Also, oml I finally made this stupid account..... so much stuff just to do that, and it still took me almost a week to be able to send messages.. never had that on literally any other site, but oh well.
I don't even know the rules so I'm a bit scared to do or say anything out of bounds lmao like cussing, I purely made this to give constructive feedback and criticism, as a 'professional' tester on your campaigns, after having played them, and honestly finding most of them more enjoyable than the official ones. One that can stick with you and help you identify anything weird, with any of them. I can only hope and wish that you might remaster the first campaign like you mentioned before, because the other two have peak Blizzard level polish, aside from still having a few bugs. Not to mention, you would be following their campaign formula to a tee and it's kind of amazing, where you start the game as "the good guys", setting the scene for the story, then "the bad guys" as you take everything over, and then "the good guys" again (It's clear to me that the first LN (Living Nerubian) campaign comes after WoTS) to either fight back or flee to salvation.
I had a whole list of bugs from all 3 of your campaigns (played on Reforged's most recent version with classic graphics) that I wanted to discuss, including the demo of the prequel which you locked the thread of, but now I have to replay them all to remember the bugs lmao. Won't do that now but probably within a few days to a week, because I definitely want to see these be the best that they can. I, (playing on hard, no challenge) repeated each mission, or each point where I encountered the bug multiple times, confirming it as an actual bug and not some random glitch, and will do the same again on my re-playthrough. I remember a couple key things though very clearly that need pretty big attention:
- WoTS (War of The Spider) Mission 2, I've noticed starting from the first allied Undead Nerubian mission, there seems to be some sort of resource bug. This I've also seen on every following UN ally, they are unable to harvest gold from their goldmine, so when they run out they die unless I use the gold cheat to pump up their treasury. Sometimes they seem to get some gold at random, but I don't know how because the gold mine amount never decreases and it isn't at a regular interval so I don't think it's a script. I don't know too much about the WC3 editor, but destroying the goldmine out of curiosity didn't free it from the 'haunting', but straight up destroyed it. Which makes me think somehow the entity isn't being defined as a neutral goldmine, but the "unit" itself of the 'corrupted goldmine', otherwise it would have simply reverted. Potential fixes could include fixing the root issue, or having regular goldmines in their bases with a short and sweet script that makes a drone quickly corrupt it for the gold. either way you'd have to make sure that they have the classic 'AI depletes 1 gold per harvest' cheat or they would still run out within an hour. Or, leaving it as is, and just adding a script to give them gold at regular intervals equal to the corrupt gold mine.
- In that same mission, if you hit Okwan's side with more than a few hundred hitpoints worth of splash damage from the artillery he turns on you, which seems more like a bug than a feature. That means if I use artillery when he's being attacked to defend him, or I join his attack wave but have artillery in mine, it's basically game over. I would think you might be able to fix the cause itself and define direct vs splash damage, but that might be a little complex. Or you could just make it so instead of him getting angered from taking a certain amount of damage, maybe only after destroying 1 or 2 of his buildings? This way, unless you're fighting near a building with like 10 hp there's no way to accidentally make him hostile, fixing this issue easily.
- WoTS Mission 10, At the gates, completing the bonus objective of destroying the bottom 2 Nerubian bases seems to not trigger, I assume if it did it would have added a few friendly AI to fight with me? Yeah.... that mission was pretty hard without those lol. I don't know what the actual trigger is, because below each base there was a contingent of hostile neutral Nerubian troops, and one quest marker was over the bottom left's HQ, the other on the right was over that neutral garrison. I tried redoing the part a few different ways, including reloading before I finished the quest, before I attacked either of them period, and restarting the mission as a whole, to no avail.
- Every mission in ToC (Threads of Conflict), There's a disturbing and strange bug I've noticed that isn't present in your first LN campaign, as far as I can tell. The tooltip for the "Queen's Dominance" specifically states that it will make up to 5 eggs near the building (which I know is touching it's hitbox) and then stop. This insinuates that spreading my buildings out some and filling them with queens would give me terrific unit production, as expected of such an aggressive race without defensive capabilities. This seems to hold true in the first LN, because after playing ToC I had to go back to check, because in ToC there seems to be some sort of invisible arbitrary global egg limit, around 10 or 12, which is horrendous for a number of pretty obvious reasons.
First, this means if I have queens scattered between multiple bases, there could either be 1 or 2 eggs at every building, which doesn't give me much to defend with if I get attacked, or it could be all 10-12 at one base and none at the other... Second, if I try to counteract that with their manual egg laying ability, #1 that costs gold that I can't waste like that, and #2, then no garrisoned queen will lay ANY eggs, defeating most of their purpose, to be able to ready eggs for production. Also would like to point out in this section, that the 'select all available spawning eggs' ability from your HQ doesn't seem to work, or if it does it has an extremely short range that needs to be bumped quite a bit. I would prefer if the ability is fully global, and goes from nearest to furthest eggs, which would fix a lot of the macro issues I had playing as them. Third, this means they make units slower than every other race, which are able to spam their unit production buildings, when I would think it's supposed to be the other way around since this one can't make defenses.
From what I see, you have the AI work in a slightly different way in WoTS, sometimes the buildings make eggs, sometimes the drones 'build' them, but they also don't have this issue. And if this is somehow intentional, trust me, it shouldn't be. Instead you could just double the cooldown on the egg laying passive or something to compensate. The Living Nerubians just feel too punishing to play, but if this got fixed, it would entirely fix that issue by proxy.
Also you said you made 4 or 5 missions for ToC? I'm sorry to say, but only the first 3 are playable. I could show you a screenshot, but exactly what's happening, is the menu shows two duplicates of mission 4 and mission 5A, and it also shows mission 5B which I thought you said wasn't done. Trying to click on any of them, all sound stops, and it doesn't work. Even trying to click on one of the first three after that doesn't work, until you go back to the main menu, and then back into the ToC mission select. Also when leaving the menu, for just a split second it shows more clones of 4 and 5A/B, seemingly doubled, so for a moment there's missions 1, 2, 3, 4, 5A, 5B, 4, 5A, 4, 5A, 5B, 4, 5A lmao. Little bit of a nightmare, but the 3 I played I noticed were of the same quality as WoTS which is exciting, can't wait to see what happens when you decide to try at the campaigns again.