DK2 Anniversary

[RyliKeeper]

Thank you a lot impboy4 for the effort you put into this campaign, I got plenty of hours of entertainment of it. I liked especially that you kept your remakes in the spirit of the original game and that you used many unused sound files for the levels.

I especially liked the idea that you recruit these other keepers for your cause in the secret missions whose Aid you get in multiple levels and then finally in the last mission all of them are present.


However, I took a bit issue with the last level - it felt a bit incomplete. I didn't think there was too much going on: Both the goodly Heroes and the other keepers didn't seem to do too much.
Since I made some levels for myself mostly a few years ago I took it upon myself to find out why that was the case. I ended up modding the level heavily to have this intense finale that I craved after playing this awesome campaign! I would like to share that version with you and I will write a change log with reasoning below.
The level now has a medium to high difficulty and takes around 2-3 hours to complete, depending on strategy.


Here are the Change Notes:

* I use the General Improvement Mod (GMI) as baseline as it makes the game a lot more enjoyable to me. I understand not everybody feels that way, therefore I add a non-GMI version. I think GMI is more balanced and allows for ranged units to be impactful.

• Modified the Keepers' starting dungeons and behaviour - each now has a creature flavour (Blue Dark Angels, Green Vampires, Yellow Dark Knights & Archers, Purple Mistresses & Archers). They also received some traps for dungeon defense.
• AI keepers received mana vaults on start. The human keeper may also find a few if he goes looking for them...
• Raised Trainable Creature Level to 6 from the training room - This mostly helps the AI keepers to get some stronger minions as the Human keeper will use Combat Pits most likely anyway. (AI seems to ignore using combat pits)
• Removed Freeze Abilities from Vampires and Monks as they trivialized the battle with the King. To compensate Vampires received an additional drain ability at lvl 6 and monks and additional heal. (Mistresses kept theirs at lvl 8 as getting one is very difficult imo. If you for whatever reason feel the need to cheese that fight, try getting a few of them)
• AI keepers receive an extra hero portal each to allow for slightly more creatures for them. Yellow receives an extra regular portal as yellow struggles hardest against heroes. These portals are impossible to be claimed by the player or other keepers.
• Fixed an oversight that caused later Hero Parties to not spawn.

[Spoiler Alert]: If you plan on giving this map a shot and wish to go in "blind", then stop reading the next notes.

• Added & Modified Hero Parties - As time progresses they get stronger.
• Made the first Line of Hero Gates in the Hero Castle destructable, preventing assiciated hero parties from spawning. This might however draw the ire of the heroes...
• Added two destructable hero outposts to the map from which additional hero parties may spawn.
• Added basic decision trees to Heros to allows them to focus their attacks on other keepers if they manage to destroy their primary kill target keeper. This gives incentive to the human player to defend his allies so that heros won't overwhelm the alliance of keepers.
• Buffed the King's health & health regeneration by a very large amount. He is a very tough opponent, requiring a large force to deal with. In addition he may flee if he feels threatened and summon aid from the outside world.
• Modified the Defense Party that comes to the aid of the king once he is first engaged: Now they attack the allied keepers instead, acting as a kill squad. If left to their own devices they will kill off all other keepers and then move to kill the player.
• Once the king is defeated chaos ensues - The allied keepers planned to coup the player keeper to get revenge for their defeats in previous recruitment levels all along and steal away his victory. Fight your former allies to claim the portal gem! That is, if the heroes didn't already kill them...
• Many smaller changes were not listed because they were too minor to be worth mentioning.

Small personal notes: The map runs mostly stable, it crashes around 0-3 times for me per play through, depending on whether the stars align or not. However, I found having too many creatures spawn or be on the map at the same time to be contributing to this. Therefore, don't convert too many enemies, especially when not using GMI (GMI makes conversions very difficult). Thus I tried to not make too many creatures spawn at once and stagger large invasion spawns.

Save often and enjoy!

Modified Level 20 Anniversary.zip

[impboy4]

I really appreciate your effort, but your version strays too much from the vanilla and defeats the story of the Alliance with those changes. I made the plot that you and your Alliance all get to destroy the overworld together.

This is good standalone though.

[RyliKeeper]

I really appreciate your effort, but your version strays too much from the vanilla and defeats the story of the Alliance with those changes. I made the plot that you and your Alliance all get to destroy the overworld together.

This is good standalone though.

I take it you playtested it once then.

During the modification work I started off with the level ending once the king died, but I thought it would be great for gameplay to have it go on a little longer. I found the version with All AI keepers against the players the most satisfying to as it posed a bit of a challenge, depending on how many friendly keepers you were able to keep alive. I also tested an FFA version, but that went nowhere, as AI Keepers didn't manage to defeat each other or send anything to the player.

If you're interested I can come up with a version, that ends once the King dies, should be easily doable with some Win condition changes. (There is a Trigger looking for King dead + All keepers dead, switching to only requiring the death of the king should solve it).

However, in order to spice the level up in difficulty I'd also weaken the AI keepers a bit, making them more reliant on Human Player support.
I'd:
- Lower trainable lvl in training room for 6 to 5. (Or even back to 4)
- delete the goodly portals from the AI bases, move their evil portals in their locations instead. (This will block the keeper from benefiting from letting his allies die.)
- remove some green player vampires

[RyliKeeper]

Hey there again!

I did the promised changes and then some.

There are again 2 version, this time one with a King, that goes on the offensive! He will assist certain Hero Parties in Securing kills on your allied Keepers. It is up to you to force him back!


- Reverted trainable level to 4 in the training room
- minor changes to map layout, improving goodly giant navigation to player's dungeon.
- removed hero portals from allied keepers bases, moved regular portal to their locations. Adjusted keeper dungeon layout accordingly.
- New: Instead of waiting for his fate, the King takes up arms against you and your allies personally!
- Removed Thunderbolt Keeper spell. (Made killing the King too trivial, as "Immune to Lightining" attribute seems bugged)
- Added Stop ability to the King
- Lowered Stun duration to 0. He gets briefly stunned by lighting (Traps & Mistrisses & Fairies)
- Reduced King health regeneration by ~66%, making him more easily killable on his own land.

- Level ends on King death. However, if you decide to continue playing, you may duke it out with your fellow keepers.

I recommend the version with the offensive king, more fun imo!

[RyliKeeper]

I fleshed out the idea some more and did some more polishing.

Changes:
- Slight layout change so that AI keepers will no longer claim the neutral dungeons of deafeated keepers (unless a new path is dug by heroes or the player). Claiming empty dungeons made the keepers weaker, as their creatures were spread around the map more, leading to a worse defense.
- Reworked King decision tree. He no longer gets distracted by destructions of hero portals, once he picks a target to attack. He now attacks until he is repelled or until his target is dead.
- Fixed a bug where a fleeing king would start attacking again, making him run in circles until he was killed.
- Added the far-away hero portals as triggers for king attacks.
- added more mana vaults for the player to find
- Changed the way the final defense wave spawns. It can no longer spawn at the same time as the Final Attack wave.
- Stone knights moved to the final defense wave (was on offensive wave)
- fixed some Speech misfiring
- Changed Prince abilities slightly, one is now Attacker, one is Disabler, one is Healer. (Doesn't make much of a difference tbh)
- increased King Run Speed slightly.



All in all I am happy with how the map turned out. If you want to, you can incorporate it in your package! (Was built on your nice work, anyway )
Would you mind if I opened a new thread for this map in order to get some playtesting? Of course I would mention that it was built on your map package, giving you the credit and linking to this thread.

Best wishes
Ryli

Modified lvl 20 - offensive King v1.1.zip