Winds of Fate

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Re: Winds of Fate 3.0.0 (Drake Campaign for BfW 1.15.13 and up)

Post by SigurdFireDragon »

Lord-Knightmare wrote: June 2nd, 2021, 8:19 pm I wish "Lich-Lord" was gender specific, like "Lich-Lady" or "Lich-Mistress", otherwise I would not have mistaken the Sowan for a male lich lord.
Is there anything in lore/mainline preventing this from being done for this case?
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Winds of Fate 3.0.1 (Drake Campaign for BfW 1.15.13 and up)

Post by SigurdFireDragon »

Winds of Fate 3.0.1 is now available on the Wesnoth 1.15.x add-on server!

Changes:
Fix some unit spawns appearing on volcanos
S05x: Prevent replay save for dialog only scenario
S09 & S10: Make foreshadowing message fire only once per scenario
S09: Make sure only player side can attack the dragon
S04 & S05: Remove carryover in 04, and start gold in 05
S04: Make sure ally doesn't steal player villages
Add a unit overlay for the sapphire item
Make sapphire do 6-3 damage for level one units and 2 more for each level
S04: More AI aggressiveness
S06: Remove one Caravel
S11: Reduce enemy gold
S10 & S11: Recruitable veterans
Some code cleanups
Dialog, lore, & story improvements as well
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Re: Winds of Fate 3.0.1 (Drake Campaign for BfW 1.15.13 and up)

Post by Lord-Knightmare »

S10 & S11: Recruitable veterans
I greatly appreciate this change. Despite being very expensive to recruit, at least the lost of too many veterans here won't impact the player too much now. On a side note, I can finally get level 3 units of the Clasher caste now (I only got 1 so far if my saves are checked).

I also saw the PR. Good Luck.
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Re: Winds of Fate 3.0.1 (Drake Campaign for BfW 1.15.13 and up)

Post by octalot »

S02 from the version 3.0.0 of the add-on seems to have a bug in Karron's AI. Instead of taking the north-east castle, he ended up trying to take the north-west one, thus dying (well, retreating) before ever recruiting.

Turn 5 I move a drake to 19,16 to draw enemies north-east during the night. (The next turn I forget to move him, resulting in a careless loss.)
Turn 7 Karron turns up and makes clear that I need to race for the north-west boss.
Turn 9 Karron gets poisoned
Turn 10 Karron rests in a village that's 7 hexes from the north-west keep, and 8 hexes from the north-east one
Turn 11 The north-west leader is off his keep, the north-east leader is on his, and Karron goes for the vacant one.
Turn 12 A unit attacking Karron blocks his route to the keep, otherwise this would probably have been a loss with him recruiting next to the must-survive orc leader.
Turn 13 the orcs beat Karron.

The attachment is a mid-game save. Careless play on my part sacrificed a Drake Flare who was already half-way to level 3. The enemies have a lot of income without Karron's forces capturing villages, so I'm considering restarting, but given I now have plenty of time to farm experience I should probably play on.

Turn 7 is quite scary because north-west doesn't have many troops between him and Karron. It wasn't until I checked the scenario file that I realised where the huge income was coming from.
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Re: Winds of Fate 3.0.1 (Drake Campaign for BfW 1.15.13 and up)

Post by name »

octalot wrote: June 5th, 2021, 11:44 am S02 from the version 3.0.0 of the add-on seems to have a bug in Karron's AI.
Looks like an odd sequence of events created this behavior in the AI:
1. An enemy ship drifts into attack range and Karron decides to go after it (rather than stay with his land_on_keep leader goal).
2. After sinking the ship, Karron goes back on mission but is poisoned and retreats to a village to cure.
3. From that village, Karron gets opportunistic about which keep to go to (again abandoning his leader goal that was set to the NE keep).

From previous experience working with the AI, I find what works best (or works at all) is to rearrange the situation a bit to fit the typical AI behavior.

So I will remove assassin recruiting from the orc side facing Karron, to improve #2. Whenever Karron does not get poisoned (or badly injured) he tends to stay enough on the task of taking the NE keep. There have been some cases in the past where poisoning caused near-losses of Karron.
octalot wrote: June 5th, 2021, 11:44 am The enemies have a lot of income without Karron's forces capturing villages, so I'm considering restarting, but given I now have plenty of time to farm experience I should probably play on.
If you do decide to restart, consider removing the Orcish Assassin from Side 3's recruit list. That change will likely be applied to the next version and it might make Karron a lot more predictable.
octalot wrote: June 5th, 2021, 11:44 am It wasn't until I checked the scenario file that I realised where the huge income was coming from.
We use village_gold extensively to set income advantages for enemies. It plays much better this way, since the player can weaken opponents by taking territory/villages from them.

But... I am concerned players are used to enemies having raw income (that somehow became the mainline campaign go-to). Do you feel having a description of the enemy income mechanics in the objective screen notes would have helped you significantly?
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Re: Winds of Fate 3.0.1 (Drake Campaign for BfW 1.15.13 and up)

Post by Lord-Knightmare »

name wrote: June 5th, 2021, 3:18 pm
octalot wrote: June 5th, 2021, 11:44 am S02 from the version 3.0.0 of the add-on seems to have a bug in Karron's AI.
Looks like an odd sequence of events created this behavior in the AI:
1. An enemy ship drifts into attack range and Karron decides to go after it (rather than stay with his land_on_keep leader goal).
2. After sinking the ship, Karron goes back on mission but is poisoned and retreats to a village to cure.
3. From that village, Karron gets opportunistic about which keep to go to (again abandoning his leader goal that was set to the NE keep).

From previous experience working with the AI, I find what works best (or works at all) is to rearrange the situation a bit to fit the typical AI behavior.

So I will remove assassin recruiting from the orc side facing Karron, to improve #2. Whenever Karron does not get poisoned (or badly injured) he tends to stay enough on the task of taking the NE keep. There have been some cases in the past where poisoning caused near-losses of Karron.
octalot wrote: June 5th, 2021, 11:44 am The enemies have a lot of income without Karron's forces capturing villages, so I'm considering restarting, but given I now have plenty of time to farm experience I should probably play on.
If you do decide to restart, consider removing the Orcish Assassin from Side 3's recruit list. That change will likely be applied to the next version and it might make Karron a lot more predictable.
octalot wrote: June 5th, 2021, 11:44 am It wasn't until I checked the scenario file that I realised where the huge income was coming from.
We use village_gold extensively to set income advantages for enemies. It plays much better this way, since the player can weaken opponents by taking territory/villages from them.

But... I am concerned players are used to enemies having raw income (that somehow became the mainline campaign go-to). Do you feel having a description of the enemy income mechanics in the objective screen notes would have helped you significantly?
Saying the AI is bugged instead of "bad RNG luck" seems silly to me.
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S02 - Aspirant difficulty. I saw no such bug in his AI.
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Re: Winds of Fate 3.0.1 (Drake Campaign for BfW 1.15.13 and up)

Post by Hejnewar »

Difficulty: Difficult.
Version: 3.0.1

S1 - No threat, just camp nearest mountain range and you are golden.
S2- No threat, your ally is worse enemy than you actual enemy.
S3 -No threat, just outspam your opponent with units.
S4 - Normal threat, krakens are annoying to fight against and a lot of pierce.
S5 - Confusing (no threat), constantly spawning invisible units and fear of villages being retaken by randomly spawned animal, (yes they do have little intrest but that doesnt prevent them for sometimes spawning in villages and thanking them that way),just fly around get bells easy once you get a hang of what is happening. You can farm xp there but I did not.
S6 - Normal threat/ no threat, I'm pretty sure that you can cheese it by outmaneuvering enemy army, I did that a bit here but just a bit.
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Re: Winds of Fate 3.0.1 (Drake Campaign for BfW 1.15.13 and up)

Post by Hejnewar »

S7 - No threat.
S8 - Normal / high threat, I was constantly forgetting that I have to extract units manually and had to reload because of that in the end. (Why does enemy wose spawn near exit from the level?)
S9 - No threat.
S10 - Very high threat / high threat if I had more melee focused army, it would go better but with this many Infernos ulfs were problematic. S10 is way more of a last boss battle than S11. (This scenario is more of a nightmare difficulty than difficult difficulty probably.)
S11- No threat / no threat, I don't want to bother with actually fighting him, I did it for a bit off replay but in general giving him a keep would just repeat S3 but on a bigger scale and with player just spamming Arbiters.
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Re: Winds of Fate 3.0.1 (Drake Campaign for BfW 1.15.13 and up)

Post by name »

Hejnewar wrote: June 5th, 2021, 8:46 pm Difficulty: Difficult.
Version: 3.0.1
It is funny that we ramped up the Difficult difficulty a few months ago and were worried it might have gone too far. Apparently not.
Will take it further then, on the scenarios you found unthreatening.
Hejnewar wrote: June 5th, 2021, 8:46 pm S1 - No threat, just camp nearest mountain range and you are golden.
Would a higher mountain spawn rate on the stymphalian birds or the addition of giant spiders spawning in the mountains help?
Hejnewar wrote: June 5th, 2021, 8:46 pm S5 - Confusing (no threat), constantly spawning invisible units and fear of villages being retaken by randomly spawned animal, (yes they do have little intrest but that doesnt prevent them for sometimes spawning in villages and thanking them that way),just fly around get bells easy once you get a hang of what is happening. You can farm xp there but I did not.
I will have to look for a way to disable their village capture ability altogether.
Looks like one way may be to reset village ownership upon capture: https://www.wesnoth.org/forum/viewtopic.php?t=36594
Hejnewar wrote: June 5th, 2021, 9:03 pm S10 - Very high threat / high threat if I had more melee focused army, it would go better but with this many Infernos ulfs were problematic. S10 is way more of a last boss battle than S11. (This scenario is more of a nightmare difficulty than difficult difficulty probably.)
So would you like me to turn the difficulty down on this one or keep it where it is?
Hejnewar wrote: June 5th, 2021, 9:03 pm S11- No threat / no threat, I don't want to bother with actually fighting him, I did it for a bit off replay but in general giving him a keep would just repeat S3 but on a bigger scale and with player just spamming Arbiters.
You used no saurians? Was there not enough swamp to justify them?
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Re: Winds of Fate 3.0.1 (Drake Campaign for BfW 1.15.13 and up)

Post by Hejnewar »

name wrote: June 6th, 2021, 3:30 am It is funny that we ramped up the Difficult difficulty a few months ago and were worried it might have gone too far. Apparently not.
Will take it further then, on the scenarios you found unthreatening.
Not every scenario needs it. Two that I would say don't need it are S2 and S9. S3 needs it very badly, just spamming units and throwing them at the enemy should not be viable strategy in my opinion. S6 is good (it's not a threat only if you can cheese it), S7 is xp farm and S11 is just lenghty.
Would a higher mountain spawn rate on the stymphalian birds or the addition of giant spiders spawning in the mountains help?
No. There really is just one simple problem, stymphalians are level 1 units (that would cost like 22g) that gives xp equal to level 2 unit, so getting max xp with them is just easy, not to mention that their habitat is very safe because nothing can catch you from ambush there.
So would you like me to turn the difficulty down on this one or keep it where it is?
I would like it turned down, iirc knyght also complained about it on lower difficulties. There is really no point in killing players recall list in second to last scenario given that in the last one you will be mostly spamming arbiters anyway.
You used no saurians? Was there not enough swamp to justify them?
Arbiter is just so much better in this scenario, saurians die from fire, balde, impact and despite their dodge they are not very tanky and also dont deal that much damage (they are cheaper tho), just too much of their price comes from movement and skirmisher ability, as for augurs only healers are needed. Arbiters are hard to kill wherever they stand and your goal is to create line of units that wont die no matter what and as long as you cycle healthy and wounded ones at some point you will kill all blue units and win the scenario.
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Re: Winds of Fate 3.0.1 (Drake Campaign for BfW 1.15.13 and up)

Post by SigurdFireDragon »

Hejnewar wrote: June 5th, 2021, 8:46 pm S5 - Confusing (no threat), constantly spawning invisible units and fear of villages being retaken by randomly spawned animal, (yes they do have little intrest but that doesnt prevent them for sometimes spawning in villages and thanking them that way),just fly around get bells easy once you get a hang of what is happening. You can farm xp there but I did not.
AFAICT, they are not spawning there and won't seek to capture a village by themselves, but currently the code has nothing to prevent them from moving there if they think it's a good place to attack you from.
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Re: Winds of Fate 3.0.1 (Drake Campaign for BfW 1.15.13 and up)

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Hejnewar wrote: June 6th, 2021, 4:35 pm Not every scenario needs it. Two that I would say don't need it are S2 and S9. S3 needs it very badly, just spamming units and throwing them at the enemy should not be viable strategy in my opinion. S6 is good (it's not a threat only if you can cheese it), S7 is xp farm and S11 is just lenghty.
Okay, I made S01, S03, S05, and S07 more challenging on Difficult. Particularly S03. S05 should have somewhat more potent but less numerous wildlife so it gets in the way a bit less.
Hejnewar wrote: June 6th, 2021, 4:35 pm There really is just one simple problem, stymphalians are level 1 units (that would cost like 22g) that gives xp equal to level 2 unit, so getting max xp with them is just easy, not to mention that their habitat is very safe because nothing can catch you from ambush there.
Lord-Knightmare wrote: May 29th, 2021, 2:43 pm 1. The kill/harvest counter seems too low for "Challenging". Should like 20 or 25.
Reduced Stymphalian level from 2 to 1. Since player XP is now harder to acquire, moved harvest count up from 15 to 20.
Hejnewar wrote: June 6th, 2021, 4:35 pm I would like it turned down, iirc knyght also complained about it on lower difficulties.
Reduced the gold of enemy waves from 300 to 250.
Hejnewar wrote: June 6th, 2021, 4:35 pm Arbiter is just so much better in this scenario, saurians die from fire, balde, impact and despite their dodge they are not very tanky and also dont deal that much damage (they are cheaper tho), just too much of their price comes from movement and skirmisher ability, as for augurs only healers are needed. Arbiters are hard to kill wherever they stand and your goal is to create line of units that wont die no matter what and as long as you cycle healthy and wounded ones at some point you will kill all blue units and win the scenario.
Would this still be true in open swamp? Where you have saurians' 60% defense versus 20% defense for Arbiters?

I ask because the map for this scenario is our own creation with no usage in other mainline campaigns. So I can adjust it to make the center area (where a lot of the fighting takes place) becomes a large swamp. The map is set on the western shores of Lake Vrug, so swamp will not look out of place.
SigurdFireDragon wrote: June 8th, 2021, 2:52 am AFAICT, they are not spawning there and won't seek to capture a village by themselves, but currently the code has nothing to prevent them from moving there if they think it's a good place to attack you from.
Going by the AI WML page, supposedly:

[avoid]: Makes the AI avoid specific locations. The AI never moves a unit to these locations except for trying to move its leader to a keep or toward [leader_goal]s, and thus applies to all CAs except move-leader-to-goals and move-leader-to-keep.

Which sounds like the S05 wildlife AI 100% cannot move to villages with the current code. The wiki could be wrong, and we are also working with a development build. But I suspect the most likely culprit is how the spawner dumps a unit to a neighboring hex when the hex it originally chose is already occupied. You see this behavior a lot in the multiplayer scenario Dark Forecast.

If the alternative hex the spawned unit is dumped on happens to be a village owned by the player, the player village is de-captured.

I think the solution might be to allow the wildlife sides to capture villages technically, since that fires a capture event, whereas de-capturing villages fires no event (that I know of). And then when the capture event fires, reset the village ownership to the original owner (if no original owner, reset to no owner). This way, when a creature lands on a village under any circumstances, it should effectively not be able to capture it.

Would have to test it though.
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Re: Winds of Fate 3.0.1 (Drake Campaign for BfW 1.15.13 and up)

Post by Celtic_Minstrel »

name wrote: June 10th, 2021, 4:28 am [whereas de-capturing villages fires no event (that I know of).
Isn't "de-capturing" a village just a special case of a village capture event? So, maybe it also fires that event?
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Re: Winds of Fate 3.0.1 (Drake Campaign for BfW 1.15.13 and up)

Post by Lord-Knightmare »

Isn't "de-capturing" a village just a special case of a village capture event? So, maybe it also fires that event?
decapping a village is just another capture event, AFAIK.
Reduced Stymphalian level from 2 to 1. Since player XP is now harder to acquire, moved harvest count up from 15 to 20.
Hmm, Symphalian is now a level 1? Is his ranged attack still as menacing as the level 2 variant?
Which sounds like the S05 wildlife AI 100% cannot move to villages with the current code. The wiki could be wrong, and we are also working with a development build. But I suspect the most likely culprit is how the spawner dumps a unit to a neighboring hex when the hex it originally chose is already occupied. You see this behavior a lot in the multiplayer scenario Dark Forecast.
When I was playing S05, the AI monster units ignored all villages and I was careful to never relinquish a village to them. I sort of decided to leave one village uncapped so that I could utilize the scenario for XP grinding.

If you really want them to not capture any village, maybe use an [object] to set movement costs of village of monster units to "impassable"?
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Re: Winds of Fate 3.0.1 (Drake Campaign for BfW 1.15.13 and up)

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Celtic_Minstrel wrote: June 10th, 2021, 1:51 pm Isn't "de-capturing" a village just a special case of a village capture event? So, maybe it also fires that event?
It should be it seems like, but the wiki says: "Villages becoming neutral (via [capture_village]) do not fire capture events."
https://wiki.wesnoth.org/EventWML#capture

Maybe I am reading too much into that sentence?
Lord-Knightmare wrote: June 10th, 2021, 2:33 pm Hmm, Stymphalian is now a level 1? Is his ranged attack still as menacing as the level 2 variant?
All of its stats are the same, except it is now a level 1. By Hejnewar's estimation the stymphalian's stats make it a 22 gold level 1 unit. Which makes it slightly better overall than any one of your starting hunters.

But your hunters are individually better than a stymphalian during the day (and can use lava to boost their fighting power during the night and twilight), can fight better as a pack of 6 to 8 (whereas stymphalians spawn far apart), and can reach level 2/3 (the stymphalian by comparison has no advancements, so it can only AMLA).
Lord-Knightmare wrote: June 10th, 2021, 2:33 pm When I was playing S05, the AI monster units ignored all villages and I was careful to never relinquish a village to them. I sort of decided to leave one village uncapped so that I could utilize the scenario for XP grinding.

If you really want them to not capture any village, maybe use an [object] to set movement costs of village of monster units to "impassable"?
My experience has been the same playing it a number of times on Challenging, but the spawning rate is higher on Difficult, which is what Hejnewar played on. I have reduced the spawn rate slightly for Difficult (compensating by using more dangerous units). But it would still be good to have a catch all solution.

Unfortunately the [object] approach will not solve the spawn-spill issue, since as we see with the Dark Forecast scenario, the spawner will dump units onto impassable terrain whenever it "has" to (which is the likely cause of the bug Hejnewar discovered since he was dealing with a high spawn rate).
Last edited by name on June 10th, 2021, 4:49 pm, edited 1 time in total.
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