WF - Wild Frontiers [SP Campaign]

[vghetto]

I registered a account just to tell you how much I love this campaign. It's seriously fun, especially the start when you are exploring and expanding your town, and the dialogue is written in a good lighthearted way.

Hi, welcome to the forum and thank you for your post and suggestions. Are you playing on wesnoth 1.14 or wesnoth 1.15?

Thank you for complimenting the dialogue, I'm sure OTna would be pleased by that. The work on the dialogue is still ongoing, but it gets delayed by the contributors availability or lack of free time.
I try to avoid doing any dialogue writing myself. The creative artist in me is very much dead and buried.
I'm also a next, next, skip, skip, just freakin' start already type of player. That doesn't help.

The different gifts you can pick at the start are great, it makes each game unique in its own way. It gets a bit messy lategame when you have a very large force that needs managing but aside from that every playthrough has been a blast for me.

Yes it can get messy and a bit tedious later on imo. I'm not sure how to fix that, but I have an idea that I will get to later in this post.

That said, I have a few questions and suggestions;

• Is there a list that shows what each gift does? Reading this thread also showed me they give passive racial bonuses, which you normally get by completing 10 assignments of a faciton. Speaking of bonuses, would be fun if players could see what they were.

I think you are referring to the selections at the very start of the game. I'll see about adding what each faction unlocks. I had them described in an earlier post I recall.

Spoiler:

Drakes -> removes shroud and removes fog. (some maps)
Dunefolk -> Spawns two armored market caravans (a rare artifact)
Dwarves -> Lowers cost and allows for gold to become negative without defeat (a book on finance)
Elves -> Cools down Elves and Dwarves anger, reduces elves/dwarves raid size (treatises scrolls)
Loyalists -> Less turns for work projects (some loyal workers)
Orcs -> ally spawn size increase (a strong guardian)
Outlaws -> allows planting mushrooms and gives better healing (a book on fungi)
Undead -> reduces undead raid size (a prisoner)

• The quests and associated dialogue are great, can't complain about that, but they can get a bit "grindy" towards lategame especially when you're juggling like seven factions to please.

Sometimes a quest can be finished by doing the alternative.
killing ogres can fulfill killing orcs/dwarves quests
killing woses can fulfill killing elves quests.
killing bats can fulfill killing undead quests, and so on.
Does that help or did you mean something else by "they can get a bit grindy".

• I presume the answer is 'no' to this question, but is there a way to implement adjacency bonuses to buildings like city building games? Like, say, you build a granary right next to a farm, that would improve the farm's yield by one gold or something.

I'm always open for suggestions. The farmed tiles around a farm can potentially be used for something.
A granary sound like a good idea. It could make your town more compact and easier to defend and maintain.
I'll have to check if wesnoth has a granary type image, or if one of the mods has one.
what other building extensions do you propose?

• After building a windmill I get two incoming caravans, sometimes from the same direction. If they arrive at the building at the same turn they overwrite eachother's item. Are two caravans intentional? Gets a bit hectic to give the item to the right dude.

You get two caravans if you selected "a rare artifact" starting bonus, they spawn independently from one another and yes they could sometimes spawn from the same direction.
You could leave one of your units on the windmill and wait for the two caravans to come near the windmill.
Then using right-click on the caravan, order one of them to stop moving. The allied caravans don't disappear at the end of the season, so you don't have to rush them, but the item at the windmill does get lost at the end of the season if it isn't picked up.

The next version of WF will give a selection of 3 items, but only 1 can be bought.

• Each time I complete a quest I get the option to hire mercenaries for 100 gold. This is nice and all but it doesn't let me continue without hiring them. It's a great price but there is a time and place for getting a dozen new units.

You can suspend quests and get back to it, but yes after you hire, you have to wait for them to arrive before continuing with other quests.
Should I add an option to forfeit their spawning?

• I love the city building aspect of the campaign but I always get a bit sad once you've built everything and the only thing left to do is to build paths (for winter), forts (for defense), or farms (for income). Are there any plans to allow you to upgrade buildings like you can do with the keep?

Likewise. I'm working on generating of a new map area to allow establishing another town, the hero can travel between the old and the new map. It will spawn a new set of loyal units and enemies but you get to keep your original recall/recruit lists.
Work on this is in progress, but it might take some time for me to get it right.

I have no plans for upgrading the recruiting buildings. (haven't thought about it honestly). Upgrade them to what? and to do what?

• Finally, I would like to know what triggers the elves and dorfs to attack. I know it's by cutting down trees and levelling mountains and hills, but how much can I safely remove before being attacked?

The library spymaster report tells you that. You have to keep their chances zero or negative by building mounds or raising mountains for the dwarves or by planting trees for the elves.
The starting bonus (treatises scrolls) or the completion of 10 elves quests will cool them down by reducing their chances by 2 every turn.
It is like planting 2 trees or building 2 mounds every turn.

Once again I will say that I really, really like this campaign. It's a different pace. A sort of slow-burn survival with a bit of city building, and a dash of terraforming while you're at it. I hope everyone stays safe, and have a happy holiday!

Thank you.
Yes, I want the player to be able to play WF at their own pace. I like to take my time while building and expanding. You have others like in weewah's replays, they can get done with everything before the first winter arrives! I still don't know how they pull it off!

Edit: I would also like to know what the differences between Easy/Normal/Hard is. Does it affect spawnrate, calamities etc.

Yes it affects different aspects. Going on memory:
Some raids and even calamities can get skipped in easy and normal.
Autumn gets fog on hard.
It is more likely to spawn higher level enemies on hard.
You can select more starting bonuses on easy.
Some of the starting bonuses are not available on hard.
You can't start generating village gold until your caravan moves to the edge on hard.
Less/more gold on side-missions.

Mind you, most of my testing is on normal. I don't know if easy is fun to play.
Judging by the replays, the hard difficulty looks like fun.

Edit: In the next upload peasant workers can build on the farm area.
You can forgo hiring the mercenaries.

[Jonlissla]

Thank you for your quick reply! I'm currently using 1.14 as it's the stable release. I tried the update for fun but couldn't seem to download this campaign without getting a error. I was looking forward to watching a replay that was posted earlier but it was filled with error messages so not much I can do there.

Really grateful you posted that list of bonuses by the way. It can be difficult to keep track of since it's not really mentioned anywhere in the game. Also helpful to know that the two caravan thing was due to a bonus. The game doesn't really tell you much at the start. Is there a list of calamities as well? I haven't encountered any in my playthroughs and I remember that long ago I was invaded by a bunch of yetis that promptly wrecked my army.

Does that help or did you mean something else by "they can get a bit grindy".

Well, this can be a bit tricky to answer as my question was pretty vague from the beginning, and after thinking about it there are several factors that make it feel... artificial and sort of grindy in a way? Let's see if I can explain it;

Some missions require the same objective, but you can only focus on one at a time. I remember the sixth Loyalist mission requiring you to remove hills or mountains, and there was another mission that required the same thing. This means that you have to remove ten hills, then pay 100 gold for mercenaries that you may/may not want, wait three turns, and THEN you can continue with the other mission where you will have to do the exact same thing again. Remove ten hills. Pay 100 gold, wait three turns, and then you can continue with something else. It doesn't feel like you're improving relations with a faction as much as you're fulfilling a quota straight from a MMO alá kill ten rats.

The reward itself is pretty weird as well, namely the mercenaries. You're doing all this work for a faction only to be forced to pay for the reward? I would much rather have a single lvl 2 Loyal unit deliverd to me, or perhaps a item magically teleported to my Keep, or perhaps a monetary reward. Perhaps working for the Elves will give you a bonus to your farm output by, say, 25% for the rest of the season or something similar. My main reward and goal for doing their missions is the additional troops you get to recruit, and the passive racial bonus. Getting half a dozen mercenaries each time I complete a single assignment feels like it defeats the purpose because by the time you've beaten five missions to unlock their recruitment you will have been given a ton of spare troops.

The following is pure speculation and would require a lot of work and rewriting, so don't take it seriously;
I personally feel like it would be better to have longer missions tied to a unique narrative depending on the faction, so instead of having to complete 5/5 missions you'd have 3/3. Elves for example distrust you, so you have to plant trees and perhaps protect a wose that's sent to you for a set amount of turns. Next you're chasing bandits as usual but once completed a unique bandit spawn in as a sort of mini-calamity that you have to take care of. Anything to make missions stand out more.

I'm always open for suggestions. The farmed tiles around a farm can potentially be used for something.
A granary sound like a good idea. It could make your town more compact and easier to defend and maintain.
I'll have to check if wesnoth has a granary type image, or if one of the mods has one.
what other building extensions do you propose?

The reason I presumed the answer was 'no' was due to engine limitations. I have no idea what's possible regarding scripting and spawning, and truth to be told I didn't even think a campaign like this was even possible. I mean, each season is a new map, but somehow units remember their orders, and even buildings under construction remember how much time is left until they're finished. And now you can even enter other maps, come back, and things are just as you left it? That stuff is black magic to me, or perhaps I'm underestimating the game.

I would love to see alternative ways of passive income. How about building a mine that bases its output on how many mountains or hills are in a set radius around it? Make a minimum distance between them so they can't be overlapped to prevent cheesing? Might be a bit tricky to balance as you can raise hills yourself though, or you just let the player do what they want. Or how about a logging camp that gives income based on how many trees are nearby? Having your entire town be filled with forests would be hilarious, and could be viable if you get elves on your side.

I have no plans for upgrading the recruiting buildings. (haven't thought about it honestly). Upgrade them to what? and to do what?

Well, what I'm looking for is perhaps a sort of money sink in a way, and now that I think about it, a lategame goal. I feel that instead of building multiple buildings (like three libraries) to unlock more mages, why not add a menu to them that allows you to upgrade the building itself? You can make the buildings larger or perhaps give them more unorthodox shapes like 2x4. Would be really interesting if you could tie a tech tree to it as well. Like in Starcraft basically. Let's say you build a blacksmith, and there's a upgrade there for X gold that gives all blade weapons +Y damage. Or perhaps a bonus to certain units' resistances, or perhaps giving mages First Strike to their magical attacks.

The whole lategame goal thing revolves around the aspect I love the most; expanding and building your town. You will reach a point where this is no longer feasible due to perfomance or bloat. For example, in one playthrough I had around 90 units active, and about 50 farms or so. It required a excessive amount of micromanagement and each turn lasted way longer than I wanted it to. It would therefore be interesting if the player could build 'tall', rather than 'wide', like you can in several 4X games.

The library spymaster report tells you that. You have to keep their chances zero or negative by building mounds or raising mountains for the dwarves or by planting trees for the elves.
The starting bonus (treatises scrolls) or the completion of 10 elves quests will cool them down by reducing their chances by 2 every turn.
It is like planting 2 trees or building 2 mounds every turn.

Ah, so that's how it works! Thanks for clarifying. Can I reduce the change of orcs or necromancers invading, or is that tied to some other stat like my total amount of units?

[vghetto]

Thank you for your quick reply! I'm currently using 1.14 as it's the stable release. I tried the update for fun but couldn't seem to download this campaign without getting a error. I was looking forward to watching a replay that was posted earlier but it was filled with error messages so not much I can do there.

Yeah, it can get tricky with the replays. You'll need to match the replay's wesnoth and WF versions for an error free viewing.

Is there a list of calamities as well?

Spoiler:

There's 1 winter calamity, the Yetis and the rest occur in the summer.
A Lich with some level 2 undead. The Lich can spawn a new undead near your units every turn until you kill it.
Some Gryphons protecting a nest on a mountain.
A recruiting loyalists with lots of level 2 units.
A recruiting Saurians.
A group of level 2 Drakes
A group of level 2 Dwarves
A group of level 2 Elves
Level 2 Orcs attacking from all 4 sides. (not as bad as it sounds)

Some missions require the same objective, ....

For now each faction only has 5 quests, and they repeat. I'll see about improving on that.
Completing the first 5 allows you to directly recruit those units, completing the second 5 unlocks the bonus.
After that the fee and required number goes down. The mercenaries hired become level 2.

I agree with you about the exaggerated number of mercenaries. I'll reduce them to 4. You will be able to forgo paying or hiring them altogether.

For the extra income, the next upload will have the granary idea ready, they will act like villages and earn you income and support. They won't heal though.

I like the mine and logging camp ideas, I might do the mine thing next.

... You can make the buildings larger or perhaps give them more unorthodox shapes like 2x4. Would be really interesting if you could tie a tech tree to it as well. ...

Similar things were proposed before. I try to avoid complex multi-hex terrain stuff because they can be a pain in the ... to figure out how to do right.

...It required a excessive amount of micromanagement and each turn lasted way longer than I wanted it to. It would therefore be interesting if the player could build 'tall', rather than 'wide', like you can in several 4X games.

You can enable acceleration from the preferences when turns start to take too long and there are way too many units on the board.
I think the granary idea will help a bit because it will make the town much more compact and easier to defend will less units.

Can I reduce the change of orcs or necromancers invading, or is that tied to some other stat like my total amount of units?

The next upload allows the dark adepts or rogue mages to build a sacrificial altar. You sacrifice one of your units on that altar and all the enemy raids chances will go into the negative. This will include elves, dwarves and calamities.

[weewah]

I have no plans for upgrading the recruiting buildings. (haven't thought about it honestly). Upgrade them to what? and to do what?

Upgrades could unlock alternative (possibly custom) traits instead of the standard 4. Dextrous for Bowmen, Healthy for Spearmen, a +10% resistance trait for heavy infantry, a +10% defense trait for fencers!

The next upload allows the dark adepts or rogue mages to build a sacrificial altar. You sacrifice one of your units on that altar and all the enemy raids chances will go into the negative. This will include elves, dwarves and calamities.

This sounds kinda overpowered. Surely we can't just send a line of 6 gold ruffians to their deaths over and over to avoid all enemies? How about limiting it to once per season, and instead of setting the chances to negative, have them reduced by 10% per level of the unit sacrificed?

I do quite like the idea of spell structures though. Especially with sacrifices required, since you end up with a bunch of loyal level 3s later on who have no more goals in life. Lots of potentially fun spells can be done:

• Great Mages can exhaust all their mana and lifeforce to summon a meteor strike: a few turns after the Great Mage dies, a circle of radius 3 is struck by a meteor, killing all units there and permanently turning the terrain into lava. Lava is unwalkable for defending against enemies, and illuminates to make your loyalist units stronger, so this is a nifty effect.
• Mages of Light can exhaust all their mana and lifeforce to instantly and fully heal all friendly units currently on the map. (Alternatively and more awesomely, RESURRECT a dead unit, if that is possible.)
• Silver Mages can exhaust all their mana and lifeforce to instantly teleport ANY unit (friend or foe) to ANY location. So you could teleport gravely injured units to safety, or teleport powerful allies to the frontlines, or teleport enemy leaders into bad terrains that are surrounded by your units and so easily take their lives and bounties.
• Elvish Sylphs can exhaust all their mana and lifeforce to cause mushrooms to grow all over (each tile has a 1 in 4 chance of spawning a mushroom).
• A few units can be sacrificed to empower another unit, letting it gain bonuses based on the race and level of the sacrificed units. To prevent the creation of an unstoppable monster, each unit can only be empowered once.

Edit: Did some testing with the new farm yields... and I have no idea how they work.

It seems yields cannot be built adjacent to one another, and are effectively just more villages? But somehow, I have 12/14 villages, even though all 14 farms and yields are owned villages? Or do yields on the same farm block each other while they are being built?

[vghetto]

Those are some fun ideas with the traits and the altar. I will look into them.
For now, you can only have 1 altar on the map at any given time. It costs 60 to build and gets destroyed once a sacrifice is done.
I will change the altar behavior in the future, but I can't say how yet. There are many ways of doing it.

The yields give income and they count as villages, but can't be used for healing.
You don't get to own them while being built. That shows 12/14 discrepancy.
You can't have two yields adjacent to each other, for now this includes yields from a neighboring village.
Depending on your farm layout, each farm can have up to 3 yields at most. If the farms are built next to each other, then 2 might be the most it could have.
I'm not sure if I should keep it that way or try to allow the maximum three regardless of layout.

Edit: next upload, you can only sacrifice lvl 2 or higher.

[Jonlissla]

Haven't tried out the Altar yet but upgrading farms definitely made things more compact.

[weewah]

Bug: I started the first drake diplomacy mission, which is to cut 10 trees. I cut 2 ancient trees (which count as 5 each), but the mission didn't complete. I went to the library and saw the mission progress IS 10/10, but no matter what I did, I couldn't get the mission to complete.

Do we still need to have 100 gold in bank to complete the mission even though they are free now?

[Jonlissla]

Do we still need to have 100 gold in bank to complete the mission even though they are free now?

Yes, it gives you three prompts; Yes/No/Forgo Mercenaries, whereas the last one just jumps to the next step of the quest. It's a bit jarring in its current state, and I think the entire mercenary mechanic needs to be split from the quest system. Maybe putting it in the tavern would be better? The lighthouse can call for aid (AI troops), and the tavern could give you a bunch of units from X faction.

Haven't tried out the Altar yet but upgrading farms definitely made things more compact.

Aaand here's what it looks like after another year. It's messy as hell, I'll see if I can't get something better looking than this. I feel that moats are essential when it comes to defense and can't imagine defending without them – which is exactly what I'm going to do next. It did get a bit too easy towards the end, but I'm currently using Advance Wesnoth Wars and XP Bank and it does make the game much more forgiving regarding levelling up your troops.

I'm really liking the add-on to the farm, but since it counts as a village the friendly AI can sometimes be stuck there trying to heal. There is also a absolute ton of flags waving around which tanks perfomance, had to disable animations for it to become managable. Either way it will be fun to see what you cook up next.

[vghetto]

Do we still need to have 100 gold in bank to complete the mission even though they are free now?

Yes for now. It will be fixed in the next upload.

I'm really liking the add-on to the farm, but since it counts as a village the friendly AI can sometimes be stuck there trying to heal.

This might be considered a bug in the wesnoth AI. It seems the AI is looking for aliasof=Vt without checking if it actually heals first. Or, maybe I shouldn't have used Vt in the first place.

I changed the alias to aliasof=_bas, Gt. Hopefully that would fix it for WF.

There is also a absolute ton of flags waving around which tanks perfomance, had to disable animations for it to become managable.

Hmm, I don't know how to fix that

[weewah]

Still testing out new yields.

Balance Suggestions:

• The first season tent should either not contain enemies, or contain only level 2s. Having an enemy level 3 Grand Knight appear and wreck your starting city is terrifying.
• Similarly, the first season team 4 bandits should go back to being ordinary outlaw bandits x_x. Right now they can attack with undead (which your starting units are absolutely not prepared for) and dwarves . Edit: They are now back to normal outlaws.. but I don't remember updating? Is it just random or am I just forgetful?
• The starting option that gives 1 artifact to start with is now the worst option by far on hard difficulty, since you do not get 2 caravans per season until you complete 10 dunefolk? missions. How about making them have 2 caravans per season normally, and become 3 caravans after doing the dunefolk missions?
• The starting option "Book of Fungi" is quite overpowered. I can drive my caravans all the way to the map edge on the same turn they spawn, simply by growing a line of mushrooms beforehand and having the caravan eat them. I see that growing mushrooms is only supposed to be unlocked after 10 diplomacy missions with some faction, but for some reason this is currently doable without any diplomacy at all. This option should be balanced after requiring the 10 diplomacy missions for mushroom growing.
• Edit: Mercenaries now cost 100 gold for only 4 units, which may not even include the unit you want! Elves could give you shaman archer fighter scout instead of their wose, drakes could give saurians instead of burners, orcs could give goblins instead of leaders, dwarves could give gryphons and zerkers instead of fighters and guards, etc. I can't think of a good solution for this at the moment, but mercenaries aren't really worth hiring now.

Also, since yields effectively increase your gold generation, how about giving the enemies ways to increase their gold generation too?
Some ideas for new non-combat units:

• Goblin Lumberjacks: Those spears had to come from somewhere! Goblin lumberjacks form the backbone of the orcish economy, providing cheap wooden tools and weapons to their brethren. Give these guys a goto micro_ai that targets trees. At the start of each turn, if a goblin lumberjacks unit is on top of a tree, cut down the tree, set the goblin's MP to 0, and give the orcish side 5/10/15 gold for easy/normal/hard difficulty.
• Skeleton Scavengers: The fragile bones of the children and elderly are not suitable for combat, but plenty useful for delivering fresh corpses to a necromancer. Give these guys a simple_attack micro_ai that targets units with less than 10 hp. Whenever they kill a unit, the necromancer gets gold depending on the level of the unit killed.

Elves and Dwarves could be given non-combat units that plant trees or build hills instead of giving gold, making the next waves of elves/dwarves harder to fight off since they have good terrain to fight on.

[vghetto]

Thank you for testing!

[*] The first season tent should either not contain enemies, or contain only level 2s. Having an enemy level 3 Grand Knight appear and wreck your starting city is terrifying.

They are surprise tents. They could give you a friendly level 3 too.

[*] Similarly, the first season team 4 bandits should go back to being ordinary outlaw bandits x_x. Right now they can attack with undead (which your starting units are absolutely not prepared for) and dwarves . Edit: They are now back to normal outlaws.. but I don't remember updating? Is it just random or am I just forgetful?

Yes it is random.
3/4 chance you'll get the normal bandits and 1/4 you'll get the special faction with the skeleton or dwarf.
This is what the faction consists of:

Spoiler:

Dark Adept,Skeleton,Dwarvish Fighter,Dwarvish Scout,Elvish Fighter,Elvish Archer,Orcish Grunt,Orcish Leader,Peasant,Ruffian,Sergeant,Mermaid Initiate,Woodsman

[*] The starting option that gives 1 artifact to start with is now the worst option by far on hard difficulty, since you do not get 2 caravans per season until you complete 10 dunefolk? missions. How about making them have 2 caravans per season normally, and become 3 caravans after doing the dunefolk missions?

Hmm, hard is hard. 3 caravans is too much even for easy.

[*] The starting option "Book of Fungi" is quite overpowered. I can drive my caravans all the way to the map edge on the same turn they spawn, simply by growing a line of mushrooms beforehand and having the caravan eat them. I see that growing mushrooms is only supposed to be unlocked after 10 diplomacy missions with some faction, but for some reason this is currently doable without any diplomacy at all. This option should be balanced after requiring the 10 diplomacy missions for mushroom growing.

I'm not nerfing mushrooms!

[*] Edit: Mercenaries now cost 100 gold for only 4 units, which may not even include the unit you want! Elves could give you shaman archer fighter scout instead of their wose, drakes could give saurians instead of burners, orcs could give goblins instead of leaders, dwarves could give gryphons and zerkers instead of fighters and guards, etc. I can't think of a good solution for this at the moment, but mercenaries aren't really worth hiring now.

yeah, I don't know. Maybe revert it back to the bigger numbers or reduce the cost?

Also, since yields effectively increase your gold generation, how about giving the enemies ways to increase their gold generation too?

No I won't be doing that. They get gold when another raid happens. I like your ideas though.

Elves and Dwarves could be given non-combat units that plant trees or build hills instead of giving gold, making the next waves of elves/dwarves harder to fight off since they have good terrain to fight on.

They are annoying as is! let's not make it worse.

Thank you for the suggestions.

[weewah]

Started a Hard game on Wesnoth 1.15.6, Wild Frontiers 1.11.0. Here's how it went:

WF-A New Beginning replay 20201227-160855.gz

(220.16 KiB) Downloaded 124 times

With the introduction of yields, the optimal farming layout has changed (for the better imo).

Without yields, placing farms in a hexagonal arrangement = 1 farm per 7 hexes.
With yields, the same hexagonal arrangement seems to have 9 villages per 21 hexes at best.
On the other hand, placing farms in a square pattern so they have some gaps between them gives 4 villages per 9 hexes, which is slightly better and what I did in this replay.

Also the gaps between farms are excellent for placing roads or mushrooms for faster movement. This new layout is awesome.

WF-Summer of Dreams replay 20201227-184045.gz

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The Fungi and Termite starting bonuses combined are incredibly awesome. Fungi makes mushrooms refill MP, while termites replace all terrain between the center and each of the 4 signposts with lots of mushrooms. Your caravan can easily reach the map edge on the same turn it spawns, even if you barely plant any mushroom growths manually.

What's even better is the orcs spawn right in the wide lanes of mushrooms. I had one paladin almost single-handedly wipe out an entire orcish raid in one turn simply by attacking-eating mushrooms-moving over and over.

WF-Fief Uprising replay 20201227-190551.gz

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Do not like Fiefs. They are very vanilla and much harder than the rest of the campaign .

I got really really lucky with this fief, since the nearer enemy was elves. Elves are easy!

And even better, the other enemy was dwarves! Normally, this would be terrible, but since dwarves move very slowly, I managed to wipe out the elves before the dwarves arrived.

WF-Autumn of Gold replay 20201228-202348.gz

(294.5 KiB) Downloaded 113 times

I used the fief gold to throw land mines (runes) everywhere for the undead to step on. This works much better than my previous attempts at fighting undead by offering hordes of level 0 ruffian sacrifices.

That said, the undead hordes seem smaller than before? Do they only increase in proportion to the number of farms, without counting the yields?
Also they were moving strangely in one big blob, even the ghosts stuck with the group rather than splitting off like usual. That would have been very annoying without all the runes and mushrooms I threw around.

----------------------------

I do not like Fiefs.

In the rest of Wild Frontiers, you have a large gold advantage, a terrain advantage since you can terraform, healing mushrooms, runic landmines, and even lots of wild animals and bandits that attack everyone. You are attacked from all directions, but that's actually a plus since different factions attack in separate groups.

In Fief, you have a slight gold disadvantage, a terrain disadvantage (because loyalists hate trees and hills and they are everywhere), no mushrooms or runes, and the enemies are allied against you. Worse, they can attack you at the same time from the same direction, and this is where things really suck.

Right now I am fighting against an Undead enemy and a Loyalist enemy at the same time in the Autumn Fief. Undead are deadly at night and so should very much be attacked in day. Loyalist horsemen are LETHAL in day, and so should very much be attacked at night. But both enemies have combined their forces into one flawless blob of death with no weaknesses to exploit!

(I could probably beat both of them up without much issue if I was going with the very awesome dwarven units, but mercenaries aren't good right now. )

[*] The starting option that gives 1 artifact to start with is now the worst option by far on hard difficulty, since you do not get 2 caravans per season until you complete 10 dunefolk? missions. How about making them have 2 caravans per season normally, and become 3 caravans after doing the dunefolk missions?

Hmm, hard is hard. 3 caravans is too much even for easy.

Actually, since we currently can choose between 1 of 3 artifacts each time, how about keeping the caravans at the same numbers but letting us choose 1 out of 4 instead if we have the artifact starting bonus?

[*] Edit: Mercenaries now cost 100 gold for only 4 units, which may not even include the unit you want! Elves could give you shaman archer fighter scout instead of their wose, drakes could give saurians instead of burners, orcs could give goblins instead of leaders, dwarves could give gryphons and zerkers instead of fighters and guards, etc. I can't think of a good solution for this at the moment, but mercenaries aren't really worth hiring now.

yeah, I don't know. Maybe revert it back to the bigger numbers or reduce the cost?

Yes, it gives you three prompts; Yes/No/Forgo Mercenaries, whereas the last one just jumps to the next step of the quest. It's a bit jarring in its current state, and I think the entire mercenary mechanic needs to be split from the quest system. Maybe putting it in the tavern would be better? The lighthouse can call for aid (AI troops), and the tavern could give you a bunch of units from X faction.

There are two constraints for the mercenary problem: the mercenaries gained from each mission must be good enough that the missions are worth doing, but not so good that unlocking the faction after 5 diplomacy missions is pointless because we have too many of that faction's units already.

If the number of units gained is too small, we risk not getting any of the units we want, so the missions are pointless.
If the number of units gained is too large, we have so many of them by the time we do 5 missions that unlocking the recruitment is pointless.

So how about doing it in the same way markets are done, in that you can choose which artifact to buy, or none at all?

Add a menu to the tavern where mercenary teams can visit your town and be hired or dismissed, with a cap of 10 teams at any time. A new tavern initially contains no teams. Whenever a diplomacy mission is completed, a team of 5 random (possibly duplicate) units are added to the tavern. From the tavern menu, each team can then be hired for 100 gold, or dismissed to make room for new teams. Finally, at the end of each day (every 6 turns), each team in the tavern is replaced by another random team of units from the same faction. This way, even if you are unlucky and all 10 teams in your tavern are garbage, you only need to wait for them to be replaced at the end of the day.

[vghetto]

Very good replays, thanks!

2 possible bugs, the armor of thane description and the size of the undead raid.
I fixed the thane description and added back potion of gloom to the market.

The size of the raid depend on the number of villages, they don't take the number of farm yields into account. The dilemma now is should they? I don't know yet.

About the troll raid, I've spiced up the orcs raid to be split up between Trolls (trolls and nagas only), Goblins (goblins/wolves and nagas), Orcs (orcs only), Hordes (the normal way). Which one you might get is random.
I might do the same thing with the undead raids. Make one of them be all skeleton types.

About the behavior of the first undead raid, I think they were waiting for night to fall.
About the suicidal Bandit leader, that was the simple_attack micro ai kicking in. Remember without it he would've just ran away.

I haven't decided on the mercenaries issue yet.

Fief ain't that bad!

[weewah]

Alternative solution for mercenaries: 10 side 9 mercenaries arrive after each mission completed. Then you can right click the mercenaries on your turn to convert up to 4 of them to side 1 for 25 gold each. At the end of your turn, all remaining side 9 mercenaries leave, so they don't get into any fights at all.

[Jonlissla]

The size of the raid depend on the number of villages, they don't take the number of farm yields into account. The dilemma now is should they? I don't know yet.

I think they should, as income has effectively been tripled with little to no loss of map space, yet the threats remain the same.

Alternative solution for mercenaries: 10 side 9 mercenaries arrive after each mission completed. Then you can right click the mercenaries on your turn to convert up to 4 of them to side 1 for 25 gold each. At the end of your turn, all remaining side 9 mercenaries leave, so they don't get into any fights at all.

That sounds a bit complicated to be honest. Occam's razor would problably be better here, so let the player hire mercs at the tavern as you suggested earlier. It's simple and user friendly.

There are two constraints for the mercenary problem: the mercenaries gained from each mission must be good enough that the missions are worth doing, but not so good that unlocking the faction after 5 diplomacy missions is pointless because we have too many of that faction's units already.

If the number of units gained is too small, we risk not getting any of the units we want, so the missions are pointless.
If the number of units gained is too large, we have so many of them by the time we do 5 missions that unlocking the recruitment is pointless.

Very good points. Another conundrum is that if mercs are split from the mission system entirely then what's the point of missions themselves? Why spend time and effort trying to unlock extra recruitment if you can just hire a bunch of mercs from the tavern? Not sure how to go about this to be honest. The reward could be changed for one Loyal unit or perhaps a artifact delivered to your Keep.