Scenario Review: DW 1 - Invasion!

Feedback for the mainline campaign Dead Water.

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beetlenaut
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Re: Scenario Review: DW 1 - Invasion!

Post by beetlenaut »

I've never seen anyone play it that aggressively before, but nice work. I usually accept the loss of more villages including all the ones on land in the east. That method works too, but it takes longer. (The undead coming in from the land are too slow to be a major threat.)
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Benefuchs
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Re: Scenario Review: DW 1 - Invasion!

Post by Benefuchs »

  • 1) Level, Version? 1.10.4; fighter and warrior (German)
    2) Difficulty? 6 ; 8
    3) Scenario Objectives? Clear.
    4) Dialogue and story? Nice; I like Gwabbo's sailor-speak.
    5) Challenges? If you don't know before that undead will spawn from the villages the enemy captures, you probably find out to late. Especially undead mermen make it difficult.
    6) Is it fun? 9
    I really like mermen, and the map is very nice for them.
    7) Make it more fun? Hint for the spawn of undead from the villages, I liked the suggestion that Gwabbo already sees that during his escape from the skeleton.
    8) Reload or restart? Leader got killed in a careless and a bit unlucky move. Did not manage to get much XP and levelling, will probably play again.
    9) WML? NA
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Marche
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Re: Scenario Review: DW 1 - Invasion!

Post by Marche »

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

Citizen (Beginner), 1.10.3

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

3

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

Crystal

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

A bit bland, but it introduces the campaign well.

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

Bit of bad luck with hits, nothing really major (though my impatience could've easily been the death of me)

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

I want to rate it higher but I can't give more than 7. The merpeople are fairly boring units, for me, and I don't really enjoy docking all my water warriors to fight through mobs. This scenario is pretty good about it, with swamps, but it feels less like I'm using nifty water units and more like I'm trying to walk my pet fish. It does its job, if that's to introduce the units and their capabilities, but there's just not much to write home about them I think.

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

Make it either a smaller level or make the far-off villages more important. Maybe they are on harder difficulties - I wouldn't know. But I bumrushed immediately and didn't need more than a single turns' units. I'll be trying this on greater difficulty to see how it scales, but I'm still a beginner and the beginner level here feels as easy as the first level in a Tale of Two Brothers. Some kind of strategy would help, but I can't think of which terrain could be altered without messing with other difficulties.

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

I might've lost king once or twice to a bat attack, but I don't think I did. Got close enough to make it a nailbiter, though.
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PorkSol
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Re: Scenario Review: DW 1 - Invasion!

Post by PorkSol »

(1) What difficulty level and version of Wesnoth have you played the scenario on?
1.10.5 - Triton - (Difficult) - No save/load

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

At first, 11.

Once I read the spoiler on how the AI worked, 7.

At first I did not understand the way the AI bats worked. I assumed that they would go after the villages no matter what, so I split my forces and tried to guard every village. This strategy is impossible, your citizens are too weak to guard the villages and the AI will overwhelm you with Soulless.

Embarrassingly, I never figured out the AI targeting logic on my own. I ended up reading a spoiler in this thread that explained that the bats will not go after villages if they can attack your units instead. So you don't need to guard the villages at all.

After that, the scenario became quite reasonable. I simply rushed my citizens forward with healer support and kept the bats focused on my units, instead of capping villages. The AI only got the first water village in the southern swamp, so they didn't get a lot of aquatic soulless. They got some additional land soulless, but they were ineffective since the fight took place primarily in the water. I was able to afford to send some citizens out to capture villages, so I had good income, while the AI had very little. So the AI was overwhelmed and I finished easily on turn 15, with a nice gold bonus and some leveled units. Unfortunately, I had bad luck and didn't get to kill the AI leader with my leader. 1 hp citizen sent to weaken the AI leader killed him on a 9% chance.

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

Objectives were clear. Strategy was not, but that's not necessarily a bad thing.

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

No complaints.

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

See above. Learning the trick to keep the bats from taking villages. After that, it was merely a matter of sucking the bats in, sacrificing citizens to hang on til dawn and leveling units. Some restarts due to poor execution and loss of loyal unit/leader/priestess.

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

7.5 - There isn't anything wrong with the scenario, but it requires you to know that the bats will behave in a counter-intuitive and self defeating way. Since this is only an intermediate campaign, some people may not have figured that out yet, so the scenario can become pretty irritating for them. I had to restart a lot more in this scenario than I did in the initial scenarios of the expert campaigns. If this was labeled as an expert campaign I would probably bump the fun score up by a point or so.

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

I can't think of any. It is good as is. I don't know if the rest of the campaign is difficult enough to be considered an expert campaign, because I haven't played it yet. So I can't suggest adjusting the description, yet.

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

Failure to understand the bat AI - 10+ restarts. Sloppy execution of the main battle, letting important units get swarmed - 3 restarts

I'd post a replay, but it is corrupt. It doesn't show the aquatic soulless that are spawned by event early on.
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D-Wade
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Re: Scenario Review: DW 1 - Invasion!

Post by D-Wade »

(1) What difficulty level and version of Wesnoth have you played the scenario on?
Normal, 1.10.5

(2) How difficult did you find the scenario? (1-10)
7, It was the first time I really used mermen.

(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?
It was a good introduction to the campaign.

(5) What were your major challenges in meeting the objectives of the scenario?
Trying to level citizens and your heroes.

(6) How fun do you think the scenario is? (1-10)
8, was fun playing mermen but the scenario itself was nothing too special

(7) What, if any, are changes you would have made to the scenario to make it more fun?
Just leave it as it is ;).

(8) Was there any event that caused you to lose the game and forced you to reload or restart the scenario?
Nope.
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flammstrudel
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Re: Scenario Review: DW 1 - Invasion!

Post by flammstrudel »

(1) What difficulty level and version of Wesnoth have you played the scenario on?
1.10.2 Triton (difficult) – no reloads

(2) How difficult did you find the scenario? (1-10)
6/10

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

(4) How clear and interesting did you find the dialog and storyline of the scenario?
It's okay.

(5) What were your major challenges in meeting the objectives of the scenario?
Finding the right strategy. My first idea was to contain the plague by holding as much villages as possible. That proved to be impossible due to bats. I attempted it a couple of times and couldn't make it work. Next time I tried to win a decisive victory near the southern edge of the lake and quell the undead's conquest this way: it failed miserably. After that I gave up all landed villages right from the start, placed my army south of my castle and slowly lured the enemies in the trap. Around turn 15 all core units of the enemy were gone, however there were heaps of zombie fishes closing in on me (they controlled all villas except the ones on the northern ridge). I abandoned the main base and raced south, crushed a few newly recruited units and killed the undefended boss mage (around turn 18). Didn't lose any units (except civilian fodder), got a brawler and leveled two other units. This way the scenario was surprisingly easy.

(6) How fun do you think the scenario is? (1-10)
9/10

(7) What, if any, are changes you would have made to the scenario to make it more fun?
It's fine the way it is.

(8) Was there any event that caused you to lose the game and forced you to reload or restart the scenario?
A couple failed attempts due to wrong strategy.
RaustBD
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Re: Scenario Review: DW 1 - Invasion!

Post by RaustBD »

Hey, I just have a comment to make on the campaign in general: Why on earth did you make such an awesome class like the merman brawler and then just have them stop leveling at LEVEL 1? That was such a let-down when I leveled my first merman civilian only to find out that the brawler was a level 1 prestige class. I'd SERIOUSLY recommend adding in some additional classes for that line, it's just too much of a let-down otherwise.
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beetlenaut
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Re: Scenario Review: DW 1 - Invasion!

Post by beetlenaut »

RaustBD wrote:Why on earth did you make such an awesome class like the merman brawler and then just have them stop leveling at LEVEL 1?
I had several reasons. 1) The whole point of the unit is that they are not soldiers. They are unarmed, and you can only go so far without weapons. 2) Against skeletal units, they are pretty powerful already, and adding more power would make killing those too easy. Like many units that top out early, brawlers are actually more like level 1.5. 3) Part of the strategy is to decide weather not being able to level is worth getting the impact damage. 4) It makes the unit lines more interesting when they don't all go to level 3.

I'm sorry it hurt your feelings, but there is no reason to find them any more disappointing than a soulless, which I love to see on my side. I usually reach the last scenario with six or seven brawlers--many of which have AMLA'd a couple times and have around 45 or 50 HP.
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RaustBD
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Re: Scenario Review: DW 1 - Invasion!

Post by RaustBD »

beetlenaut wrote:
I'm sorry it hurt your feelings, but there is no reason to find them any more disappointing than a soulless, which I love to see on my side.
Alright, I respect your choice, but I heavily contest this point. Merman Civilians are not like walking corpses or goblins. They are like farmers and ruffians, a rookie class that branches off into several units that fully develop into level 3s, and so it's really more like letting walking corpses level up into skeletons or skeleton archers and then justifying the soulless leveling dead end by saying they have a plague special.

Just saying.

Personally I also disagree with the notion that making some units have stunted class progressions adds variety or makes things "more interesting", but something tells me that would be a very difficult debate to have, and besides, this isn't the place for it.

Edit: Oh, sorry I didn't say this in my first post, but I'm liking the campaign so far.
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beetlenaut
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Re: Scenario Review: DW 1 - Invasion!

Post by beetlenaut »

RaustBD wrote:it's really more like letting walking corpses level up into skeletons or skeleton archers and then justifying the soulless leveling dead end by saying they have a plague special.
Yep. IftU is like that. You can level walking corpses into ghouls, then all the way up to ghasts (and you can't recruit ghouls either). I still choose the soulless dead end sometimes because plague can be more useful than poison. So I agree with you, but don't see anything wrong with it.
RaustBD wrote:Edit: Oh, sorry I didn't say this in my first post, but I'm liking the campaign so far.
I'm glad you like it otherwise.
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ChaosRider
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Re: Scenario Review: DW 1 - Invasion!

Post by ChaosRider »

I see here something about walking corpse lvlup to ghoul, you can use allways in campaign one of MWC eras(Age of Gods = 5 lvl leaders,Age of Legends=4 lvl leaders, Age of Heroes=3 lvl leaders, Normal=2 lvl leaders, Rpg=1 lvl leaders (here no recruits, for maps where you use only your leader)) and for maps which delete recruit list of each player in game and adds diffrent one you can use same eras but which have in name "RR" (Random Recruits), this will allow you to have recruits from these eras :D...
Creator of WOTG (+2880 units), MWC (+615 units), SurvivorsArea, RandomColosseum, RC WOTG, RC MWC, ColosseumRandomClonesBattle, BetweenDarknessAndLight, StealingWeapons, MoreUnitsForms, MoreDamageTypes, CanBeOnlyOne, ColosseumOneWinner, BonusSpam, CriticalStrike - available at 1.12 Wesnoth server.
fareley
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Re: Scenario Review: DW 1 - Invasion!

Post by fareley »

beetlenaut wrote:I've never seen anyone play it that aggressively before, but nice work. I usually accept the loss of more villages including all the ones on land in the east. That method works too, but it takes longer. (The undead coming in from the land are too slow to be a major threat.)
I did the first scenario again just now (still a very beautiful campaign)
Again it took some time to figure out how you meant to play the scenario, I tried it your way this time :)

(1) What difficulty level and version of Wesnoth have you played the scenario on?
1.10.6, hardest difficulty
(2) How difficult did you find the scenario? (1-10)
10. It is not like SUPER unbeatable, but make it much harder and you will even frustrate hardcore players away from the scenario
(3) How clear did you find the scenario objectives?
Very clear, kill the guy
(4) How clear and interesting did you find the dialog and storyline of the scenario?
chuckled at the king saying "Yay I did it" or sth like that after landing his first hit, just when I placed him at the most dangerous spot on my front lines. What a naive king, worthy of being only lvl 0!
(5) What were your major challenges in meeting the objectives of the scenario?
Completely getting overrun on my first attempts by the hordes of soulless in the water; figuring out just how much aggression I wanted to apply this time; leveling the king; attempting to not shed tears over losing my lvl 2 fighter or two high xp initiates. Or like 2-3 brawlers lost (I was able to level some more though).
(6) How fun do you think the scenario is? (1-10)
8 - It is a really great scenario with a very challenging mechanic of the enemy suddenly snowballing out of control, interesting units and an awesome map! I would give it a 10 out of 10 if it just wasn't so hard until you really get into the fish mindset (going with the flow), which does take an hour or two.
(7) What, if any, are changes you would have made to the scenario to make it more fun?
I don't know; the scenario is like super awesome, just hard. Just from difficulty alone (and the scale of hordes of undead) I would have placed it later in the campaign, but story-wise it does make sense this way. There is quite some hidden knowledge pretty unique to this scenario that the player has to figure out first while going through frustrating losses: not just the bats rather fighting than capturing, but more important what villages are acceptable to lose, when to fight (starting at dusk), where to fight (river banks), using the own army to divide the army of the enemy so he cannot clump up his fishmen soulless etc.
(8) Was there any event that caused you to lose the game and forced you to reload or restart the scenario?
Restarting from turn 1 a couple times, so this sadly corrupted the replay :c
Also reloading one turn where I turned off my brain and just suicide-killed my king for no reason. Other than that, no reload/restarts, I did come to accept my high-exp/lvl losses.

Basically my strategy this time was to not lose a single village to the west of the enemies' keep, but to lose all north and east from my keep (was able to not lose like the most north-western 2 villages from the north-east island, but the other ones I eventually lost and recaptured). Was able to conquer and divide, using my priestess to snipe a soulless fish each turn and the 3 initiates to snipe at least one more, keeping their numbers manageable and eventually decimated nearly all of them until I had to fight the land units (which I milked for exp for my leader, losing 2 high exp priestesses in the process). Sacrificed a lvl 2 fighter and a couple of brawler for no real reason standing next to the enemy leader (who was on 7 hp the entire time) while getting exp on the north on the melee units.

Sorry for a lot of text; once again thank you very much for designing an awesome scenario/campaign :)
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Maiklas3000
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Re: Scenario Review: DW 1 - Invasion!

Post by Maiklas3000 »

(1) Difficulty and version? Nightmare, 1.11.15.
(2) Difficult? (1-10) 9 at first, 7 once you get the hang of it.
(3) Clear? Clear.
(4) Dialog? Good, but see "Changes" below.
(5) Challenges? It's not nearly as hard as it looks. The hardest part is keeping Cylanna and Gwabbo alive through the first night. You can take horrifying losses of other units and still easily win. In contrast to 1.9, in 1.11, bats no longer predictably attack. I gave a healthy Vampire Bat the choice of a juicy beached Merman Citizen or a village, and it chose the village. What makes the scenario relatively easy is when the enemy gets closer to your keep and splits up to attack units sitting on villages. You can then swarm with Citizens by day, similar to bats by night. Giving the killing blow of the enemy leader to your baby leader is important, but not easy, because he's likely to miss and then be vulnerable to attack, unless you finish off the enemy with another unit or toss a wounded Citizen to the enemy.
(6) How fun do you think the scenario is? (1-10) 9.
(7) Changes? When there is the dialog that cries that they're raising the dead from every village, my screen is not scrolled to that area, so I was like "What? Where?!" You can see it in the attached replay.

I think it would be nice to create a new first scenario in this campaign, one that would not be so tricky and that would allow you to advance your leader potentially to L1 (which is highly desirable for the current second scenario.) I had in mind something like a wolf hunting trip. Seems appropriate for a boy. [Edit: Oh, I forgot about the "Wolf Coast" scenario. Well, instead, it could be a hunt for Crab Men from Under The Burning Suns.]

(8) Restarts? I lost a few times, restarting from start each time. No save-reloads.
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Inky
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Re: Scenario Review: DW 1 - Invasion!

Post by Inky »

(1) What difficulty level and version of Wesnoth have you played the scenario on?
1.10.4 Triton /difficult (automatic 130 gold)

(2) How difficult did you find the scenario? (1-10)
9 - extremely difficult. Actually this scenario gave me more trouble than any other scenario in the whole campaign.

(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?
Good.

(5) What were your major challenges in meeting the objectives of the scenario?
Once the enemy bats start capturing villages, the amount of soulless becomes unmanageable.
Also had some trouble leveling Kai Krellis since he kept missing! I did level him before the end though.

(6) How fun do you think the scenario is? (1-10)
8 - a nice challenge.

(7) What, if any, are changes you would have made to the scenario to make it more fun?
Well I found the bats to be pretty annoying but I guess that's the intent.

(8) Was there any event that caused you to lose the game and forced you to reload or restart the scenario?
Yes, this took me 3 tries. (first time Gwabbo died to a bunch of soulless; second time the enemy captured too many villages and became basically unstoppable.) Figured out I needed to immediately send citizens southeast to hold villages/distract the bats.

Strategy: send a couple citizens SE immediately and capture villages there; send rest to get other villages to generate income, then begin spamming citizens until you have the advantage (you have enough income to recruit 2 per turn). I also got 3 initiates as they are the only ones who can do anything against bats, but 2 of them ended up dead. In retrospect I should have gotten some fighters/hunters to help ZOC the bats.

(Unfortunately my replays for this campaign are messed up.)
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D-Wade
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Re: Scenario Review: DW 1 - Invasion!

Post by D-Wade »

(1) What difficulty level and version of Wesnoth have you played the scenario on?
1.10.7 Normal
(2) How difficult did you find the scenario? (1-10)
7 (first time), 4 (second time)
The mission isn't that hard but you stockpile quite some casualties if you just try to protect the villages. After I read that the bats rather go after your units than the villages, I sent some Citizens down south and only lost two or three villages. The rest of the mission was easy and I tried to level up as many units as possible.
(3) How clear did you find the scenario objectives?
Very clear.
(4) How clear and interesting did you find the dialog and storyline of the scenario?
Interesting start to the campaign.
(5) What were your major challenges in meeting the objectives of the scenario?
The major challenge was to prevent the bats from capturing too many villages early on and risk being flooded by Walking Corpses. Other than that it is a walk in the park.
(6) How fun do you think the scenario is? (1-10)
8 - It has an interesting challenge at the start.
(7) What, if any, are changes you would have made to the scenario to make it more fun?
None.
(8) Was there any event that caused you to lose the game and forced you to reload or restart the scenario?
Once I pressured to hard and Cylanna ended up dying.
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