Campaign Creations

I'm replaying all the books atm, having never finished anything past #3. Right now I'm still on #1 and here are a few bugs I have found so far:

On the secret stage "Fallen Angel" Miranda's level was uncapped. I now have a Miranda with 3/4ths of the experience to get to 7th level. I ran through it a second time to see if it happened every time and I was capped correctly. I don't know what I did differently the first time, maybe it was a total fluke. Also, after rescuing Tanya the quest description update improperly. "Destroy the mist generator" is set to completed when it should be "Rescue Tanya" that is set to complete. Not a big thing obviously.

On "Returning Home", during the fight between Hikaru and Shizuka, Shizuka didn't attack at all.

Shizuka herself has an odd bug with her portrait. Her lower eyelid seems to be pulled down an inch during a few frames, which gets rather distracting.

Heres a few other non-bug things:

Kosseimaru in "Witch Hunters" is horribly overpowered. I understand that there are some heros that are good, some that are decent, some that are awesome, but hes a few steps above all of them. Infinite self supplying energy from devouring his own summoned undead, which powers infinite blast nova. That's pretty good by itself. The problem is his summons are incredibly strong. If they were capped at the Burning Archers he already has at beginning level, it would still make him the among the strongest heros in the game (50 damage each is incredible spiking ability when you have 10 of them). But Abominations? Summoning 2k hit points of tanking power that dishes out huge damage for each cast is just mindblowingly overpowered. Just stand outside the enemy base with a meat wagon and Kossei can take down entire bases on his own. This is with him at a mere level 5. I dunno if this is intentional, IIRC from when I played the campaigns long ago Kossei isn't controllable in any other stages anyway, so you may be just trying to show off to the player that he's fucking awesome, if so disregard this part.

In "Revolution", Mira will only load her stats from "Resistance", not the ones she would have from "Fallen Angel" if you finished the bonus level. The reason I'm not listing this as a bug is because Mira is a very powerful army killer in Battle Angel class. Just at the level 5 she had my skeleton army was easily slaughtered in about 10 seconds, which kind of killed my whole skeleton wall + healing wards + obsidian statues and 12 meat wagons for damage strategy i was going for. Had I not been able to kill their own army in about 10 seconds with Kanna's Ultimate I would have been in serious trouble. Had Mira been at level 6 and used her ultimate to create a second damage dealing mira, it would have been much harder. Almost definitely would have killed me. Not undefeatable, aboms + soul reaper chain lighting spike could handle it easy enough, but I don't know if this was an oversight or an intended thing so that players wouldn't have it significantly harder just because they did the bonus level. Personally I would like the unnerfed Mira, at least in hard mode.

In general it seems a bit too easy, especially the "go stomp over inactive groups of enemies with large hero group" missions. I understand a number of the later levels are more difficult, but as a masochist I am unhappy if every mission on hard mode isn't putting me an inch away from breaking a wall with my face  ;D.  "Road to Arcadia" has a good idea of forcing you to move along to save the base under attack, but it takes so long for them to go down that you can take all the time you want in practice. In "Resistance" and "Resurgance" some kind of consistent enemy attacks on your party along with removing the wells in hard mode would probably make things more interesting.

On "Returning Home", during the fight between Hikaru and Shizuka, Shizuka didn't attack at all.

Old bug involving Hikaru's Divine Shield, I'm surprised it isn't fixed (unless you're playing 1.23 and not 1.24 since I haven't actually felt the need to replay Book 1/2 for now to check if it's fixed)

Heres a few other non-bug things:

Stuff about Kosseimaru

Kosseimaru wasn't a hero in the RoC version, and when he was converted to a hero (along with Kanna) the difficulty of that mission dropped like a rock for various reasons. His raise dead spell always seemed kind of wonky, since it will progress from Abominations to... Banshee-type creeps? Okay...

In "Resistance" and "Resurgance" some kind of consistent enemy attacks on your party along with removing the wells in hard mode would probably make things more interesting.

I wouldn't mind Resistance getting a difficulty increase, since it's pretty easy to just waltz over and steamroll the Zande's base once you finished collecting all the goodies for Kanna in preparation for the next level...

But god, Resurgance is one of the missions where you practically have to do everything the right way or you lose and the fact that it uses your exact hero stats complete with all the items as enemies means some set-ups are pretty much impossible for Kanna on a New Game+.

Kanna is a great hero (and my personal favourite) but she's really support-oriented and with her only partner being Mizuki who is quite frankly, horrible, that mission is a pain in the ass and a sudden difficulty spike from the rest of the missions.

Davzz wrote:

In "Resistance" and "Resurgance" some kind of consistent enemy attacks on your party along with removing the wells in hard mode would probably make things more interesting.

I wouldn't mind Resistance getting a difficulty increase, since it's pretty easy to just waltz over and steamroll the Zande's base once you finished collecting all the goodies for Kanna in preparation for the next level...

But god, Resurgance is one of the missions where you practically have to do everything the right way or you lose and the fact that it uses your exact hero stats complete with all the items as enemies means some set-ups are pretty much impossible for Kanna on a New Game+.

Kanna is a great hero (and my personal favourite) but she's really support-oriented and with her only partner being Mizuki who is quite frankly, horrible, that mission is a pain in the ass and a sudden difficulty spike from the rest of the missions.

Resistance and resurgance are actually the 2nd and 3rd levels in the campaign. You are thinking of witch hunters and revolution. Witch hunters is rediculously easy just because of kossei, and still easy without him. I remember when he was a normal unit as well, which is why I postulated that the reason for him being so powerful might just because hes supposed to be really powerful instead of to be balanced. RTS-based missions being easy don't bother me nearly as much as the small party based missions where you have heroes each individually 3x as powerful as all the enemies you fight and its just a slog throughout it. RTS missions are interesting enough because they mostly have unique goals and you get to play with the modified races, though some difficulty is always good.

I had no problems my first try on this time through revolution on hard (though I had a basic idea of how it worked from playing it a year ago). All I did was spam skellies, healing ward (lvl 3) and meat wagons and I easily took down the base with Johan and Nekurow with almost no casualties. Healing ward is incredible and the choke point there is great combined with Kanna's ultimate (in theory, I didn't even bother using the ultimate actually). Also, using siege wagons I took out a large amount of the other base that I could hit from the cliffs. I could have easily downed the 3rd base in the extra time, but I was too busy killing random things to look for treasure.

Had I known what I know now that as long as you don't kill the heroes the countdown doesn't start, IMO the mission would be a piece of cake even if everyone was level 10. Hikaru wouldn't have been much stronger, earthquake isn't a great ultimate. Johan would be mildly stronger with avatar and the better spells, but hes still tied up with skeletons that can be recreated indefinitely. Nekurow would gain almost nothing, his healing light was already maxed. Only my miranda would have been significantly more powerful with illusion dance (as I said above, but still handleable), which she probably should have had if she was loaded from the secret mission correctly.

Kanna is pretty damn awesome, the undead side doesn't have healing wards for a reason and her ultimate kicks ass. Armies of regenerating skeletons are great cannon fodder while 6-10 meat wagons instantly kill everything in an area every volley. Mizuki is good for the aura powering necromancers, and summoning more fodder herself. Not amazing but good for a non-hero. As I said before, an army of the soul reapers spamming chain lighting would probably own even harder (especially on the heroes, great spike combined with the attack kanna has from the last mission's Crown of the Deathlord, you can kill any hero on sight), with just a handful of necromancers providing the fodder instead of the overkill amount I was using. I just had no idea what all the units capabilities were, so I went with a standard undead tactic.

Ohh, another slightly important bug I forgot: in Witch Hunters, you can't produce any more acolyte's from your necropolis. I didn't even notice till the end, and the mission is still dead easy, but it would obviously be a pain in the ass if you invested in a few shades and found you permanently crippled your gold supply.

Also, please don't think I'm disappointed with the campaigns. They are fun and lots of them are genuinely interesting strategically (like revolution). Just trying to help RCX improve them.

EDIT: One more thing to say: on "Road to Arcadia", if any hero dies, you lose. This remains so even after you get control of the base with the altar to resurrect heroes. IMO, you should either not lose when a hero dies after gaining the base or the altar shouldn't be there, have the ally hero just respawn a short period after dieing. I'm ashamed to say I lost horribly running straight into that minefield with Nekurow  >:(. Major "WTF JUST HAPPENED?" moment there.

Yeah, I agree that the non-RTS missions aren't that great. I really only like the ones that end fast or are basically just boss battles. Revolution is in fact one of my favourite missions due to the concept but it's one of the missions which I'm horrible at for whatever reason.

Resistance and resurgance are actually the 2nd and 3rd levels in the campaign.

Doh, I can never remember the names of the missions. Ah well. I always thought that the 2nd mission (or was it the 3rd? The one where you get to play as Shizu/Ziel/Scaldar anyway) was basically a counterpart to the 1st mission, except for the Arcadian side, so I don't really care if it's too easy.

Kossei is just that hardcore.

Of course in a later level he's completely corpse-starved and that advantage really goes out the window.


As for Witch Hunters, there's practically nothing that can be done to make it any harder. I just wrote it off because changing non-heroes into heroes makes that huge of a difference (because let's face it, Higure isn't all that strong and he's about as useful as Mizuki).

Davzz wrote:

Resistance and resurgance are actually the 2nd and 3rd levels in the campaign.

Doh, I can never remember the names of the missions. Ah well. I always thought that the 2nd mission (or was it the 3rd? The one where you get to play as Shizu/Ziel/Scaldar anyway) was basically a counterpart to the 1st mission, except for the Arcadian side, so I don't really care if it's too easy.

Me too. First book suffers from an overabundance of re- prefixed missions. I have to double check the names every time.

RazorclawX wrote: As for Witch Hunters, there's practically nothing that can be done to make it any harder. I just wrote it off because changing non-heroes into heroes makes that huge of a difference (because let's face it, Higure isn't all that strong and he's about as useful as Mizuki).

Since AFAIK Zande are just the standard nightelf race with some model swaps, couldn't you enable the melee-style AI instead of the Campaign one?

Also, a more general question: do you value my opinions of what I think would be good changes for the maps, or would you rather I just stick strictly to bugs I encounter?

Salloc wrote: Since AFAIK Zande are just the standard nightelf race with some model swaps, couldn't you enable the melee-style AI instead of the Campaign one?

Melee-style AI doesn't work out too well since it will always try to creep with a Lv.1 Hero whenever possible.

RazorclawX wrote:

Salloc wrote: Since AFAIK Zande are just the standard nightelf race with some model swaps, couldn't you enable the melee-style AI instead of the Campaign one?

Melee-style AI doesn't work out too well since it will always try to creep with a Lv.1 Hero whenever possible.

Thats a shame. Ohh well. I guess Kossei has to have some fun during one of the levels, the rest of the campaign is about everything hes made falling apart  :'(

Rebellion I liked a lot. It was quite easy, but just killing tons of stuff with a large group of heroes was fun. I also really liked that the Zande were a controllable ally instead of your own units, that made them semi-autonomous in regards to base defense.
A few suggestions though: The giant army Kanna is talking to disappears seemingly for no reason. Be cool if they rushed your base, which would make the large group of villagers you rescued earlier useful.
Also, the secret boss Cinder drops a tome of experience. Given the level cap, your heroes will either be at the cap before you get a chance to dig your way to him, or you will easily reach it a minute later.  To put it bluntly, the reward is useless. Considering Veranda in Returning Home dropped a lighting or shadow orb, perhaps Cinder could drop an orb of darkness? He could use some buffing as well. He sounds like such a badass but I don't think I needed to cast Holy Light more then once against him.

The Fated Hour was perfect. Lots of tricky areas, and while the timer wasn't so strict that you had to rush, it definitely encouraged you to move fast which could kill you if you weren't careful.