8. Xenophobia

[Content Feedback]

(1) What difficulty levels and game versions have you played the scenario on?
(2) How difficult did you find the scenario? (1-10)
(3) How clear did you find the scenario objectives?
(4) How clear and interesting did you find the dialog and storyline of the scenario?
(5) What were your major challenges in meeting the objectives of the scenario?
(6) How fun do you think the scenario is? (1-10)
(7) What, if any, are changes you would have made to the scenario to make it more fun?

[Xindage]

(1) What difficulty levels and game versions have you played the scenario on?
1.18.0 - Incursion - Biased RNG
213 Starting Gold.
(2) How difficult did you find the scenario? (1-10)
4 Kinda easy, saved a lot of gold and prevented anyone from diening.
(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?
This scenario had a good dialogue during the scenario, I like it.
(5) What were your major challenges in meeting the objectives of the scenario?
Mostly when I was trying to cross the bridge into the Orc's territory.
(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?
Make the scenario start with some units already fighting each other, seems like that what caused the war to happen in there was our presence.
Everything was calm and peaceful, as soon the human race put their feet on these lands the war started.
(8) Replay/Other notes.
I had some close call moments and restarted just once, i did some bets on luck and i was blessed

[Vendrick]

(1) Invasion, 1.18
(2) 6
(3) Clear
(4) Dialogue continues to be good.
(5) Assaulting the Orc Warlord's keep is dangerous; retrieving the Sentinel Shield and killing the Dwarf Lord is also dangerous if other Dwarf units can intervene.
(6) 7
(7) I like the touches to the default AI: the guard posts and the ability to switch to a more aggressive stance.

I also like three-way fights, with the added complexity of positioning my units, and damaging the Orc units enough so that the Dwarves prefer to target them.

I thought this was close to the best outcome for Xenophobia, finishing without losses and 529 gold but the replay above got 622(!) gold, so evidently not.

This scenario has probably the strongest item in the campaign, the Sentinel Shield. It transfers hits from adjacent allies to the bearer. The AI can't see this and will use off-type attacks and take enormous retaliation damage trying for kills it can't get.

Strategy was to send an assassination squad to kill the Dwarf leader, while the bulk of my forces attack the orcs, aided by the Dwarves. The Arcane knight seems to frighten the Dwarves into moving through the mountains, leaving them closer to the orcs rather than the player - I didn't event think the AI responded to threats to non-leader units.
The Dwarf Lord is so powerful that it isn't even safe to attack him in melee at all since he can kill any of the assassination squad in two attacks if he's lucky so the Archmage has to do all the work.

There's a huge blunder with Owaec, when I attack an L2 Thunderer in melee and Owaec. He takes full retaliation, leaving it so the L2 Thunderer can can kill him in one hit. I clearly didn't notice this at all or thought it was a L1 Thunderer or something, because I could have killed it with low risk using my other non-essential units.

The AI behaved strangely with the knight - I didn't think the AI would commit to an attack that could kill their leader (4/4 hits at 40% less the odds of hitting 3/3 at 60%: ~2% chance), so the AI had a modest chance of killing him.

I don't care for Silver mages but at least one is very useful for a scenario later in the campaign.

I transfer a bunch of items so I can bring them into the next scenario without recalling extra units.

Dacyn gets the first AMLA of the campaign. The campaign's default AMLAs are either +8 HP or + 1 melee/ranged damage (depending on number of strikes). +8 HP seems much better than +1 range damage considering Dacyn's essential status and meagre 47 HP.