[Campaign] Crimson Prophecies - Act I

[Trailblazer]

CRIMSON PROPHECIES - ACT I

OVERVIEW



This campaign (Act I) is set after the events of Warcraft 3 and before events of World of Warcraft. Actions take place in the region of Eastern Plaguelands during the aftermath of the Third War. Events that transpire are not canon to the already known lore of Warcraft universe.



This campaign was created and play tested in the latest version of Warcraft 3 and made for SD graphics. It consists of 10 missions - 7 playable maps, 2 interludes and 1 epilogue.



This is my first campaign made so any feedback/suggestions/improvements and help are greatly appreciated.











STORY

Spoiler: Story

The story of Act I of this campaign is mainly following the adventures of Thaelion aldis, a young knight-squire to the established paladin of Argent Dawn Remont the Devoted. They are both part of an offensive launched by the highlord of the order – Maxwell Tyrosus whereby the goal of said offensive is to retake lands from the Scarlet Crusade. Major characters in the storyline include:

Commander Tir Pureblood

Stablemaster Vazeros

Lieutenant Varys

Archbishop Pirius the Redeemer

Saidan Dathrohan

Tavie Swiftwhisper

Thaelion Aldis

Remont the Devoted

Maxwell Tyrosus

And others that will be revealed as you play through the missions

CHANGELOG

Spoiler: Version 1.0

First Release

MEDIA

Spoiler: Screenshot 1

Spoiler: Screenshot 2

Spoiler: Screenshot 3

Spoiler: Screenshot 4

Spoiler: Screenshot 5

Spoiler: Screenshot 6

Spoiler: Screenshot 7

Spoiler: Screenshot 8

Spoiler: Screenshot 9

Spoiler: Screenshot 10

Spoiler: Screenshot 11

Spoiler: Screenshot 12

 

[Trailblazer]

Firstly, I want to preface this by saying it is my first ever created campaign. I tried uploading it into the maps and resources tab but my uneducated self ran into issues which I could not solve by myself so I saw this other tab dedicated to pre-released maps so decided to post it here and it works. I don't know if it is because this is a singular w3n file or something.

Secondly, missions that include base building where AI is supposed to have its own base and economy are not the same because -
AI that I created in the editor usually sent attack waves that destroy one building and just go back. Don't know how to fix it really so I scrambled that idea.
Instead most factions have attack waves related to them that are sent periodically to players location because this way I found i can gauge the campaign difficulty much better.

Also, because I have very limited programming knowledge, while making the campaign I realised that leaks can be quite dangerous so I did my best to remove them all through ways explained mainly from tutorials on this site but some may exist still.

As mentioned before, any feedback, help and critics are greatly appriciated

 

[deepstrasz]

Hey.

Don't multipost please unless it's an update. I feel that message could have been placed in the opening post.

Perhaps a moderator as @Footman16 will be able to help you with uploading it where it should (assuming it's finished or nearly so). It might be related to stuff like your browser, internet service/VPN or perhaps add blockers or none of those.

As for the AI returning to its base, try playing around with the options. For instance untick the units, groups and heroes flee boxes. Or you can try learning more about AI:

Spoiler: click for links

AI Editor

AI Editor Introduction: AI Editor is simple way to create AI for existing or custom race other then use of JASS. AI editor is used for making "Melee Maps or Campaigns", for other type of maps (AoS, TD...) you should use triggers. This tutorial will teach you the basics and hopefully you...

www.hiveworkshop.com

The AI Editor

This tutorial is about the different parts of the .wai AI editor, how to configure conditions, the condition explaination. and also it will give a explaination about the functions. (How I'm going to write it is by the left) How to configure conditions To configure conditions right click where...

www.hiveworkshop.com

How to make an AI for your map

How to make an AI for your map NOTE This tutorial assumes that you have an adept knowledge in the GUI part of the World Editor. You do not have to know JASS or any other code to read through this tutorial. Everything here will be triggers, with very little script structure. This...

www.hiveworkshop.com

Warcraft 3 Scripting Tutorials (JASS, Lua, vJASS, TypeScript, AI, etc.)

Contains tutorials regarding scripting (JASS, Lua, vJASS, TypeScript, etc) and the AI editor. Read the Rules before posting.

www.hiveworkshop.com

Log in

Log in

wc3modding.info

AI Manual

First and foremost, a hello is in order, As always Blizzard left us bare stumbling in the dark, so I took the liberty to shed some light on something that has been abandoned for too long, AI natives, there are natives which you can guess what they do by just reading their name but there are...

www.hiveworkshop.com

Creating AI workflow

Or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Read AI This tutorial serves one primary purpose: teaching you how to learn ai by yourself. In order to achieve that we'll go through two steps: First, we'll read through an ai script from one of blizzard's campaign maps and use it to understand how ai...

www.hiveworkshop.com

Intermidiate AI concepts - boring no longer

Intermediate AI workflow concepts - boring no longer If you've played a campaign or two from this site, you'd know that the AI in most maps is made the same way: there's a base with some defenses, which will occasionally send out groups of units to your base. And that's about it. This causes...

www.hiveworkshop.com

Also, reach out for help here: World Editor Help Zone whenever you need it.

 

[tulee]

Firstly, I want to preface this by saying it is my first ever created campaign. I tried uploading it into the maps and resources tab but my uneducated self ran into issues which I could not solve by myself so I saw this other tab dedicated to pre-released maps so decided to post it here and it works. I don't know if it is because this is a singular w3n file or something.

Map development is for un-finished projects. Yours definitely looks close to finished, so it is recommended to post it in the map section.

Secondly, missions that include base building where AI is supposed to have its own base and economy are not the same because -
AI that I created in the editor usually sent attack waves that destroy one building and just go back. Don't know how to fix it really so I scrambled that idea.
Instead most factions have attack waves related to them that are sent periodically to players location because this way I found i can gauge the campaign difficulty much better.

Assuming you are not accidently setting your AI to melee, then you can fix the issue of campaign AI running back after killing a unit or building by:

A) Keep your buildings and units centralized in one area. Having a single guard tower or a single unit a big distance from your main base means that when an enemy attacks that outlier unit/building, the army will not have time to reach that place before the enemy retreats. If you have everything centralized in 1 area, when an enemy force attacks a unit or building, the army of that base should be close enough that it will engage with the enemy and a fight will begin.

B) Have a 0 second delay in attack waves and instead control the "delay" with the number of production buildings in a base. More production buildings = faster attack waves, since they rebuild the required number of units faster and then attack faster. Since the official delay is set to 0, if for some reason an attack force does what you describe and retreats after attacking an outlier unit/building, it will go back to its own base then immediately push out again, instead of waiting.

C) You can give the main base some kind of weak attack with a huge range (4000+), so if any enemy attack waves approach, even if they destroy an outlier unit/building and start to leave, your main building will attack them, causing them to try to attack the source of damage.

TLDR: The AI for Wc3 normally targets the closest unit/building of an enemy and then retreats; it's not a bug. But by condensing a base close together with no outlier units/buildings (A), and having 0 attack wave delays (B), you can reduce / eliminate this problem.

Also, your project looks great!

 

[BaiyuGalan]

 

[Navy45]

I played through the first level, and it was very good ! Unfortunately, there were a few issues, some of which made me unable to continue :

On the issues I encountered :

• I don't know why, a few minutes after the first level started, I got a victory screen without doing anything in particular or without any quest being completed. It didn't happen when I restarted the level. The same thing happened at the beginning of the second level.
• Finishing the first level didn't unlock the button to play the second level. I was able to start it by clicking continue at the end of the first level, but after I had to quit due to getting a victory screen, I couldn't start the second level again due to it not appearing in the campaign screen.
• Killing the scourge units to the south triggers a quest updated message for the quest "Switching sides" instead of the caravan quest.
• The footmen's defend ability's hotkey isn't Q despite other units following QWER hotkey pattern.
• The main quest to find a place for a camp is behind the dragon whose killing is an optional quest, which is confusing. Maybe you should put the dragon in another part of the mountains, and have Tavie mention there might be a good place to build a camp in the mountains (so that players don't think the mountains are purely an optional area)
• Overall, the map maybe lacks a bit in dialogues. Neither the bandits, the deserters, the lich, the trolls or the scarlet crusade say a word. Something like the lich taunting us, the deserters justifying themselves and the scarlet crusaders condemning us would bring a lot of flavour in the level. There also isn't any dialogue when Tavie is first recruited, which seems weird. If the goal is to show she isn't very talkative, maybe have our hero try to start a conversation and her barely responding.

Despite these issues, the level was still very enjoyable. The terrain was quite good, especially the Argent Dawn base which looked really cool, in addition to showing off a lot of characters for later levels.
The heroes have good abilities and the rebalancing of their stats seemed to work quite well with the balance.
The map isn't too challenging. I played on normal, I don't know if there are differences between difficulty levels.
The Map design was really solid. I expected to have to do a lot of backtracking because of the amount of quests, but the map is sectionned well enough that you rarely have to go somewhere you've gone before.

Overall, I definitely plan to finish it when the campaign button issue (and ideally the random victory screen) issues are resolved !

 

[Trailblazer]

I played through the first level, and it was very good ! Unfortunately, there were a few issues, some of which made me unable to continue :

On the issues I encountered :

• I don't know why, a few minutes after the first level started, I got a victory screen without doing anything in particular or without any quest being completed. It didn't happen when I restarted the level. The same thing happened at the beginning of the second level.
• Finishing the first level didn't unlock the button to play the second level. I was able to start it by clicking continue at the end of the first level, but after I had to quit due to getting a victory screen, I couldn't start the second level again due to it not appearing in the campaign screen.
• Killing the scourge units to the south triggers a quest updated message for the quest "Switching sides" instead of the caravan quest.
• The footmen's defend ability's hotkey isn't Q despite other units following QWER hotkey pattern.
• The main quest to find a place for a camp is behind the dragon whose killing is an optional quest, which is confusing. Maybe you should put the dragon in another part of the mountains, and have Tavie mention there might be a good place to build a camp in the mountains (so that players don't think the mountains are purely an optional area)
• Overall, the map maybe lacks a bit in dialogues. Neither the bandits, the deserters, the lich, the trolls or the scarlet crusade say a word. Something like the lich taunting us, the deserters justifying themselves and the scarlet crusaders condemning us would bring a lot of flavour in the level. There also isn't any dialogue when Tavie is first recruited, which seems weird. If the goal is to show she isn't very talkative, maybe have our hero try to start a conversation and her barely responding.

Despite these issues, the level was still very enjoyable. The terrain was quite good, especially the Argent Dawn base which looked really cool, in addition to showing off a lot of characters for later levels.
The heroes have good abilities and the rebalancing of their stats seemed to work quite well with the balance.
The map isn't too challenging. I played on normal, I don't know if there are differences between difficulty levels.
The Map design was really solid. I expected to have to do a lot of backtracking because of the amount of quests, but the map is sectionned well enough that you rarely have to go somewhere you've gone before.

Overall, I definitely plan to finish it when the campaign button issue (and ideally the random victory screen) issues are resolved !

Thank you very much for the feedback!

The random victory screen that pops up is a region enter... something I forgot to remove when I was testing if game cache option works, thats my bad.
About the button not appearing, i figured out later that you have to do another action with triggers to unlock the map even though you can play the next map by clicking continue. I will make all levels playable, was a mistake to leave it like this, even though later ones are not gonna be doable with default heroes that you get by just loading the map
Yeah I tried to make everything QWER, looks like the footman had old defend ability which uses default blizzard hotkey.
The dragon thing is my biggest problem on this map. I was thinking of redesigning that part of the map a little but as of now it this is one of those cases where a optional quest kinda interferes with the main one.
Thank you for mentioning the dialogue thing. I found it hard to get a feeling how much text a player should recieve when playing, what would be considered bombardment of information and what is too little, I dont want a player to find himself pausing and going to logs tab mid boss fight to read 8 lines of dialogue during the battle.
I am glad you like the terrain

 

[krawg]

much of what i want to say is already said by navy45 i finished the campaign the flying units for argent dawn units are bugged they dont get multishot the wood upgrades are bugged for both factions we never get more then 10 clearly alot of work has been put in this campaign but you need to make an Ai for the bases i played on hard and it was very easy since they dont rebuild and when raising their bases they dont rush us so you can push the enemy with a very small force i like the unique tech trees maybe add an offensive spell caster or debbufer in the future for both factions good luck on your next part