A lot of detailed and useful feedback was given on Discord/IRC so I am reposting it and responding here so it does not get lost:
Yeah, the scenario where you first encounter the elves was probably too goofy to get across how much more numerous and better organized the elves of Wesmere were than Gorlack's small flight or how nimbly elves move through forest.
Saurgrath is the capital of the Saurian Empire which will fall in LoW (all lore regarding Saurgrath and the Saurian Empire comes from LoW) about twenty years after WoF takes place. So at this time their capital city may still have enough cultural significance for one of the saurians to mention it in passing?
The reason the elvish lady welcomed in the saurians (and drakes) is (for better or worse) explained in her lost diary, which the player can find in the panthers' pen. It is odd that the long lived elves forgot the drakes existed on the Great Continent thousands of years ago, but they likewise forgot the orcs were anything more than a children's fable (as shown in The Rise of Wesnoth) after a similar amount of time. The nature of the undead creature in the cave is left as a mystery for future exploration (for better or worse). Not all drakes went into exile from the Western Continent, it is only the drakes on the Morogor Archipelago who are descendants of the exiles led by the disgraced Dominant Morogor (the Morogor archipelago was named after him once they settled there). The drakes do not fight against Khrakrahs in this version (the mainline one), instead they all fight on the same side. The reason the drakes did not migrate sooner was because they did not know/remember any way back to a landmass beyond Morogor until the arrival of humans from the Green Isle; they basically studied and followed the route taken by human and orcish ships to reach the Great Continent.
Regarding the drake females controversy, I agree it was an overreaction. Ultimately, the political wind was blowing in the direction of turning the drakes into a species of hermaphrodites, if not for this change to sex parity.
The issue of payment was a sticking point for the project council so negotiations dragged out for months, leaving canon in a state of limbo between the old and the new, all the while WoF was being (re)written to meet her requirement that it have much more lore (to be considered for reentry into mainline). The paid commission never happened but for years after we were given the impression some or all of the "new cannon" was still going to happen, just slower and piecemeal since it was being done on a volunteer basis. It only became clear some months ago this was never going to happen at all.
So setting the drake lore mostly in the distant past and future was necessary to avoid the constantly shifting, unreliable state of the game's canon over the past several years. Also, having the drakes only slowly reappear as a major power as we approach "The Fall" era helped explain why they make so very few appearances in other campaigns.
Regarding the campaign's recall costs in 1.18, the following conversation may help explain (but not excuse) my rationale for setting them so high as I did:
1. Make cheaper units worth recalling.
2. Keep later scenarios fun and balanced while avoiding hated recall list wipes.
3. Eliminate turn limits.
The higher the variable recall costs the more of these problems are solved.
You can solve problem #1 just by setting the recall cost to the original recruit cost. So recalling a Royal Guard would cost 14g instead of the usual 20g.
But to remedy both #1 and #2 you may need something like... the original recruit cost plus half of the difference between the unit's current cost and original cost. So now a Royal Guard costs 37g to recall instead of 20g.
And to fix all three problems you need perhaps 75% to 100% of the unit's current cost. So 45g or 61g for a Royal Guard instead of 20g.
Given the unpopularity of 100% recall costs and the META of carefully packing recall lists with units possessing experience approaching their next advancement... I have been looking for a better solution. And I think it might be recall costs equal to 75% the current (recruit) cost plus some amount to represent the value of its experience if (and only if) it is not maximum level (so just a flat 75% for most level 3 units since they are AMLA). The "some amount" representing experience value will probably have to be not just a linear interpolation but some kind of exponential curve interpolation so that the cost of recalling a level 1 only approaches 75% the cost of its level 2 advancement when it is very close to achieving that advancement.
Good points. In your play through did you find the lore book in scenario 2 (it is a bit north of the orcish captain you have to capture alive)?I’m a fan of WoF. Lorewise, I think its very good. I think a lot of the story concept sin WoF, such as castes, weren’t explained properly, which was confusing. The elves just letting the drakes in was weird. It was also weird how all the elves followed so easily and the dialogue in the scenario could be improved. When the saurians mention Saurgrath it sounds far too weird, as they live very far from Saurgrath and most saurians are from their own clans. I don’t like the vairable recall costs, though that isn’t lore.
Yeah, the scenario where you first encounter the elves was probably too goofy to get across how much more numerous and better organized the elves of Wesmere were than Gorlack's small flight or how nimbly elves move through forest.
Saurgrath is the capital of the Saurian Empire which will fall in LoW (all lore regarding Saurgrath and the Saurian Empire comes from LoW) about twenty years after WoF takes place. So at this time their capital city may still have enough cultural significance for one of the saurians to mention it in passing?
Hmm, my guess is maybe half these things become more clear when you play the campaign because there is a certain amount of visual story telling, jokes, context and sequencing of events/dialogue which are hard to parse from reading the strings and game logic. But the other half are due to mistakes I made packing too much trivial lore into some critical later scenarios - particularly Harvest (7) and Overlook (8).On WoF - I've read the post on forum about it's removal from 1.16, and I think what it was before should have been improved instead of completely revamped. Females were rare and valuable members of Drake society, they were protected, and I see no point in them being Dominants and risking themselves on the battlefield, with all inherent dangers. Yes, they are larger and stronger, like all reptiles, and can fend for themselves, but not so much that they can be used in war. The same applies to Saurians, but their male to female ratio is not revealed, so their greater social flexibility makes more sense.
The elves' reaction to the appearance of drakes on their borders is beyond stupidity, and the fact that they forgot each other, although both of them have their own keepers of knowledge, seems illogical, at least for the former. A senseless war with people because of the whims of the new allies, given the opportunity to migrate to the north, also does not look well thought out.
Their pact with the dwarves is meaningless without changes to the lore in other campaigns, which is something I'm usually against, depending on what they are of course. I don't quite understand what happened in the cave with the undead, and the fact that the Drakes had to fight the Dragon, although their kinship is obvious, and this is not the same cave in which Khrakrahs lived in SoF, also raises questions. The fact that their entire race went into exile at the behest of one individual, no matter how great the Dominant Morogor was, somewhat disrupts the sequence of arrival of races on the Great Continent - first Humans, then Orcs, and then the Drakes. Also, why didn't they do this earlier, before Haldric founded Wesnoth? Orcs migrated en masse from the Green Island, they should have caused more problems and ships, but this did not happen. Bear in mind that I only read WoF, I might have missed something.
The reason the elvish lady welcomed in the saurians (and drakes) is (for better or worse) explained in her lost diary, which the player can find in the panthers' pen. It is odd that the long lived elves forgot the drakes existed on the Great Continent thousands of years ago, but they likewise forgot the orcs were anything more than a children's fable (as shown in The Rise of Wesnoth) after a similar amount of time. The nature of the undead creature in the cave is left as a mystery for future exploration (for better or worse). Not all drakes went into exile from the Western Continent, it is only the drakes on the Morogor Archipelago who are descendants of the exiles led by the disgraced Dominant Morogor (the Morogor archipelago was named after him once they settled there). The drakes do not fight against Khrakrahs in this version (the mainline one), instead they all fight on the same side. The reason the drakes did not migrate sooner was because they did not know/remember any way back to a landmass beyond Morogor until the arrival of humans from the Green Isle; they basically studied and followed the route taken by human and orcish ships to reach the Great Continent.
Regarding the drake females controversy, I agree it was an overreaction. Ultimately, the political wind was blowing in the direction of turning the drakes into a species of hermaphrodites, if not for this change to sex parity.
The best part of WoF's story was when it was dealing with drakes and Gorlack was front and center. When it started veering off into other stuff I quickly got lost. I still don't know what the whole deal with Nova was about. I assume it was some kind of oblique reference to some obscure bit of Wesnoth lore...
Yeah, Nova was somewhat a product of design-by-committee. Originally, this character was a regular lich (with a different, wesfolk name) that had come over as part of Jevyan's undead legion. But your predecessor SP lead wanted liches to be much more special and rare, so the character was changed to a surviving lich-lord from the Green Isle. But that was then considered unsatisfactory because she wanted to rewrite the lich-lords as being (IIRC) something like incredibly powerful demigods native to the Green Isle, as part of her proposed total rewrite of all mainline canon for which she wanted a paid art commission.As WoF lore goes, I very much liked the different castes and their interactions, as well as the "final boss" and the resolution of it. I thought WoF did a great job making drakes feel properly alien - but still relatable - instead of just humans with wings. In my mind, this is the biggest selling point of the campaign, and was very well done.
I disliked the Avatar of Nova and past/future lore. Partially because it mostly isn't explained in-game (IIRC), but also because I feel it adds to neither Gorlack's story nor that of any other mainline campaign. I also share concerns about the progression: the variable recall cost, lack of gold carryover, and ability to recruit L2s.
In one scenario of WoF, there's a lich named "Avatar of Nova", who's not an actual lich but rather the manifestation/puppet/avatar of a some powerful being called Nova. This isn't explained much in-game, but campaigns/Winds_of_Fate/story/Past_and_Future_Drake_History_(Spoilers).txt file contains a great deal more detail. It's very detailed and impressive, and also mostly irrelevant to Wesnoth mainline as it all happens either way before or way after (not sure how it interacts with UtBS). I would generally consider stuff in-game to be canon, with non-player-facing documents/wikis/etc to be suggestions and ideas
The issue of payment was a sticking point for the project council so negotiations dragged out for months, leaving canon in a state of limbo between the old and the new, all the while WoF was being (re)written to meet her requirement that it have much more lore (to be considered for reentry into mainline). The paid commission never happened but for years after we were given the impression some or all of the "new cannon" was still going to happen, just slower and piecemeal since it was being done on a volunteer basis. It only became clear some months ago this was never going to happen at all.
So setting the drake lore mostly in the distant past and future was necessary to avoid the constantly shifting, unreliable state of the game's canon over the past several years. Also, having the drakes only slowly reappear as a major power as we approach "The Fall" era helped explain why they make so very few appearances in other campaigns.
Regarding the campaign's recall costs in 1.18, the following conversation may help explain (but not excuse) my rationale for setting them so high as I did:
Welcome, I am here to complain on varied recall costs in Winds of Fate. I think building army only to pay for them as much as for recruiting already on max level and lossing them like nothing is nonsense, make me feel like keeping everyone with XP almost enough to advance but to nevertheless not exceed it in order not to pay 20/30 gold more. Maybe there should be some changes in recalls but paying for units trained to get into this high level just as for new high level recruits is not needed.
Your criticisms are valid and I actually agree with them. Basically, the recall mechanic in Winds of Fate is an imperfect solution to the fundamentally broken recall system of mainline campaigns.
The problem with a typical campaign is that it is a linear sequence of scenarios (like in many traditional strategy games such as StarCraft) married to an experience system taken out of a nonlinear, open world, role playing game.
In a strategy game, players are generally put through a sequence of carefully balanced scenarios (following a story line) that get gradually more challenging and complicated, while carefully granting them access to new units which are stronger, more complicated and more expensive. Everything is tightly controlled so that each scenario is fun, challenging and winnable at the outset.
In a role playing game, players are generally free to move about and take on whichever battles they choose, be them hard or easy. If a battle looks too tough players can avoid it and instead grind experience and loot by opportunistically attacking easier enemies and quests.
So typical strategy games give highly curated and balanced game play at the cost of taking away a lot of player freedoms, whereas typical role playing games provide an imbalanced mess of a world but give players all the freedom and knowledge they need to manage it on their own terms. Both styles of game are excellent in their own ways, which is why they each grew to become so popular over the decades.
But the two styles do not combine well the way a typical wesnoth campaign tries to do so. Carryover of gold and experience (as recall-able veterans) makes mid and (more so) late campaign scenarios either much too easy or much too hard. Some campaigns try to solve this with a recall list wipe but a lot of players hate this with a fiery passion.
Winds of Fate's solution is to take a step back from trying to combine the two genres and just be a traditional, linear flow strategy game campaign. I tried to make each one of the scenarios as unique, balanced and fun as I knew how, and also give players as much freedom inside that scenario as possible - which is why there are basically no hard turn limits anywhere. But inter-scenario power creep was sacrificed to make that happen. So there is no gold carryover and the power of recalls is roughly on par with that of fresh recruits.
Generally I understand what's that supposed to do but playing Winds of Fate it becomes very frustrating in "The Ancestor" which anyway is in my opinion badly written scenario from technical reasons. Drakes having bad defence on snow have to fight yetis, altogether with varied recall costs it makes whole thing very hard and completing it I had to loss almost entire army. Maybe better solution would be to make smaller cost differences like 20 for level one 30 for level 2 40 for level three or similiar. I know 20 for recall can make last scenarios too easy but we shouldn't make it too hard as well. In addition there can be way to just change the recruit list in first scenarios so that player's team won't get too strong too quickly and be on similiar strenght like enemy teams.
Which difficulty level did you play on? I am going to rebalance this scenario during my next update for the campaign and one of the changes I am considering is to vary the number of yetis by difficulty. So something like:
easy = none
normal = 1 yeti
hard = 2 yetis
nightmare = 4 yetis
The fact you lost almost your entire army is actually not bad at all, because this campaign is balanced so that you do not need any veterans to beat any of its scenarios. You could play the entire campaign with only fresh recruits. So if you just barely make it through a tough scenario with almost no surviving soldiers there is no need to worry or reload. All that matters is that you made it to the next scenario.
Another way of looking at it is you can solve 1-3 significant problems with variable recall costs:I've used normal difficulty and had 4-6 yetis on my way. Last scenario I completed using only recruited gliders so I believe most scenarios can be completed like this (still not sure about "The Ancestor" in current version.
1. Make cheaper units worth recalling.
2. Keep later scenarios fun and balanced while avoiding hated recall list wipes.
3. Eliminate turn limits.
The higher the variable recall costs the more of these problems are solved.
You can solve problem #1 just by setting the recall cost to the original recruit cost. So recalling a Royal Guard would cost 14g instead of the usual 20g.
But to remedy both #1 and #2 you may need something like... the original recruit cost plus half of the difference between the unit's current cost and original cost. So now a Royal Guard costs 37g to recall instead of 20g.
And to fix all three problems you need perhaps 75% to 100% of the unit's current cost. So 45g or 61g for a Royal Guard instead of 20g.
Given the unpopularity of 100% recall costs and the META of carefully packing recall lists with units possessing experience approaching their next advancement... I have been looking for a better solution. And I think it might be recall costs equal to 75% the current (recruit) cost plus some amount to represent the value of its experience if (and only if) it is not maximum level (so just a flat 75% for most level 3 units since they are AMLA). The "some amount" representing experience value will probably have to be not just a linear interpolation but some kind of exponential curve interpolation so that the cost of recalling a level 1 only approaches 75% the cost of its level 2 advancement when it is very close to achieving that advancement.
Statistics: Posted by name — Today, 7:02 pm
