.1.1.
lostnumber wrote:Dog training is listed as a trait for Ukian Commandos but does not work.
I'm not sure why or if it wasn't working, but its effects may have been unintuitive. I'm changing it so it is more like leadership in that it increases with level, and it affects all dogs, not just the level 0.
lostnumber wrote:I also thought I was supposed to use the shiny sword of doom that I randomly picked up on Echnida, and when I did so it triggered the long sequence of dialogue only to make me lose after it had finished which kind of disrupted the flow of the story.
I think some of this can be solved by moving the sword to the northwest region of the map, so Raenna has to go through Belleros so he is less irrelevant. It also puts the sword further away from Echidna. The shield was there in case Chimera was causing too much trouble and the armor was there to make it so whoever took on Ares didn't get wiped out quickly. I found them necessary, but maybe they can be removed. The fewer deus ex machina items, the better.
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Re: 1.9/1.10 SP Campaign - Bad Moon Rising

Post by doofus-01 »

1.1.2 went to the server. Biggest changes are to the skirmishes & worldmap: The enemies should be less strong and the keeps & castles have been removed, hopefully the new system is intuitive enough. I put an explanatory dialogue in the first world map scenario, but you'd only see that if you started Part 2 from the beginning. Anyone already past that should right-click on the world map and choose 'Marching Formation'.

The crash upon leveling certain units is a core bug and will be fixed in BfW 1.9.1, so be aware that that can still happen. I also haven't touched the "Downed by the Water" scenario, that is on to-do list. I think the rest of the things mentioned above are fixed though.

EDIT: And, of course, the skirmish/worldmap stuff is still screwed up.
- I will fix the menu entry to show up only on the world map.
- The reconfiguration scenario also eats 20% of gold, that was not intended.
I hope that is all.
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Re: 1.9/1.10 SP Campaign - Bad Moon Rising

Post by doofus-01 »

1.1.3 just went to the server. The skirmish stuff is almost working, though there is still an occasional glitch with the gold that I will need to fix next time. There are also some small changes to part 3. It seems the passive_leader tag no longer works, that is why the leaders in "Downed by the Water" scenario ran to the exit.
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Re: 1.9/1.10 SP Campaign - Bad Moon Rising

Post by doofus-01 »

1.1.4 went to the server, now I think the skirmishes really are fixed. The previous version had some bad stuff happening in the last half of Part 3, so an update was necessary. Some small improvements were also made to Mirror Pond scenario.

There is an instability somewhere, and variables get cleared when they shouldn't be. That causes bugs, but starting from a different savefile causes the bugs to move to a different place. That makes it next to impossible for me to find what is causing it, but at least the player can get around it if he/she knows something is wrong.

From what I've seen, the symptoms are either the gold gets screwed up or the skirmish enemies are too easy. Sometimes the skirmish enemies would become too strong in previous versions, maybe even crashing Wesnoth when ghosts attacked on worldmap (because of an additional bug in BfW 1.9.0), but that shouldn't happen now. I haven't seen a scenario trigger get screwed up, but that may just be because I have mostly been working on the skirmishes.
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Re: 1.9/1.10 SP Campaign - Bad Moon Rising

Post by doofus-01 »

1.1.4.a just went to the server because there are differences in the terrain codes of BfW 1.9.0 and 1.9.1, so some maps could not be loaded. 1.1.4.a should now work for BfW 1.9.1, but stick with 1.1.4 if you are still using 1.9.0. No new content was added to 1.1.4.a.
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