DsRaider

Join Date 11/2008

+70

[1.0] Reflections Upon The Campaign

So I just finished the Campaign and I have to say it was about what I expected, as in kinda boring. D+. I know this probably isn't a priority but some relatively small changes would make a big difference in making the campaign much more interesting to and fun to play. If the campaign is a as is kinda thing then still when either Stardock or Modders add more scenarios here are some ways to improve on the current campaign.

The Good:

-Interesting Lore.

-Lovely Paintings.

-Plenty of Items.

-Leveling Champions.

-Lots of Monsters.

-Side quests.

The Bad:

-No real building but it's tacked on anyway.

-Too many champions.

-Lots of pointless turn ending.

-Lack of choices or strategies.

-Walking everywhere and then walking around some more

-Lack of real boss fights.

First of all you just spend way to many turns walking around. I suggest doubling the movement rate on terrain and removing the rough terrain penalties. There is no reason to have the same movement rate as in sandbox games, it gets annoying fast. I also suggest adding the movement boosting spell to the tech tree and adding in more mounts. Also re-adding the old town portal spell couldn't hurt. You shouldn't be forcing players to waste 100 turns walking around.

The second big issue is the champions, and how they remove strategic depth. Cap the total amount of champions allowed in a group at 3. This way players will use normal troops, make more then one army, and have to actually think sometimes instead running everything over with a huge champion stack.That bored me to tears. Autocalc, autocalc, autocalc...

Thirdly there is the weak enemies. They are simply to static and weak. Why so few enemy champions. Please please add way more smack talking enemy champions with tons of spells and abilities and high armor values. This would add a lot to the scenario. You could even have a few duels. Also more boss fights are really needed, and need to be done better. Bosses should have tons and tons of hp and cool abilities. That last Demon should have been laughing at my blows, casting ranged damage spells, summoning more lurks, and trying to get a huge mass damage spell like horrific wail past my counters. Instead it was just another demon to stab. I'm not saying they have to be impossible to beat, just that they should last awhile and be interesting. Also when it gets to the last mission some of the enemy troops need to be using platemail. You will have it so they also need it, it makes no sense for the enemy troops to never have anything better then leather.

Fourthly there is the vestigial resource system. Admittedly what I suggest here isn't so small of a change. The biggest problem here is the resource system, it makes no sense to gain constant resources over time and yet not spend resources constantly over time. Get rid of all the mines near your starting positions. Instead add special quest mines spotted across the landscape. You would gain resources by walking on these special locations whereupon you would face a repeatable random encounter which would reward you with resources when you win. This way champions and armies become the the main way to gain resources instead of time, which is broken in a scenario where you don't have real enemies or building. Also please switch all the campaign cities to having only 1 essence. That way you face real choices in enchanting. A similar system could work for mana, you basically get endless amounts of it as of now. The land should be spotted with shards, which would be guarded by elementals or dark wizards but when liberated by a player grant a substantial one time mana reward, and a very low over time amount. Shards are such a huge part of the lore so why are they so neglected in the campaign?

Fifthly here are some larger changes. Re-add pioneers and make a few more spots settleable. It can't hurt and it would really help make you seem like your building a true kingdom. More cities will just help you defeat enemies sooner and travel easier. Also as stated above enemies are too static. Why are there no enemy cities. It would be nice at least once face an enemy that adapts to you and be able to fail... At least have some monster lairs or forts that spawn wanderers.

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Can't say I agree with all your points, but the post does post food for thought, so hope its read and thought through by John

I must be harsh and say I stopped playing the campaign due to lack of interest.

Sincerely
~ Kongdej

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I stopped playing the campaign when it killed the hero who had my best equipment in a cutscene.

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From 1.01 Patchlog.

Added functionality to the KillChampion trigger so that we can give all of the dead champ's items/equipment to the sovereign

I would be happy just to start a good conversation on how to create and improve campaigns. What in particular did you guys like or dislike in the available scenario.

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I completed what I felt was the "mini campaign". It was good overall. I'm hoping there are MORE chapters released to continue the story. I know this game is about "sandboxing", but I still like to play a good story campaign. Galactic Civilizations 2 is a good example.

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Quoting TimeCircuits,

reply 5

Ya they have mentioned so much more of the lore it would be shame to waste it. Next Relias has to arrive at New Pariden in order to lead the noble revolt.

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I agree with just about everything here.

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No one has any ideas of their own on how they would improve the gameplay of the campaign?

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Quoting DsRaider,

reply 8

No one has any ideas of their own on how they would improve the gameplay of the campaign?

To let go of other posts and just saying what I think from personal experience:

Remove the ability to construct buildings in the cities owned by the player.

Remove all the technology from the campaign whatsoever, its just a silly distraction with no purpose.

Set the main hero's overland movement to 4 even when you have more heroes and units with you.

Give me some proper GuI to reflect the current mission and goals.

Balance out the monsters throughout the campaign.

Reward less champions as reward, and clean up the bugs and UI interface around getting new champions in the main group.

Allow me to hire or construct some sort of mercenary unit groups (3 man unit groups to assist Relias)

I think these points would help make the campaign more about the main character - Relias, and his immediate nearby friends, let other power come from temporary mercenaries.
Also the resources go berserk from each campaign, at the end of the 1st map I have somewhere around 1 trillion gold, research points, metal and crystal.

Sincerely
~ Kongdej

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I think there are some valid points here. There were too many champions, and they got too powerful too quickly. I got some bad ass sword from killing some butcherman and after that my sov was a tank, particularly since he had the sweep ability as well. Cities were unimportant and more of a distraction than anything else. Also, there was no sense of urgency, I could sit around and heal, build up mana, build up my gold supply, etc. It would be better if enemy/monster armies got more powerful as time went on.

In the end it was just a hack and slash fest without much thought involved.

I also had some strange dialog on the 3rd map, because I decided to go south instead of north. All of the sudden Janusk was part of all my stories, but I didn't even have him in my party yet.

And the end battle - I had an army with 7 powerful champions, an earth elemental and a fire elemental. It was over in like 5 seconds, especially since I had a silver flute and I could case "Sunder" which caused 75 damage to an elemental. Shirayne was dead in two casts of this and she only had one turn, where she did nothing but move closer to me. Pretty big anti-climax.

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Quoting Ausland,

reply 10

I also had some strange dialog on the 3rd map, because I decided to go south instead of north. All of the sudden Janusk was part of all my stories, but I didn't even have him in my party yet.

Oh the story could use a slightly better progression (I wandered wrong too a few times)

Thanks for the input

Sincerely
~ Kongdej

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Quoting Kongdej,

reply 9

Remove the ability to construct buildings in the cities owned by the player.

Another option might be to add in quests to build certain improvements. For instance you might get a quest to help your settlement by building a building like a garden or tower of dominion, which requires a unique resource you can only get through completing a quest like clearing out some wolves from a lumberyard. This would bring city building to the fore of the scenario. It might not be possible with the current code though.

Quoting Kongdej,

reply 9

Remove all the technology from the campaign whatsoever, its just a silly distraction with no purpose.

Yeah the current system is pretty bad. Rather then removing it entirely you could remove a lot of the pointless techs, make every tech cost the same, and make the only source of techs lost libraries. That way techs would become bonuses you get for finding lost libraries. These would be things you don't need but would be interesting to have like Mages, magic items, potions, production and food bonuses, special buildings, prestige, improved weapons, and many other things. Other techs and items you need later in the game would be automatically given to you at the start of missions, like chainmail.

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Quoting DsRaider,

reply 12

That would be interesting too.

Sincerely
~ Kongdej

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Solid reflections.

Agree with pretty much everything here.

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As I mentioned in the OP there is a lack of choice when it comes to strategy. One way to add this may be to have different quest options. So you can choose to do the quests that activate the shards in order to mass mana, or choose to do the city quests that allow you to build better troops faster, or do the champion line of quests that grant you better items for champions. Also on top of that you would be collecting lost libraries and having to choose what techs to get because you would have a limited amount. Also a lot of main quests could offer you a choice in rewards. I think this would make for interesting choices in the game.

If I ever have time, I'm in Midterms right now, I may decide to do a Fallen Enchantress Plus scenario, which would just be everything discussed here added to the main campaign. After that I might do a whole new remake of the WoM campaign. It also depends on how much Stardock plans on supporting and updating scenarios.

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Whould give it a C+ overall (nice story, good followup on tutorial, solid point of dificulty for new players / possibly reviewers and nice presentation of the monsters) given I had a bit of fun with it otherwise not liking Campaign-Modes in TBS games mostly. Agree with some of the points. Especially the walking around klicking end turn much / low speed (but that is one of the few minor things I do dislike about the game in general, not just the campaign so no major deductions from the campaign score for that from me). And the better GUI needed for the quests in the campaign (dark writing on dark background / map background is not the best idea to be honest...) as well as some of Kongdej's Ideas to make it better.

All in all solid work for a TBS campaign but no match for a good isometric RPG (let alone an excellent one, nice to see the engine whould very much make a good CRPG possible given the ideas here to make such a campaign better seem very much in Scope for what Modders could do without major fuss...). So bring on the ideas / mods, maybe a good modder will turn this engine into a splendid RPG... (and since mods don't need to mind the difficulty beginners or reviewers like one can also hope for some fiendishly difficult stuff... At least as an option...)

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Quoting Blackmantle_,

reply 16

All in all solid work for a TBS campaign but no match for a good isometric RPG (let alone an excellent one, nice to see the engine whould very much make a good CRPG possible given the ideas here to make such a campaign better seem very much in Scope for what Modders could do without major fuss...).

Ya it would be hard to make a truly good RPG by modding FE, hard but not impossible. For a pure RPGs I would steal as much from Final Fantasy tactics as possible. I think that system would work best. You could also run with the current system of mixed RPG and TBS but skew it more to the RPG. FFT uses a lot of hero on hero combat and it does it in a very fun way. Defintly a lot could be learned there. On reflection it reallt makes no sense to me that the Fallen Enchantress scenario has little to no champion versus champion combat, and that it's boss fights are badly done.

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The campaign was disappointing... the plot reached a climax and then ended. It feels like there should be more. It wasn't enough to get truly invested in what was happening, or make the world of Elemental a truly rich and interesting world.

It was an interesting campaign, and it did give me a bit of interest in the lore.

That and, yes, the cities never got attacked, so there was no point in building them up. Except possibly to have a bigger army. There was no point to having more than one army, since all the heroes were stuck together.

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As I predicted months ago the campaign was not going to be good and it wasn't.

The campaign seems like an after thought. Better than WOM's campaign but not by much. What makes it better is that the game mechanics are more solid. I would say that this would make a fine Tutorial except it does not have many of the elements that the Sandlot game has.

Well the good thing is that I have never seen a good campaign out of any 4X game and I doubt I ever will. But then I don't play 4X games for the campaign.

The one really good thing about the Campaign is that the Champions can die. I really wish this coulds also happen in Sandlot games. It is very annoying that they never die.

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Quoting Bellack,

reply 19

It would be an interesting challenge to make scenarios into truly deep games in their own right. Instead of just simple rpgs used for story telling. Battle for Wesnoth managed this to a fair degree but it's not really replicable into FE because the game is divided into strategic and tactical maps. I'm thinking that forcing players to really make sacrifices and choices while also cranking up the difficulty would be a good start.

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