Scenario Review: DW 1 - Invasion!

Feedback for the mainline campaign Dead Water.

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Elivaras
Posts: 43
Joined: May 17th, 2015, 12:46 am

Re: Scenario Review: DW 1 - Invasion!

Post by Elivaras »

Honestly, I -LOVE- this campaign. I love the mermen, so this campaign is absolutely amazing for me! I've played it most on challenging and difficult, and I think I've found an expert strategy to beating this scenario -very- easily, in about 12 turns or so. I managed to level Kai Krellis, and two initiates to Enchantress and Priestess, with only about 4 losses. No Save-Reloads. (However this is on a slightly older version, on the IPhone, so something -might- have changed since then)

The first two waves or so of spawns from the dark sorcerer is bats. If you let them capture too many villages, it's game over. So how to stop that? By giving them bait! At the very beginning, I recruited 3 initiates in the right most section of the starting castle, and 3 warriors on the left. I sent all citizens BUT the most bottom-right one to capture villages. Instead of sending the bottom right one to capture villages, I sent him close enough to the land mass north west of the undead keep so that all the bats would come and attack him (With Cylanna behind him). With his good defence, he usually survives, or maybe I'm just lucky. After all the bats get drawn in, which is about turned 2-3 (DAYTIME!!), you can mop them up with your initiates and warriors streaming from the keep, preventing them from going out to capture villages. They only managed to capture 3 villages in total, the two closest to their keep in the water and swamp, and the one in the swamp south east of your starting keep because all the skeletons/bats/wc's gravitated towards my force. This strategy has worked wonders for me, as I usually inflict enough damage in the first 3 turns to keep pushing throughout the night and beat this scenario relatively easily even on the hardest difficulty. Using this strategy, the difficulty drops to about a 5 from a 10. 10/10 for fun level!

Only thing I figured out from someone else is that bats will forego taking a village to attack a unit. The rest I just happened upon. There's probably people that have figured this out already!

NOTE THAT THIS WILL ONLY WORK ON HIGHER DIFFICULTIES, AS IF THEY ARE JUST NORMAL BATS THEY WILL NOT ATTACK THE CITIZEN!

After playing this multiple times, I found this incredible strategy, so I thought I'd share it =)
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shadow12
Posts: 98
Joined: November 6th, 2015, 1:06 am

Re: Scenario Review: DW 1 - Invasion!

Post by shadow12 »

(1) What difficulty level and version of Wesnoth have you played the scenario on? Med., Wesnoth Ver 1.10.5, iOS App Ver 1.0.4 (not jailbroken) so it is not possible yet to upload or download a replay.gz

(2) How difficult did you find the scenario? (1-10) 8
(3) How clear did you find the scenario objectives? Clear
(4) How clear and interesting did you find the dialog and storyline of the scenario? Clear and very interesting!
(5) What were your major challenges in meeting the objectives of the scenario? killing the undead king, leveling Kai.
(6) How fun do you think the scenario is? (1-10) 10/10 very fun!

(7) What, if any, are changes you would have made to the scenario to make it more fun? None, it was good as is!

(8) Was there any event that caused you to lose the game and forced you to reload or restart the scenario
Yes, restarted once from turn one. The first time I thought I could waltz right in and kill the undead king. Boy was I wrong! :(

In a nutshell:
1. Sent Citizens out to gain villages and to use as decoys. The citizens are quick at accumulating villages. After taking the villages in the north/northeast, I didnt leave citizens there to hold them. Instead I tried to hold on to villages around my keep and around the southern section.

2. Recruited the max of 3 of each Hunter, Initiate and Fighter. Each are effective in their own way. I think Fighters do ok against undead. Try to level your Initiate to Priestess for sure, they will gain the ability to heal.

3. Did not take Kai south with the soldiers to kill the undead king. Instead used Citizens to trap and wound bats/other undead around the lake, then let Kai finish them off. The citizens were surprisingly resilient, especially in a village. Keeping Kai in the lake has the advantage of being able to recruit more citizens as needed. (spoiler: If you get Kai to lvl 1, you have an option of not having to fight at all in the next scenario.)

4. A big challenge was to get the soldiers through the wave of skeletons. I kept the soldiers in a tight formation. Attack during the day. Protect the priestesses. Lure the enemy into the water with a wounded citizen. They usually go for it like a cat after a wounded sparrow. The undead king was well defended by skeletons and other undead. It took me awhile to finish it.

Ended around turn 18 with about 250 carry over (which I didn't need) and 8 out of the original 9 soldiers. Had 3 priestesses, an entangler, 3 Titans, Kai lvl 2, and some lvl 1's.
Sometimes life unexpectedly throws a Troll or a nasty Queen Naga in your path.
sine_nomine
Posts: 39
Joined: April 30th, 2016, 11:34 pm

Re: Scenario Review: DW 1 - Invasion!

Post by sine_nomine »

(1) What difficulty level and version of Wesnoth have you played the scenario on?
Difficult (Triton), wesnoth 1.12.4

(2) How difficult did you find the scenario? (1-10)
7

(3) How clear did you find the scenario objectives?
Perfect

(4) How clear and interesting did you find the dialog and storyline of the scenario?
Great

(5) What were your major challenges in meeting the objectives of the scenario?
I love this scenario's gimmicks. The bats flying around grabbing villages makes it entirely possible to get overrun by a huge number of undead and you'd probably be spread too thin if you tried to prevent that. I think it's important to take out a couple soulless before the first night, then you can retreat to safety. Keeping your limited number of level 1s alive is important so you need to pay attention to time of day and screen with citizens. Limiting the number of level 1s really lets this scenario showcase the utility of citizens.

(6) How fun do you think the scenario is? (1-10)
9.5

(7) What, if any, are changes you would have made to the scenario to make it more fun?
I can't think of anything, it was great.

(8) Was there any event that caused you to lose the game and forced you to reload or restart the scenario?
I restarted this scenario once due to being rusty and therefore positioning poorly, leading to losing units, losing villages, and getting swarmed.
On my second try I was fortunate enough to recruit some initiates with good traits so I got my act together and played more carefully. Aside from that, I played through the campaign totally blind with no resets at all (I guess that's considered an "ironman" run).

Some general feedback:
This campaign was never extremely difficult but it was still challenging enough to keep things interesting and tense for a blind first playthrough. Overall I found it to be very well designed. It seemed like it was always possible to win without having to risk important units, plus there were plenty of opportunities to train units. Leadership, the number of villages, and the cost of units generally encouraged the use of several fresh recruits every chapter, which I like. There was quite a variety of enemies in this campaign and although diviners are clearly the most important unit of your army it felt like all the merfolk units were useful in some situation or another. I was expecting fighters to be worthless aside from meatshielding but even pierce attacks had their use due to sea monsters and drakes, plus the storm trident and holy water made a couple into valuable units. I suppose the merman spearman kinda sucks but there's not too much you can do about that. I really like the unique units in this campaign; the leader's leadership is immensely useful and adds a lot more thought into planning tactics, brawlers are solid impact combat units when under leadership and the stun ability is cool (though personally I didn't use it much), and citizens are amazing fodder that can contribute some significant damage under the right conditions. I'm a big fan of fodder spam and it was very effective in this campaign; by the start of the final scenario I had lost one loyal brawler (oops), seven level one units, and 55 merman citizens.
The campaign was a perfect length, not too long or too short. I didn't distribute exp super well or milk scenarios for exp as well as I could have but had no problems levelling my units and had a pretty good force by the end.
I thought the number of loyal units was appropriate (I don't like it when you have too many) and the fact that they get recalled by default (for free, one turn early) makes them incredibly valuable. I don't have any problems with that but I just thought it was noteworthy, as losing a loyal or missing a bat would be a major loss while gaining extra bats in scenario 2 would be a huge advantage.
Not sure what else to comment on. I even thought the writing was quite good, both the storyline and the way the dialogue explains the gameplay mechanics. Also the art looks nice.

Thanks for making this amazing campaign!
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lujo
Posts: 27
Joined: December 10th, 2014, 10:21 pm

Re: Scenario Review: DW 1 - Invasion!

Post by lujo »

(1) What difficulty level and version of Wesnoth have you played the scenario on?

highest, wesnoth 1.12.6 (I think)

(2) How difficult did you find the scenario? (1-10)

7 - before I really looked at the Merman Citizens and Brawlers
1 - completely trivial once I looked at Merman Citizens and Brawlers, even at highest difficulty

(3) How clear did you find the scenario objectives?

Fine

(4) How clear and interesting did you find the dialog and storyline of the scenario?

Fine, better than most

(5) What were your major challenges in meeting the objectives of the scenario?

Not paying attention to cizitizens. I got overrun by skeletons on the first try because it was impossible to efficiently level up enough things to do impact damage. At that point it seemed completely impossible to win this scenario and the only way it could be winnable would be if the citizens were rather too good. I looked into them, and they were indeed rather too good. This trivialized the level from that point on.

(6) How fun do you think the scenario is? (1-10)

7.

(7) What, if any, are changes you would have made to the scenario to make it more fun?

Nothing you can do apart from properly developing core mermen so that you don't need crazy overpowered Cizitens and Brawlers. Having said that I would properly develop core mermen into a faction in their own right that doesn't need to resort to such gimmicks.

(8) Was there any event that caused you to lose the game and forced you to reload or restart the scenario?

Yes, I failed to understand that a 9 gold unit trivializes the skeleton assault so I had to reload once due to being overrun by skeletons. Then afterwards I thought about replaying the scenario for more XP, but I decided that having a fully upgraded Leader and a large heap of Brawlers made up for not having leveled up an initiate to lvl 3.
Konrad2
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Posts: 3330
Joined: November 24th, 2010, 6:30 pm

Re: Scenario Review: DW 1 - Invasion!

Post by Konrad2 »

(1) What difficulty level and version of Wesnoth have you played the scenario on?

Difficult, 1.14.1

(2) How difficult did you find the scenario? (1-10)

3, as long as you remember to avoid fighting at night

(3) How clear did you find the scenario objectives?

It's hard to make it more clear.

(4) How clear and interesting did you find the dialog and storyline of the scenario?

Very.

(5) What were your major challenges in meeting the objectives of the scenario?

Paying attention to the day/night circle.

(6) How fun do you think the scenario is? (1-10)

6

(7) What, if any, are changes you would have made to the scenario to make it more fun?

-

(8) Was there any event that caused you to lose the game and forced you to reload or restart the scenario?

Yes, I tried to fight them too early in my first run. Of course, the zombie apocalypse teached me that I was being stupid.
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LordWolfDan
Posts: 216
Joined: September 30th, 2018, 7:31 am

Re: Scenario Review: DW 1 - Invasion!

Post by LordWolfDan »

(1) What difficulty level and version of Wesnoth have you played the scenario on?

- 1.14.5, Normal

(2) How difficult did you find the scenario? (1-10)

- 6

(3) How clear did you find the scenario objectives?

- Pretty clear

(4) How clear and interesting did you find the dialog and storyline of the scenario?

- Nice beginning, I like it how it ites up with "Eastern Invasion". Plus having a story where you're in charge of mustering a powerful army while proving yourself as a king is a good point here

(5) What were your major challenges in meeting the objectives of the scenario?

- Fighting undead. They do seem quite tough as merman hunters and merman fighters are useless against them

(6) How fun do you think the scenario is? (1-10)

- 6

(7) What, if any, are changes you would have made to the scenario to make it more fun?

- It's good as it is

(8) Was there any event that caused you to lose the game and forced you to reload or restart the scenario?

- No
devavrata
Posts: 119
Joined: August 30th, 2012, 8:59 pm

Re: Scenario Review: DW 1 - Invasion!

Post by devavrata »

Content Feedback wrote: August 21st, 2010, 7:26 pm(1) What difficulty level and version of Wesnoth have you played the scenario on?
Battle for Wesnoth 1.10.7, all four difficulty levels.
Content Feedback wrote: August 21st, 2010, 7:26 pm(2) How difficult did you find the scenario? (1-10)
7
Content Feedback wrote: August 21st, 2010, 7:26 pm(3) How clear did you find the scenario objectives?
Clear
Content Feedback wrote: August 21st, 2010, 7:26 pm(4) How clear and interesting did you find the dialog and storyline of the scenario?
Clear, interesting
Content Feedback wrote: August 21st, 2010, 7:26 pm(5) What were your major challenges in meeting the objectives of the scenario?
You are facing undead, which are hardly harmed from piercing weapons such as javelins or tridents - the dialogue rightly speaks of the undead laughing at the spears thrown at them. The walkthrough recommends the Brawler, but it is limited up to level 1 - so in the long run, it is not advisable. So the best choice is to recruit sorceresses. Also hunters (and then promote them to Netcasters) and fighters, thinking in the long run. For the time being, use the citizens you've got and promote them to brawlers but don't recruit any more citizens.
Content Feedback wrote: August 21st, 2010, 7:26 pm(6) How fun do you think the scenario is? (1-10)
8
Content Feedback wrote: August 21st, 2010, 7:26 pm(7) What, if any, are changes you would have made to the scenario to make it more fun?
It is good as it is.
Content Feedback wrote: August 21st, 2010, 7:26 pm(8) Was there any event that caused you to lose the game and forced you to reload or restart the scenario?
No
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