Revenge of the Lord - a good campaign v0.99

[alexsa2015sa]

Here's my report on level 3;
"My liege, I have divined that a force of vampires from Misty Bog is approaching from south-east". No vampire attacks ever showed up. The only vampires present were those guarding the gems at the bottom.

Secondly, the player is able to 'wall-off' blue permanently by breaking alliance, claiming the outer tiles near the river and building guard posts, making him impossible to attack. They can then set ally again. It's also technically possible for the player to guardpost the entire right side of the map, dig into the gems and be completely protected from attacks while mining the gems. They'd have to cull their way through 200+ level 4 orcs/trolls/warlocks when they eventually did want to fight, but i'm just giving you a heads up that it's possible to do. The hero parties started ignoring Blue very quickly into the level anyway so it'd only be worth guardposting him if you were going to guardpost the entire river.

The "Lose if blue dies" script isn't indented properly.

...If you haven't seen any vampires showing up, I suppose you might have completed the level sooner than they arrived - as per message, one payday later. They're not very strong level 3 ones, so they can die fast if monks stop them. Or, if you were walled off at the time, them not showing up through the hero gate is perfectly reasonable since amounts of the attackers are massive and they hit the limit quickly. Walling off the blue is an obvious exploit, but I won't do anything about it - why stop people from having fun clearing 200-ish monsters?

Edit: ah, I see, the party was undeclared so they really didn't show up.

[Hades]

Managed to complete it, thanks for the advice, and apologies for my brash temper earlier.

[YourMaster]

I finished the second level as well. I enjoyed it, it played out completely different from the first one, but similar in the 'rules' like with the bridge and the claiming of rooms.

I think one of the key difficulties of these maps is not the amount of creatures you face, but the uncertainty of what you've got to do. This takes time, and it makes you cautious and this causes you to play slowly. Making the barracks you've got to take out visible might for instance already help out quite a bit as it gives players a target and some direction on where to use their sight spell. Making the first room be poorly guarded so that the player takes it out will teach him what to do to reduce the invading parties.

And I must admit I was a weakling like Woudo and cleared some of the early rooms with a possessed archer. Low level dwarves, thieves and fairies do not do well against orcs, trolls and biles.
The ending of this second map was a bit anti-climactic, I focused on the barracks first, so the end was cleanup duty, taking out all the rooms with biles left on the map.

EDIT: Looking at the script now when I finished the map I noticed I was supposed to be attacked by bile demons as well. You also forgot to define that party. Errors like that can easily be seen in the log file. Just quickly open your map - use the cheat menu to get there - close the game again and look at the log file for errors. Fix them all, check again and when the maps don't have errors anymore re-upload.
You've made a nice campaign, but these maps take hours to finish, it's frustrating for the players as well if after two hours of play they can't finish the map because of an error.

EDIT 2:

On the same note, does the difficulty level mismatch the description of "at least as hard as last DK levels'? Because I don't recall levels upwards from 17 being particularly frustrating to beat.

(And I still can't update the file here on forum, because it keeps throwing error 413 "request entity is too large". What I'm doing wrong?)

When you're saying 'At least as difficult as the final campaign levels' people expect something a bit more difficult, your maps are a lot harder than the campaign levels.

And that error seems to be an error of the forum, not your fault. Hope Dotted fixes it soon.

[alexsa2015sa]

Thanks for the tips; I've sweeped through all maps that way using a post-victory save (...never thought it'd be useful, huh!), and there were indeed several errors, though none as severe. Several hint messages were added to levels to clarify the attack wave conditions; they're not always stoppable, like lv1 gem harvesting troll party.

But most importantly, level 4 contained an incorrect timer start (which crept in while copypasting information string), which caused sudden death to massive white attack around 2nd payday. Now, it's properly delayed until 3rd payday, and a hint message to help prevent sudden death-by-keeper was added.

[Hades]

The biggest issue I have is that I am losing imps at an unacceptable rate. As in they just go off and get themselves killed, constantly. That's the most frustrating part, as there's no way to seal off any potential enemy bases so Imps don't go kill themselves.

[YourMaster]

What do you mean there's no way to seal off enemy bases? You know you can build doors in the workshop, and lock doors so imps can't pass through right? I can't deny I lost a few imps, but that was mostly when I was attacked after each payday.
The enemy trolls did behave strangely though, they insisted on trying to destroy my workshop and had to walk all across the map and through my dungeon to get there. Walked right past my hearth. On this (the second) map I think the 'attack enemies' objective would have worked better.

[Hades]

And level 5 crashes when I destroy the first heart for some reason.

[alexsa2015sa]

And level 5 crashes when I destroy the first heart for some reason.

That's not enough information to fix the problem, since I couldn't reproduce it yet. Does the crash happen consistently, and which heart in particular was destroyed?

[YourMaster]

It could have to do with the pathfinding crash, when you're up against the limit your came often crashes when you actually look at the heart when it is getting destroyed. He did not share his log file so there's no way to tell for sure.

[Hades]

Nvm the glitch was a one off.

ETA: Final level is absolutely impossible. As in, imps will get slaughtered by the blues who have a weird predilection for sending out imps to die, while the hero waves force you to overstretch (as in your heroes will be partially rested while the heroes have infinite respawns.