More Bugs and Minor Gameplay Feedback
Spoiler:
Spells:
Omaranth Part 2 (Again):
Long Live the Queen:
- The spell system is still really cool.
I didn't really get much mileage out of several spells, especially the high level ones. By the end of the campaign on Normal, I still wanted to play around with the spell system more, but I suppose that's what higher difficulties are for. - It does favour advance knowledge a fair amount, but picking from a limited roster of spells is interesting. On reflection, I'm not sure how different this is from knowing what units are good to recruit and level. Some possible modifications, but I don't think they're particularly needed:
- Easy difficulty could have hints suggesting which spells are useful.
- The player could have the option to defer picking spells, but Delfador can't cast until spells are selected.
- A bonus Meditate spell that resets Delfador's spells and allows the player to pick again. I don't particularly like this, as the cost would either still put blind players at a disadvantage or make spell roster swapping too useful. - Using the Replay From Turn feature to reload the current turn causes a crash to desktop if Delfador picked spells in that turn. E.g: Turn 1 of a scenario. The player reloads the first autosave, which allows them to pick spells again. Selecting replay from Turn 1 then crashes Wesnoth, but this doesn't happen if replaying from an earlier turn.
This is probably most likely to happen in Omaranth, as Delfador can potentially pick spells mid-battle and the fog makes it harder to undo misclicks. - The spell window doesn't include links to the help menu or mouseover explanations of effects like Slows and Leadership. If it is easy to do, it might be worth implementing.
- Delfador as a Frost Stoat loses ZoC despite his level not changing in the unit card. He also still gives normal experience to units attacking him.
- Mnemonic's allow undo is inconsistent. It blocks undo when recalling in hexes to adjacent to Delfador and when Delfador moves adjacent to another one of the player's units, but allows undo when a player unit moves adjacent to Delfador.
- Time Dilation:
The line breaks of Panacea and Cataclysm are inconsistent with Time Dilation's.
Casting Time Dilation then recruiting causes the unit to gain the green clock visual on the following turn, and it doesn't disappear.
They also don't benefit from Time Dilation, but are still Slowed on the following turn.
(Recruiting then casting Time Dilation gives the unit the benefits - they get 1 normal move and attack.)
There's a very strange bug with Time Dilation in Long Live the Queen where casting it causes veterans with bugged increased experience costs from earlier scenarios to reset to 80% experience. If this causes a unit to level, the spell doesn't work. If the unit has a choice in advancements, it causes the spell's visuals to get stuck as well. - Cataclysm:
Cataclysm plus Blizzard allows the player to terraform the map. Blizzard converts water tiles to Ice, which is melted into flat ground by Cataclysm. Though the alternative - ice melts into water - could make some non-TDG scenarios impossible if adapted for UMC.
Cataclysm kind of requires Polymorph (the Frost Stoat has Skirmisher) to be used properly. Passives don't work with Polymorph so the player even has to leave Stoat Delfador exposed to an attack to get max XP.
Time Dilation seems much better than Cataclysm mostly because it doesn't expose Delfador as much, although I imagine Cataclysm will benefit more from higher difficulties. - Enthrall:
Enthrall is a persistent efffect, so it should have the same "Lasts until cancelled" note as Polymorph - I thought it was a one-time effect, like Blizzard.
Is there a reason Enthrall uses up Delfador's attack despite it being a persistent spell that should be cast early anyway? - Panacea (Again):
If a unit advances while under the effects of Panacea, it doesn't get the L2 benefits. I think it would be slightly better if Panacea did allow a unit to gain the stronger effects on advancing, but this isn't that much of an issue.
Advancing also cures the Poison effect (visual only).
The unit also dies on scenario end - this should maybe be noted in the description. - The Counterspell - Dancing Daggers combination didn't occur to me until I played through a second time and realised that one of Delfador's shadows was able to cast it despite having Counterspell active.
In fairness to me, there are several scenarios between the Sylvan Seer and actually unlocking Counterspell and Dancing Daggers and neither spell is particularly useful outside of the Eldred boss fight.
Omaranth Part 2 (Again):
- The scenario should state explicitly that the veteran can recruit. The scenario design makes it fairly obvious, but there should probably be an explicit prompt.
- Changing difficulty on scenario start here causes Delfador's experience to be modified by the difficulty multiplier. I wasn't able to reproduce this for any of the handful of other scenario I tested (it doesn't seem to be an issue with the Delfador units).
- Deoran loses his experience when he changes unit type, he should probably keep it if only for consistency.
- If the player somehow ends the scenario before Deoran arrives, Garard appears as a fallback but Deoran doesn't and is not present in Revelry.
This is just barely possible without debug, as Delfador flying straight to the Orc Warrior as a Roc can get one attack in before Deoran arrives. If Delfador hits 4/4 with Fireball, then hit 3/3 with Chill Touch and kill the Orc leader on retaliation - something the Orc AI is willing to risk - the player can win on Turn 3.
- The Traitor:
There is an early finish bonus but the player is instructed to burn down all villages and cannot capture and earn gold from them. The early finish bonus is calculated from the number of villages on the map, so whenever the player burns a village they damage their early finish bonus, which leads directly into the finale.
- Players might not realise that they are damaging their EFB whenever they burn a village.
- Keeping damage to a minimum to preserve EFB is in direct opposition to the story flavour of the scenario: "burn it to the ground".
- EFB will have extremely high variance for an important scenario.
There's a couple options here:
- calculate EFB based on an arbitrary number of villages.
- have no early finish bonus, and add the expected EFB to the minimum gold for the finale. - This is an extremely bad map for cavalry. This isn't really a problem in and of itself depending on what difficulty the campaign is aimed at, but in other scenarios the introduced unit types are a decent choice.
- Kaylan can advance into a Paladin, which might be at odds with his appearance later in HttT.
- 3 AI Bowmen roamed out into the woods in the upper half of the map and just idled there for the duration of the scenario.
- The Familiar can trigger the "cavalry burns a village" dialogue. It should work the same as when Delfador or a summon burns a village.
- Arand doesn't give XP when killed.
- The regular scenario end, and backup Panacea kill doesn't trigger here - I used panacea on Sir Kaylan to kill Arand. Kaylan was then poisoned in the cutscene after Revelry Revisted. At the start of Long Live the Queen, Kaylan still has the Panacea ability and benefits but doesn't die.
(Oddly, Kaylan could still benefit from Panacea again, but there's no normal conditions where it can be stacked.)
- I understand the goal of the scenario is to prevent players from having a well-stocked recall list of unused units, but I think the campaign is mostly too short for that to even happen. Even with 80% XP, I only had 4 L3 units total at this point.. The scenario is still fun to play, I just don't think it is likely to have more veterans than the player can use.
- It is a more forgiving recall list "bottleneck" than EI's, I suspect players will like it more.
- The game deleted multiple L2+ veterans at this point.
Deoran couldn't recall any of the Outlaw units (only units that start on the map can escape), but the problem wasn't exclusive to them as a Mage of Light and an Arch Mage also disppeared on seperate occasions.
(Deoran can recruit Outlaw units though.)
It could be an issue with the auto-recalled unit coordinates, but it takes a while to cycle through to Revelry Revisted from Clan Blackrest and test this sort of thing.
The Mage of Light was rescued by Contingency in Clan Blackrest, but the Arch Mage wasn't so I don't think it is related to Contingency. - The cutscene breaks replays - the replay specific UI doesn't reappear when it finishes.
- Some of the human reinforcements from across the river shared a team with the Iron Mauler leader and disappeared when he was killed; I don't know if that's intentional.
Long Live the Queen:
- I had 554 starting gold on Normal and the keeps were too small to take much advantage of it - I finished the first half of the scenario on Turn 8 with 3 keeps of veterans.
- Some of the cavalry units had their XP costs increased again - presumably the same cutscene related bug as before.
- I don't really like how the Castle hexes look.
Is there a reason they are immune to Cataclysm as well? If the player is in postion to hit Eldred with Cataclysm without Delfador immediately dying, he'll probably be slain shortly regardless of his ability to continue recruiting. - Delfador can recruit human units when fighting Eldred, which seems off because they're in a magical duel.
- The Ghosts in the duel didn't move for a turn after appearing when they were triggered by "killing" Eldred (Eldred would have died from being reduced to 0 HP) rather than seriously wounding him in the first part of the duel.
- Reloading an autosave results in the Ghosts having full moves and being able to immediately heal Eldred.
- The heal on kill for the Ghosts depends on the killer HP, not Delfador's. The Fire Guardian line and the Familiar are able to get kills fairly easily.
- The terrain could be damaged when Delfador returns to the normal map after the duel - either in a the "grass never grew back" beat or the presence of sand hexes similar to the way they're used in EI.
Statistics: Posted by Vendrick — Yesterday, 7:53 pm