Save The Village - MP Survival Scenario

[Bob_The_Mighty]

I've just uploaded a major rework of this map. The main changes in 0.2 are:

- Only the host needs the add-on since I have removed the custom units.
- The final battle now features a set of chaotic visual effects such as dead bodies, charred villages and wrecked castles.
- The first wave of goblins carry bombs which explode when they die - wounding surrounding units and destroying terrain.
- I have replaced the shops with a dwarf engineer who can improve the village defences, and a trainer who lets you hit him for 1g a pop.
- It now is a stand-alone scenario (and no longer has any connection to the rpg creation kit).
- Any unit who picks up a magic object now gets an icon showing what item they have.
- Both the outer regions and the final fight are quite a bit tougher.
- The reward for the king's subquest has been made more interesting.
- Killing the scout gives the players some additional useful infomation about the orcish battle plans.
- Many background bugs have been fixed and the code cleaned up.

Almost every feature of the scenario is remains randomly determined, thus it plays quite different every time.

Good luck, and let me know if you encounter anything odd.

[Bob_The_Mighty]

I thought I'd show some screenshots of before and after the orc assault...

[Colouredbox]

Fantastic scenario. Great job.
Haven't beaten it yet because of the difficulty but what would be it's point if it would be easy.

[AnnieSpambot]

Very nice work Bob. I think this is much improved by the rewrites. Plays completely differently each time, and yes is tough but not unduly so. I generally prefer the quest based to the survival maps but this has enough going on to keep it interesting.
The goblin bombers are brutal - definitely I have had more damage from them in the final battle than actual hits from opponents.
I do think more than most scenarios this needs to be played with the teams working together or complete annihilation ensues.
Like the carnage graphics in the last section - the map looks amazing bythe end.

[jb]

Played over 30 turns today with paso and tekelili. Wanted to give you my almost full review. Mind you we were a bit clueless at first and muddled around a bit before we got the full swing. Still, we were able to get all 5 item drops, and the extra vills from the outlands. We didn't finish the game, but after killing all but 2 orcs, we saw the late spawn and had overwhelming force remaining.

Spoiler:

The good stuff:
-I really enjoyed the randomness. The first 22 turns are pure fun.
-The item drops from the leaders are fantastic. I wonder are the items themselves random too?
-The mini quest to find the criminal was neat.
-Similar to the criminal, the orc scout was neat as well.
-I enjoyed buying the castle defenses, though I felt our options were a bit limited as we maxed out on options very early. (6 total buys i think?)
-The skeletons and orc carcases are a very elegant touch, and a reminder of the high quality of your work.

The other stuff:
-I hate the way teleporters work. We had units on top of each other, and clusterstuff galore. Once we figured it out it also became easy to "cheat" by getting extra attacks on enemies by swaping out attackers, etc.
-The difficulty is all stacked in the first 15 turns. After that it gets easy.
-The training dummy is surprisingly awesome. We leveled 5 units on him, before we leveled the 6th by killing him for the xp
-XP is too low. I understand the concept of leveling 0s. It's extremely fun and I approve of the method. But it's just too low, and it hurts the endgame more than anything.

Overall I really enjoyed it and recommend it to all. Very fun.

[Bob_The_Mighty]

Thanks for all the feedback.

The items that the leaders drop are indeed random. I started out with the idea of having as many random elements as I could set against a story. I'm glad that has worked.

I'm not sure what you mean about clusterstuff, but I don't really consider it cheating to teleport an extra unit in to have another attack. I'm not sure how else I could handle the teleporting (although the 'tunnel' feature in 1.9 might be a nice replacement).

As for the overall difficulty, I think I might up the xp setting and strengthen some of the orc waves. Should the village improvements be more costly? Should the trainer be nerfed somehow?

Could you send me a replay of your game, jb?

[Dauntless]

Hello Bob,

great job indeed. I liked the storyline, the randomness, the neat art and especially the idea and creativity. The bomber ability is really interesting.

As to the gameplay:

The concept of lvling is cute. But as jb mentioned, towards the end i basically had all sectors clear, all defence bought and didnt have much to do. Only thing left was the training dummy.
So maybe something could be done to have a bit more to do...
Be it an aditional quest from the mages, more challenging enemies on the flanks (maybe i got an easy set, no woses like you) or perhaps some additional shop down south. Also i had a lot of spare gold towards the end, so i got to buy a gazillion lvl0s for the final wave. Dunno if its intended that way or not.
The game worked without any additional problems for me.
Maybe a suggestion towards the items. It would be cute to have an analogy of the pendant of light as a cloud of darkness, since half of the army is chaotic

Also keep in mind that jb and me arent regular users, so i wouldnt aim too high with the difficulty or make 2 different ones

Great job making this

Dauntless

[Bob_The_Mighty]

Save The Village is a 3p story survival map in which players must turn a ragtag group of villagers into an army strong enough to withstand a brutal orcish assault.

This scenario has lots of randomised elements - plus special features like xp training, terrain building, magic items, bomber goblins and siege tactics. The scenario is quick to grasp and plays like a compact, mini-campaign."

Just uploaded this scenario to the 1.10 add-ons server.

Here's what changed:
- Updated for 1.10
- Fixed a few terrain bugs
- Added a title to the map
- Made the ending a bit tougher
- Increased all the building prices
- Added an extra building option

[marvalis]

I just tried this game. At first I was confused. In most survival maps you grab a few villages and then defend against an attack. In this map you start with peasants, and you have to go kill some level 1 units by teleporting.

I started a multiplayer game on the main server. Two people joined, and left again after a few turns. they too where confused and didn't understand what was going on. One guy left because he lost some units after teleporting, not understanding that only the human village is allied.

The first 22 turns seem slow. Leveling those lvl 0 units takes too long and you can't level enough by turn 22. In order to defeat the leaders you have to get a level 2 unit preferably. Difficulty here depends on what you are fighting. Using the trainer is slow and expensive. Level 0 units don't even have ZoC and can die in 1 round. All you can do at the start is use your leader and the free unit.

[Bob_The_Mighty]

A few tips:

- Take a leader with healing or leadership. Use these to support promising lvl0s
- Be prepared to sacrifice some lvl0s by using them as bait - to set up kills for your chosen candidates
- Use woodsmen to wear down enemy units that have no ranged weapon
- Team up: two leaders in one region is often enough to support the lesser units
- Some of the regions are easier than others, do these first
- The trainer is useful for levelling units with xp when you don't want to risk them dying in battle

[CahMan]

Bob,

Thanks for the great map! I played through it with a couple of friends and had a blast. It took a couple of tries but we ended up winning just by the skin of our teeth.

We noticed a couple of bugs. These may already be reported (and I'm new, so if this isn't the right place to report them please let me know).

* After the teleport on turn 21, the game reports out of sync errors. It appears like the units teleport differently for each player and confuses the game. Saving and reloading solved the problem.
* If you have no gold, Ardo says he won't train you, but then does it anyway.

Thanks Again!
CahMan

[Creight]

We are still getting massive out of synch errors on the turn 21/22 teleports home. Units aren't where they appear to be, some units seemingly disappeared into the ether, etc.

Creight

[akorsun]

Hi!
I's great map! Very detailed. I like randomness of artifacts, bosses, attack directions.
I absolutely love these dead bodies on the battle-field
Made with love I see.

Only problem I have to report is the same already reported.
Wesnoth 10.6.
After turn 22 a lot of "out of sync" errors.

Save/reload - solves problem. But very frustrating for those who play first time.