I have finished Under the Burning Suns and concluded my mainline playthrough! Overall, it was an amazing experience - I was very much engaged and kept a record of each campaign history, renaming all the veteran characters and creating backstories for them (RIP the paladin who died protecting Haldric at Fallen Lich Point -- that was my very first level three death and I still remember him).
I did end up skipping Northern Rebirth, though, as well as its sequel Hammer of Thursagan (and Winds of Fate):
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I started off playing on the easiest difficulty, but went up to intermediate by Liberty/Heir to the Throne. Mostly, I was playing for the story and the setting (and to enjoy the artistic assets) with less attention paid to combat or game mechanics, so maybe my opinion is related to my lack of strategic competence, but I found the 'expert' campaigns (like Northern Rebirth) to be generally less enjoyable.
Or maybe I'm just not a fan of dwarves and orcs lol. I did like Under the Burning Suns a lot more than Northern Rebirth and Son of the Black-Eye.
Maybe the expert campaigns appeal to different demographic groups/personalities/play styles/audience segments. People who focus on battles and on crunching numbers for a good strategy might like them. My playthrough was totally blind (i.e. no knowledge of any trigger event) with zero backtracking; I was okay with taking losses and living with the consequences of making blunders -- or even getting into dangerous situations on purpose for the sake of dramatic tension and storytelling (for example, I tried not raising walking corpses for as long as possible in the first scenario of Descent into Darkness).
For handling scale, I was really impressed by Eastern Invasion (which I understand had a massive update this version?). Even though it had some fairly big battles with multiple fronts, I think it went about it differently than Northern Rebirth. These had fairly well-defined local theatres without relying on obvious chokepoints; the open terrain increases the number of decisions the player has to make (there aren't many decisions to make at a chokepoint except how to shuffle units around), but the localized theatres make each decision more important -- when there are fifty units against fifty units, each unit and every decision about each unit becomes less important; but when there are five separate groups of ten-on-ten, each unit and every decision becomes important even though the overall scale of the battle remains unchanged.
For lore/writing/story, the expert campaigns felt generally less polished than the other ones -- maybe because the intended audience for expert campaigns tend to care more about strategy and gameplay than the story? Under the Burning Sun had some refined prose, but the tone was sometimes different from most mainline campaigns (for example, there were a few passages written in second-person like in a choose-your-own-adventure game), and there were a few lore inconsistencies (for example, it was established that elves aged rapidly shortly before they died and maintained their youthful grace before then, but older elves were described as 'moving slower' due to age in UtBS).
In my mind, I just consider Northern Rebirth/Hammer of Thursagan to be 'semi-canonical' or 'mythically true', in the sense that the start and the conclusion of the story happened generally as described (i.e. there was a slave named Tallin who founded a Northern Alliance outside of Wesnoth with the help of a dwarvish lord), but everything in between is grossly embellished or questionable hearsay (e.g. there never was a pair of immortal white mages). Like a bard's tale or gossip in a Wesnothian tavern about 'what's been going on up north'.
I did end up skipping Northern Rebirth, though, as well as its sequel Hammer of Thursagan (and Winds of Fate):
I started off playing on the easiest difficulty, but went up to intermediate by Liberty/Heir to the Throne. Mostly, I was playing for the story and the setting (and to enjoy the artistic assets) with less attention paid to combat or game mechanics, so maybe my opinion is related to my lack of strategic competence, but I found the 'expert' campaigns (like Northern Rebirth) to be generally less enjoyable.
Or maybe I'm just not a fan of dwarves and orcs lol. I did like Under the Burning Suns a lot more than Northern Rebirth and Son of the Black-Eye.
Maybe the expert campaigns appeal to different demographic groups/personalities/play styles/audience segments. People who focus on battles and on crunching numbers for a good strategy might like them. My playthrough was totally blind (i.e. no knowledge of any trigger event) with zero backtracking; I was okay with taking losses and living with the consequences of making blunders -- or even getting into dangerous situations on purpose for the sake of dramatic tension and storytelling (for example, I tried not raising walking corpses for as long as possible in the first scenario of Descent into Darkness).
For handling scale, I was really impressed by Eastern Invasion (which I understand had a massive update this version?). Even though it had some fairly big battles with multiple fronts, I think it went about it differently than Northern Rebirth. These had fairly well-defined local theatres without relying on obvious chokepoints; the open terrain increases the number of decisions the player has to make (there aren't many decisions to make at a chokepoint except how to shuffle units around), but the localized theatres make each decision more important -- when there are fifty units against fifty units, each unit and every decision about each unit becomes less important; but when there are five separate groups of ten-on-ten, each unit and every decision becomes important even though the overall scale of the battle remains unchanged.
For lore/writing/story, the expert campaigns felt generally less polished than the other ones -- maybe because the intended audience for expert campaigns tend to care more about strategy and gameplay than the story? Under the Burning Sun had some refined prose, but the tone was sometimes different from most mainline campaigns (for example, there were a few passages written in second-person like in a choose-your-own-adventure game), and there were a few lore inconsistencies (for example, it was established that elves aged rapidly shortly before they died and maintained their youthful grace before then, but older elves were described as 'moving slower' due to age in UtBS).
Yes, I think I'm okay with the general outline of the story as well -- exploring a minor population on Konrad's journey and the ripple effects of that journey is a great premise! And the idea of peasants/former slaves building a new society from scratch outside the borders of Wesnoth is interesting. I just didn't connect with the details of how that story was told -- with the lore-detached liches and the comic-relief immortal mages and so on. It works as a UMC but seems a bit strange for 'official content'.I like the story but the design of scenarios just irk me.
In my mind, I just consider Northern Rebirth/Hammer of Thursagan to be 'semi-canonical' or 'mythically true', in the sense that the start and the conclusion of the story happened generally as described (i.e. there was a slave named Tallin who founded a Northern Alliance outside of Wesnoth with the help of a dwarvish lord), but everything in between is grossly embellished or questionable hearsay (e.g. there never was a pair of immortal white mages). Like a bard's tale or gossip in a Wesnothian tavern about 'what's been going on up north'.
Oh! That sounds very interesting. I know it's a ton of work to maintain a campaign, but if you happen to just have a working version lying around, I'd love to play it.I will probably keep that version for myself (and only myself).
Statistics: Posted by fishrose — Today, 2:39 am