[Campaign] Tales of Silventria

[Razorfang]

What I meant was you get this ominous feeling when you see him, like 'oh shit!!'

 

[Lord Siler]

@Razorfang
I kinda see your point, I was pretty horrified when I first ran into one of those; it slaughtered most of my units.

Took me a bit to realize how to effectively counter it. After that it was all good.

 

[Colonel Aster]

@Blake8 wow I never thought that crusader unit would be so damn OP, I thought it would be just like a mountain giant with a cleaving attack, but this thing sounds more like a one man army. Would hate to run into a few of those.

 

[Lord Siler]

You get to face off with 3 of them at the same time(along with some other enemy units), but you get two heroes, an army of your own, all the towers you can afford to build as well as land mines. I think it's a pretty fair battle

 

[Apostle]

@Blake8
I've found several bugs in the map:

1. The text which displays when you select learn Soul Siphon has the wrong description
2. Quilbeast companion summons the same quilbeast regardless of level
3. The shards which are dropped are essentially useless

@Siler
I really like the upgrade ultimate (really good job), but I think you need a better name for it than trance, say something like "arcane might" or "arcane empowerment"or "high sorcercy" or something similar, also although it makes your spells stronger for a time its actually kind of an underpowered ultimate (you would still lose to a unit casting avatar, or a similar spell) so I suggest you lower the cooldown on some of the spells as well as increase the hero's mana regeneration while the ability is turned on, this will make the ultimate truly powerful and worth its name.

 

[Colonel Aster]

Those are some great ideas for the trance ability, youre right about it being a somewhat underpowered for an ultimate

 

[Blake8]

@Apostle Thanks for pointing these out, I've fixed all the mentioned bugs and send the updated map

 

[Razorfang]

@Siler Those are some good strategies. I didn't bother leveling the soul siphon up so I had a hard time, didn't know it'll make this much of a difference,

 

[Apostle]

Hey I had this idea regarding the air combat map you guys mentioned, what if we could somehow make the bomber (boss) unit similar to an orc burrow, by this I mean it would have several units inside of it which would fire at your units when you try to take it down, when its hit points reach below a certain point these units would exit the airship at which point you have to take them down, and that's the real fight, since you'd be faced with 5 air units while the bomber is attempting to eliminate your ground base, what do you guys think?

 

[Lord Siler]

@Apostle
Did you try to make the unit? and if so any luck?

@Razorfang
One of the first things in devising a strategy for any map (besides having a good understanding of the workings of the units available to you) is seeing how useful certain abilities in particularly the heroes ones, are. Seeing whats practical and efficient allows you to maximize your chances of winning, and doing so with ease.

I played a campaign a long while back, and you know how the creator made the chapter more brutal when you selected to play it on a harder difficulty? You had 1 hero available to you in this one missions, this was the only mission you used this hero in. Now regardless of the difficulty the hero started off at level 5 and was capped at level 7, but when you played on normal he started off with his most useful ability at level 2, his other ability at level 2 and his most useless one at level 1. However if you played this mission on hard his best ability wasn't learned yet while his useless one was at level 3 and the other one at level 2. What this means is that you can't get his most useful ability to level 3 if you're playing on hard, and you would have to sacrifice learning his ultimate to get it to level 2, and this made a HUGE difference in the mission.

 

[Apostle]

I think we may be making some progress: An flying unit idea

 

[Lord Siler]

The mechanism he mentioned looks plausible, you can make this work.

 

[Apostle]

Problem is although there is a unit is loaded into transport event, there is no unit is unloaded from transport event, so we'd have to basically set up a periodic time event that checks if units are loaded in the transport for this to work. I mean we could do things differently but then it wouldnt work as intended, also the player wouldnt be able to use this bomber unit in later chapters as Blake had wanted.

 

[Lord Siler]

This should solve the problem if you're still working on it

• Untitled Trigger 001
  • Events
    • Unit - A unit Starts the effect of an ability
  • Conditions
    • (Ability being cast) Equal to Unload (Air Transports)
  • Actions

 

[Apostle]

I almost got it to work with some minor problems, what I found was

-flying units cannot board a transport, but units whos movement type is set to "hover" can, so we're gonna have to use this

-we must set the ship's 1st and 2nd attack missiles to the ones we want and change the ones on the orb to blank otherwise the orb missiles will be the ones shot at both air and ground targets while the unit is inside the airship

-you can limit what units can be loaded on the ship by modifying the "Data - Allowed unit type" field in the load ability

I will upload the map showcasing the system once I'm sure it'll work as intended (likely tomorrow), but I've used a goblin zeplin instead of the bomber and flying machines instead of the fighters also it might not work like the burrow where every additional unit inside increase the attack rate unless we come up with some sort of system to do this

 

[Razorfang]

Interesting concept, hope you weed out the bugs

@Siler Some map makers just find the most lazy ways to increase their difficulty, insted of putting some effort into their work. I played where all that happens when you go from normal to hard is that upgrades are no longer availaible, other things I've seen done is adding hardned skin to all tier 3 units and just handicapping all your units, talk about lazy bastards.

 

[Apostle]

Ok, I figured I'll likely be busy and wont be around tommorow so here is the map, remember this is only prototype system, a rough draft of sorts

 

[Blake8]

Great work Apostle!

 

[Lord Siler]

Don't worry about that hovering movement type, we could just set all those units collision sizes to 0 so they'll be able to "fly" past most obstacles, however cliffs and water will still present a problem.

 

[Colonel Aster]

Very interesting concept (and unit) Apostle created, looks like the aerial map will see some progress soon

 

[Razorfang]

ye, ppl are doing a real great job, it just takes time to create unique "systems" otherwise it wouldve been finished by now

 

[Colonel Aster]

You guys made the map (terrain) already right ?

 

[Razorfang]

i believe Siler did, but Blake says its too small in size, in my opinion we should just use it since adding additional space wont really change much and the actual layout seem good

 

[Colonel Aster]

Blake just wants a big map for a big battle, thats just how I understand it

 

[Razorfang]

well bigger is better right?

have you been testing any of betas btw?

 

[Colonel Aster]

Not at the moment, just too busy, thats why Im not on here as often as I used to be

 

[Razorfang]

i see. i was gonna ask you what you thought of the terrain of some of them since i was the one who made it, let me know once you have some free time and decide to test again

 

[Blake8]

@Colonel Aster @Razorfang
Regarding the aerial map, yes I want a big map for a big battle, imagine what happens when you got two enemies crammed into one medium size map...it will be too easy to rush, plus not enough space for a large amount of bases...I just dont see it working out well with a medium sized map.

 

[Apostle]

I’ve replayed the forest mission and figured out a much better strategy;

- Destroy all the creeps in the southern portion of the map, this will increase your hero’s levels as well as grant you access to the mercenary camp in the south

- Instead of training knights and swordsman recruit maulers at the mercenary camp, while they do cost 6 food, they have a good amount of hp, have resistant skin which prevents them from being hit with the crusaders critical strike and have the stun ability.

- Also recruit trappers, as they can ensnare the Crusaders, and have slow poison which is immensely useful.

- Make sure to buy lots of orb in order to increase both your heroes attacks by a good amount.

- Now when you take control of the base get a few peasants and send them over to the area which has a hill on one side north of your base, build as many towers here as you can, this is the easiest spot to defend.

- Plant a large number of land mines on the path next to the hill, this will make things much easier

- When the armies come to attack you, ensnare a crusader and allow the towers to attack him, keep using ensnare to immobilize them and if they get close to the towers send several maulers to attack them directly.

This strategy has worked for me every single time I use it, ensnare works better then entangled roots since it lasts longer and has a shorter cooldown, and trapper have slow poison slows the hell outta crusaders, knight and whatever else they send you way which makes them easy work for your tower defenses.

Also I found 2 bugs:
Rod of aether doesn't work, its unclickable
Game crashes if you engage the creeps in the eastern region with Master Yanes for some reason.

 

[Blake8]

@Apostle Do you think I should decrease the difficulty in the mission?

 

[Apostle]

Up to you, it is somewhat difficult for a mission that comes so early in the campaign.

 

[Blake8]

You're right about the early part, I'll reduce the amount of troops send at you and the amount of towers within the enemy base, and also will likely provide the player a 2000 gold reward for destroying the outpost.

 

[Colonel Aster]

Looks like Lots of progress is being made, you guys already have a suitable boss for that aerial map, I see other maps are being beta tested, good strategies being provided, great job people!

 

[Blake8]

@Colonel Aster Regarding the crusaders, they are meant to be a mini bosses and not regular unit you could just train, think of them as being the equivalent of unique strong heroes. Besides if they were trainable they'd have to cost like 12-15 food, over 900 gold and a lot of lumber. You wont encounter a lot of them in the game. I promise. The forest level has less than a dozen crusaders within it, that's likely the most you'll ever have to face in a map.

 

[Colonel Aster]

Thank God!

 

[Apostle]

@Blake8

I've found a way to beat your latest beta in under 15, wanna hear?

 

[Blake8]

You're joking right? I was supposed to be a 1-1.5 hour mission, with all the enemy defenses as well as the fact that you're fighting two bases at once, I have no idea how you can finish it within 15 minutes.

 

[Apostle]

Here's the strategy:

-Destroy the creep camp in the south in order to allow access to the mercenary camp in the area

-Recruit an assassin or two from the camp <this is critical>

-Build 2 extra barracks to train catapults, build at least 8 catapults, and around 5 or so knights since you start off with a good amount of knights and get knights as reinforcements you wont have to train lots of them so dont waste your resources.

-Now send you assassins northward, the enemy has a huge fortification of towers initially you'll encounter just two but then there's 8 or 9 of them and even more as you get closer to the base. Use the assassin's wind walk ability to get past those, make sure you go to the right area once you bypassed the towers, once you're inside the base make sure to go all the way to the right and northwards, this area doesn't have any enemies to attack or harass your units so you'll be good

-Send most of your knights and other units (besides the catapults) to harass the outter towers (the first towers you encounter on your way to the base) once you do that both enemies will send all their forces against yours, just fall back and allow them to chase you, and then engage them if you want.

-Once you see that all the enemy units have left the base to defend it from you attacks, take the Archmage hero, surround him with all your catapults and knights and mass teleport to the location of the assassins, once there go towards the back where the crystal is and use all your catapults on it at once, use your knights to defend the catapults, the mission should be over in a minute or two

What do you think?

 

[Blake8]

Wow, I'm impressed...guess I got a lot of things to fix...

edit: on second thought I might just scrap that mission, it has too many bugs, flaws, and inconsistencies with what I intended to implement, I'd rather make a new mission from scratch that will fit much better into the storyline, and have less flaws to worry about

 

[Colonel Aster]

Can't believe apostle found a way to beat that map in under 15 min, now you see why you should never give heroes mass teleport as an ultimate?

 

[Lord Siler]

I'm guessing the map just had lots of flaws, Apostle said that you could've also finished the map under 20 by cutting a path through the trees with the catapults or other units to the back of the base then making the catapults attack the crystal.

Gotta put more thoughts into the design of the level otherwise you get ones the these.

 

[Mechanical Man]

It would be nice to write a bit more about the story itself, not just two lines. Like what are the factions, what they do, what they live off, what kind of society they are, what races there are, some history and so on.

 

[Blake8]

Yea, I'll do that as soon as I get more free time...

 

[Apostle]

@Blake8

You gotta do something about the ai spamming crestbearers, although they are basically swordsman with an additional anti-air attack, large groups of them can really decimate your forces.

I have a really hard time getting past them, especially at this choke point.

 

[Blake8]

@Apostle Ok, Rem as well as others told me something similar so here how I'll change the Crestbearers in the next version:

Increase food cost from 2 to 3
Increase gold cost from 160 to 180
Increase build time from 22 to 28

I think that should balance it out

 

[Apostle]

Alright, thanks, I just got your updated versions

 

[Blake8]

Honestly it was a bad idea having those Crestbears cost 2 food from the start, if you think about although they're basic infantry units they can also attack aerial units and can serve as a replacement for spearmasters in that since...and although theyre not as strong as grunts, they are a lot more versatile which justifies giving them a food cost of 3

 

[Apostle]

They can't replace spearmasters; they have heavy armor which takes 2x damage from magic attacks which is the attack type of the majority of heavy air units, so they arent a counter to flying units at all.

 

[Blake8]

Good point, but at that stage in the campaign you dont have access to heavy aerial units, but yea something needs to be done about this, I thought of giving them a special ability that would reduce the damage taken from magic, spells as well as piercing attacks, you think the unit would be well balanced with such an ability?

 

[Apostle]

Are you trying to make them replace spearmasters?