Descent into Darkness

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Baufo
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Post by Baufo »

Eleazar wrote:EDIT: I downloaded it from the add-on server today, played on the trunk freshly complied today.

•Contrary to the victory condition of "capture all villages," In "Peaceful Valley" i won, without ever having captured the village in the upper left.
Hmm, looking at the WML I think this might happen if you kill the enemy leader, then an enemy unit captures a village without firing an "capture" event so this village is not subtracted from the number of owned village. I'll probably ask an WML expert about this.
Eleazar wrote: • In scenario 4 the broken ice is weirdly replaced with terrain "s"— one that doesn't exist.
Thanks for the report, that's easy to fix by replacing "s" with the appropriate string.
Eleazar wrote: Images:
The biggest problem with the protagonist's sprite is it was frankenstined mostly from outdated sprites.

The rat and door could use a lot of help. I haven't come to them in the game yet, but in trunk there are some iron gate graphics which might server your purpose. I think neo did some rodent sprites.

There's a better Troll shaman included with UtBS.

Malin's portrait: It would be great if someone would do a few variations of the portrait to capture his changing attitude as the story progresses.
Thank you for your review!
Great tips for the door, the troll shaman and Neo's rats (how could I forget about them? he once did them for one of my add-ons).

The problem is the hero sprite though, if you consider it as bad. Maybe I will try to frakenstein another one on my own.
I was working on the proof of one of my poems all the morning, and took out a comma. In the afternoon I put it back again. -- Oscar Wilde
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Baufo
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Post by Baufo »

Alright, I have uploaded yet another update with some fixes and some replaced graphics.

While inserting Neo's rat sprite I noticed that this campaign uses a rather huge amount of underground scenarios. What would you think about trying to build in some more of Neo's awesome creep sprites?
I was working on the proof of one of my poems all the morning, and took out a comma. In the afternoon I put it back again. -- Oscar Wilde
palloco
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Post by palloco »

Im playing on 1.3.2. After the ghost is recaptured in 3rd scenario it becamed the only unit which can recruit if it is in the map. I mean, on the next scenario once I recalled him I had to recruit units with ghost, and what is even worse, each turn I want to recruit I have to bring my leader to the castle as well.
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Baufo
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Post by Baufo »

palloco wrote:Im playing on 1.3.2. After the ghost is recaptured in 3rd scenario it becamed the only unit which can recruit if it is in the map. I mean, on the next scenario once I recalled him I had to recruit units with ghost, and what is even worse, each turn I want to recruit I have to bring my leader to the castle as well.
The ghost is supposed to die, not to turn back to your side. I have also experienced this problem while playing through the campaign but I though I had already fixed that. Are you sure you are playing on the latest version?

Thanks for the report anyway.
I was working on the proof of one of my poems all the morning, and took out a comma. In the afternoon I put it back again. -- Oscar Wilde
palloco
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Post by palloco »

Ah, right, in this new version it dies.
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TL
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Post by TL »

Hi, I just finished the latest version of this on medium difficulty and thought it was pretty good. It's long enough to enjoy leveling up some troops without being so long it takes forever to get through, and the storyline is well done (if a bit predictable). Fortunately it wasn't overdone, at least on the necromancers' side. Malin and Darken Volk are interesting characters, but the Ha'lal folks are all "Grr necromancy bad die die die!" Not much depth to them. Still that's usually about what's expected for videogame antagonists and at least it was a nice change of pace to see the "good guys" having that kind of two-dimensional outlook while the "bad guys" are having nuanced debates about morality.

I do have to agree somewhat with other posters about the difficulty being all over the place. Scenarios 1-3 were just about right difficultywise, but then scenario 4 was hugely harder due to the number of level 2 orcs with fire attacks. I saw at least 4 goblin pillagers and 3 or 4 orc crossbows which make things very dangerous, especially since you've had very little chance to level up units. My level 2 units consisted of 2 wraiths and a shadow to start with, although fortunately the enemy level 2s do make it easy to level up if you survive.

Scenario 5 (Orc War) was slightly easier for me, since the enemy doesn't recruit quite so effectively (assassins vs. undead?!). Actually due to a certain unforeseen event it turned out to be MUCH easier than it looked but it was still tricky. I didn't even bother trying to hold the starting keep although I did leave a skeleton and a couple walking corpses there to bait/slow down the enemies. All my "real" units, Darken, and Malin just headed south at the orc camp across the river. Taking out a couple of the leaders quickly using specters/shadows/nightgaunts helps out immensely.

After that the next few scenarios get way, way easier. The human enemies throw a lot of L2 units at you but none of them are very good undead killers and by this point you should have several specters which makes all the swordsmen and pikemen pretty much moot. The longbowmen are slightly more dangerous but only slightly. Only a few mages show up in the outside part of A Small Favor and you can easily handle them due to the mobility of your specters/nightgaunts, since you can kill them before they get close enough to attack. Same thing for all the mages inside the mansion. The mansion actually was probably about the easiest scenario in the campaign, although the surprise room full of silver mages was a pretty nasty trick.

Alone at Last promises to be a tough scenario with all the paladins but I managed to complete the objective before they really had time to do anything but kill a few bats I had recruited for town-grabbing. Darken Volk started the scenario heavily wounded (carried over from the last two scenarios?) so he just sat healing in a village while I sent a specter in to take over his base, which means I never saw any recruits from him past the initial wave (which was pretty weak).

Then the Descent into Darkness campaign itself is basically tied with the mansion as far as easiness goes, although at least in this scenario there's a possibility you might have a specter get unlucky against the trolls. Mostly though only the troll warrior, troll hero, and troll shamans have any chance at all to damage your specters, so that's maybe 4 or 5 units in the whole scenario that can hurt your main units (and not by all that much). I think this one could definitely use some really nasty creeps; make Mal fight something bigger and nastier and more powerful than he is in order to get his new headquarters, instead of just beating up a bunch of trolls that can't really do anything to fight back.

Basically I found a lot of the scenario to just be about ghosts/wraith/specters killing pretty much everything; I had 4 specters and a nightgaunt at the end and most of them had earned 2 AMLAs by the end since those 5 units were responsible for 80-90% of the kills throughout the campaign. There's really not much chance to even use any other units except as cheap expendable fodder. Several scenarios (particularly 3 and 4) are full of slow terrain which makes it basically mandatory to rely on ghosts because nothingh else can get through the level in decent time. So your ghosts get all the XP, which means you spend most of your next gold in the next few scenarios recalling them and don't have much to spend recruiting, and any fresh level 1 troops have a decent chance of getting killed anyhow due to the sheer number of higher leveled enemies that get thrown at them.
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Post by Eleazar »

While playing "return to ha'lel" in trunk, i loose the scenario with the first orc i kill. As i understood the directions, it was killing any humans that was supposed to end the scenario— though it's not clear how i can "defeat" the human traitor without killing any humans.
Feel free to PM me if you start a new terrain oriented thread. It's easy for me to miss them among all the other art threads.
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pauxlo
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"Royal Swordsman"?

Post by pauxlo »

(I'm using wenoth 1.2.1, and downloaded DiD 13th of may 2007 from campaign server.)
Some (maybe) bugs:

In the last scenario (FEEA), I sometimes get (at start of the scenario) an error message "no such unit 'Royal Swordsman'" or so. It seems like it should be "Royal Guard".

Is it intentional that one can in this scenario simply (after killing the enemies other than the (poissoned) leader) wait indefinitely long to gather money for the next scenario?

There also seems to be a bug in the story file: The variable DIALOGUE_FAEA_START0 is defined two times, and DIALOGUE_FAEA_START1 is missing (so the dialog with the bandit is empty).
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Post by General Mac »

I really enjoyed this campaign as I like the undead faction, but I found it too short. I liked how everything moved along but a couple missions should be added. 1 or 2 missions would be good as a build up during his training, and a couple of missions should be added later on.

How I see it is like this. One mission his sister follows him and gets killed by the orcs. (possibly a reconciliation between them as she dies? Found that part of the plotline unfinished). Mission right before descent into darkness. In this mission you fight the orcs and an assasin has some scripting talking to the orc warlord. As your death knight Generals (recallable in future missions?) fight the orcs and hold them at bay the assasin and his assistants pop up and poison you. Now dying your objective changes to having to a nearby cave.

Then instead of forever and ever amen have a mission where you are fighting orcs outside the cave, and one of your battalions is scripted to come and tell you that they wiped out a scouting party of elves. Mad but not ballistic you order a retreat before the elves come hence the forever and ever amen's.

I found the last missions boring. My army was so elite that I could kill him every time and increase my strength. I was deliberatly not killing his troops to lvl up hoping for another mission. What I suggest is that every time you win you gain money to buy upgrades. You can chose to build a fortress for one of your generals (really expensive) build defensive positions (castles along the road with lvl 1's or 2's) and other things to make your new abode not only greatly more powerful but harder to take. Then at the end of every mission you get a choice to fight a random battle vs Orcs or stay and defend vs a hero. This can be a random generated map with barely any scripting vs the orcs, or the Forever and ever missions vs the heros. Then if he survives 3 or 4 of these have a huge battle. Armies of undead and orcs meet in a field and start pounding each other into oblivion.

Eventually the orc sovereign will be killed and if not having the Malin die will happen anyway. At turn 25-50 a mage team will arrive behind Malin and 10 turns later several white mages assisted by dwarves will pop up from a tunnel beside the keep and finally send Malin to his resting place.

In my opinion these would make this scenario way better. I am however not the one doing the work, it is just a suggestion and if it does not get implemented I completely understand.
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john_who
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Post by john_who »

Very nice campaign.

However I find it almost impossible at medium level, mainly because I have too few gold, especially in "Orc War". I tried winning the previous scenario faster (Beginning of the Revenge) but no way... I have something like 250 gold but there are just too many enemies.

Overall a nice work.
Squig
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Post by Squig »

i just finished the campaign on 'easy' mode (cause i'm lazy), i agree with the point on ghosts doing everything and the rest.

what bugs me the most is the first part of the Descent into darkness scenario. roaming caves to feed on rats is fun, although dying cause the rats got lucky is something which i really could do without. you might want to reduce their defense/increase their hps/reduce their atttack.
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Post by Elestel »

In the last scenario (FEEA), I sometimes get (at start of the scenario) an error message "no such unit 'Royal Swordsman'" or so. It seems like it should be "Royal Guard".
The same bug in 1.3.3.

I think is a good campaign, but the ghosts do nearly all the work.

PD: Soon, I'm going to start to translate it to Sapanish.
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Mythological
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Post by Mythological »

Elestel wrote:
In the last scenario (FEEA), I sometimes get (at start of the scenario) an error message "no such unit 'Royal Swordsman'" or so. It seems like it should be "Royal Guard".
The same bug in 1.3.3.

I think is a good campaign, but the ghosts do nearly all the work.

PD: Soon, I'm going to start to translate it to Sapanish.
The bugs in the last scenario ( including the unknown unit - "Royal Swordsman" ) have been fixed in the latest SVN and will be no more in 1.3.4 when it comes out
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Post by turin »

Bug with scenario Orc War: I killed the north-west and south-west leader, then there was an event saying the last leader (south-east) escaped. However, in the next scenario, Return to Hal'al, the enemy orcish leader was the south-western orc, whom I had killed, and who had -4 HP. :?
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Post by turin »

A few more comments, in no particular order other than stream of consciousness:

1) There's a serious plot problem (which should be rather obvious, so I won't elaborate) with allowing the Dark Adepts you recruit to advance into Lichs. It looks like the Dark Adepts you recruit are actually id="Dark Adept DiD", so why isn't the unit "Dark Sorcerer DiD" set to only advance to Necromancer? It should be easy to do.

2) I thought the scenario Descent into Darkness was cool, but it seems to me it would make more sense if you lost all access to your previous army. It would also make the scenario at least sort of challenging; at it was, once I got past healing Malin up enough to take the castle, I just recalled a bunch of Spectres (3) and Nightgaunts (2) (both of which are teh pwnzor) and obliterated the Trolls, with the help of some Dark Sorcerers and a Gaunt.

3) On the subject of Gaunts, why does that unit even exist? Was it determined that Ghouls wouldn't be worth recruiting if they couldn't reach level 3? This seems to ruin the fundamental character of the unit to me.

4) More on DiD - I really don't like how you're punished for exploring the map. I moved a Deathblade to the edge of the precipice, then he fell into the lava. LAME. It might be that something interesting happens a few turns later, but there were no hints given that such a thing would happen, so I saw no incentive to stick around. I loaded an autosave. If you want people to not do that, you need to give them a reason not to.

5) There's also a bug in the last part of A Small Favor, it tries to flip Darken Volk to side 4 but that side isn't even in the config files. This should be easy to fix.

6) The scenario Alone at Last seemed a lot harder than the earlier ones. A LOT. I think part of this was because (another bug, perhaps related to the previous one) Darken Volk kept trying to get to (20,1), so he never recruited, and wasn't there as a buffer when the paladins came. Anyway, I went virtually lossless in every other scenario of the campaign, but this one I lost a Spectre, a Draug, a Revenant, and a Wraith. Ouch. I barely got out alive.

7) And perhaps if you do better in that scenario, the plot with Dela Keshar is developed more, but as it is it seems really underdeveloped. She might as well be some random leader trying to kill you, not your sister. I would expect you to, even if Hal'al rejects you, try to convince her to join you, and get a lot more emotional when she refuses. Perhaps there couldl even be a secondary objective in "Alone at Last" where you capture her and, if you succeed, you get to force her to become a Lich with you. Or maybe you kill her and resurrect her. I dunno, but I see a lot of untapped possibilities in that plotline. I was kind of disappointed to never see that character again after I won AaL. Perhaps if I had been good enough to beat her something interesting would have happened; but if so, it seems to me that that should have been mentioned in the objectives. In fact...

8) Overall I thought the objectives tended to be rather vague. It often wasn't clear whether you won when you completed the objectives, or would get a new task, and often it wasn't clear whether you would win by defeating all enemy leaders or not. Most scenarios have you automatically win when you do that, but one that I expected to did not (the mountain pass one) and one that I expected to not do so did (DiD).

OK, I think that's it. Thanks for reading, if you did read. ;) Even though I have a lot of comments and suggestions, I thought it was a really cool campaign. I've been waiting a long time for a good campaign about becoming a necromancer.
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