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