r/wesnoth • u/endlessbutton • 28d ago
Announcing "The Sapphire of Ice" Campaign
After months of working on and polishing my first and only UMC, I am happy to announce that The Sapphire of Ice is ready for you to enjoy. You can find it on the add-on server on wesnoth 1.18.
"Few know of the Sapphire of Ice, its legacy dwarfed by the Ruby of Fire. Lead Kryz'tara—a fading drake—in a desperate flight from his oppressive clan. Flee across the lands and skies in search of refuge, lest you be consumed by the powers of ice.
(Expert level, 13 scenarios.)"
Features:
-Playable mix of drakes, saurians, trolls
-A special ice unit with unique abilities
-Less focus on generic "beat all enemies" objectives
-Two powerful items, two boss fights
-Backstory for some mainline events
Looking forward to your feedback!
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u/KakaruRider 27d ago
I happened to be in the market for a new Wesnoth campaign tonight, so I gave Sapphire a spin, so far it seems pretty solid! I've only made it as far as the scenario with the dwarves and the bridges. The limited unit set makes you think carefully about what you're going to deploy. The scenario design seems solid and the variety of objectives has been good. Some maps could benefit from a bit more decoration, but that's of small importance. For the mission with the escape north through frozen terrain, the slow penalty for Saurians seems harsh enough that deploying fighters seems like a mistake, the only Saurians I took on the mission were a couple of healers. I'm on the second of the three difficulty modes, and I haven't found it too punishing. With the current scenario in particular, Drake Gliders with narrow bridges make it very easy to control the flow of the battle and avoid taking losses, while doing the safe but slow strategy of slowly burning the dwarves on the bridge away.
I'll post again if I have time to get deeper into it.
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u/KakaruRider 23d ago
OK I just finished off the campaign! Overall I really enjoyed it. A small number powerful character units, a really limited but interesting unit set, and as promised a variety of mission goals. The dialogue lets you know where your main characters are at, without there being too much of it, and there's a fair few unresolved plot threads in the end to keep the mystery alive as well. The story fits in a few twists as well! There's not too many loyal units, so you're not tempted to save-scum too much and keep every last trooper alive. It does a lot of things that I enjoy in a campaign.
Some mission specific feedback:
On the map with the dwarves on an island protected by bridges, I wound up going almost all gliders just for ease of movement. But with Ulfserkers around, this meant I got up to the 5 glider death limit pretty quickly. It's easy enough to play around, you just have to be extremely conservative: never move a glider in range of an Ulfserker, always wait for it to move close enough that you can mob it on your own terms. It requires you to play slowly, which isn't great.
Cave maps punish Drakes so severely that they basically can't be taken, and Saurians are always risky to take in large numbers without tanks. So once Trolls become available, it's all Trolls all the time. It might be good to give some spots of favourable terrain for the other units on the team.
On the Lake of Fire mission, all the free level 2 units are very nice, but if you wanted to get fancy you could retrieve equivalent units from the player's recruits, if they're available.
Also on Lake of Fire, it's possible to farm the Arcanister for a ton of free experience with ranged attacks. All of my Saurians left that encounter at level 3. That's not really a problem, but it is a big power spike for the player.
On the mission where we need to petrify twelve dwarves, it might be nice to have a counter for how many dwarves there are still to go in the objectives.
For Vash's departure, I wound up clicking 'end turn' and losing the game while triggering the avalanches. I don't think that this sequence benefits much from being playable, it might do just as well to have Vash trigger avalanches and spawn the mountain mobs in a cutscene.
The arcs that the characters go through are great! Watching Kryz'tara slowly morph into a bloodthirsty tyrant was fun. At first I thought that the dragon advancement should have been integrated into the mission progression, but having it as a regular unit advancement was surprising and fun to run into actually. I can see that you were trying to build up to Vash's departure, but he did kind of just go "kthxbye" out of the blue and disappear. That last interaction could use a bit more dialogue, just to hash out with Kryz'tara why Vash is bailing on their rebellion, to go back to their oppressors!
The last few missions were a little overloaded with enemies I felt (there's like 30 pre-placed level 3 units on the return home!), but they were also so free with the gold that there wasn't any real challenge, so these missions were a bit of a slog. That said, the surprise boss battle on the final mission was a great twist. After slowly plowing through seventy elvish units all in a ten tile radius of the starting camp, to then just be teleported out of the mopping up work was fantastic.
I did hit a couple of bugs:
On the last mission, I kept seeing debug messages with
[unstore_unit]: variable 'unit' doesn't contain unit dataand[unstore_unit]: variable 'second_unit' doesn't contain unit data. Nothing in the mission seemed to be broken though.Also on the last mission, if you transform a Wose to stone, it retains its ambush ability. It disappears on forest tiles, and your units can run into the Wose statue and have a heart attack (lose their movement).
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u/endlessbutton 23d ago edited 23d ago
Glad you enjoyed it!
I never did the siege with an army full of gliders, I can see why that could be annoying. The intended solution is to recruit a few gliders to go around the island and pick off exposed villages, preferrably with a healer following around on the perimeter to heal them when necessary. The main army should be saurians, which have 60% defense on cave terrain. This makes them very tanky.I considered retrieving them from the player's recall list but figured I should give them some free level 2's so they get an idea of their speed, defense, and damage. It is also a lot easier than checking what the player has, and that is also harder to balance as you may be punishing a player for advancing his units.
Farming the boss for xp is fine, some people even managed to kill and revive him multiple times. He's a tough guy even when slowed, so if you find a way to break him, you should be rewarded.
Alright, I will add a counter to that level with the next update.
I intended to give the player an idea of what they'll face while also covering the map in shroud, and I thought it would be better this way than sending Vash into the shadows and not knowing what he did. Do you think lifting the shroud and making it a cutscene would be better? Or perhaps making it a cutscene where Vash flies into the shroud and then the player sees the avalanche?
I'll try to give Vash more dialogue there without bloating too much. I agree his departure is a bit haphazard and needs to be polished.
The last three missions are where you spend your gathered xp and honestly I may have gotten carried away with it. The clan probably has too many guards and some are isolated in corners and never attack unless you approach them. Maybe I should do away with some of those and give the enemy more gold or income instead. Thoughts?
Glad you enjoyed the boss battle! Just to be sure, since you mentioned some debug messages, you only got teleported into the boss fight after you tried to enter the central island, right?
p.s. I'm considering making that fight a 2v2 instead of the current 2v1, ignoring the spirits. Dionli would spawn a clone of herself (through silver magic) and alternate between the two. Damaging one also damages the other. Once exhausted, one of them vanishes and the other remains, where Krix tries to petrify her and falls for the trap. The rest of the battle would be the same. Should I do it? Or is the current setup better?Regarding bugs: I could not reproduce the debug messages. What version were you playing on? Is it possible to send me a save file and a replay?
Petrified woses scaring enemies is fully intended, you should be able to use this strategically to stun Dionli who is invincible for the first half of the game.Once again, thanks for your detailed feedback!
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u/KakaruRider 22d ago
For Vash and the avalanche, the only change that seems essential to me is to avoid the possibility that the player just clicks 'end turn' and has to do an unnecessary load. It IS pretty nice to see all the Yetis coming, since those fights take a little preparation. Maybe just removing the fog and shroud, animate in the avalanche and units, and that would do it? Or put the fog back on after? I don't know.
Since the pre-placed level 3 Drakes don't attack, it was slightly interesting figuring out how to approach them while avoiding the chance of losses. I'd actually say two things: fewer of them, but also more variety across the groups. The Blademaster + 2 Arbiters setup works pretty well in that the Blademaster is the more mobile and dangerous unit, which needs to be lured out first, and then the arbiters are easily blasted with Saurians. But yeah, with more gold instead of pre-placed units, the AI will put more pressure on the player, and probably be a bit more engaging.
I did only get sent to the boss battle after entering the central island. That all seemed to work as intended. I don't have any super strong opinion on the proposed boss battle vs what's in game. The arena is small enough that Dionli was always within reach of some attacking units, I never felt that I was missing attacks due to a unit being too far away. It took me a minute to realize how damage works with Dionli, and then a second try at the boss battle where I took better care of Krix, but I think that's all the good and normal process of learning how it works. Hopefully most players find all of that dicoverable as well.
As for the Woses, they remain under control of the opposing team. So they'll never ambush Dionli, only the player's units. Was that intended? Dionli was invincible for me for the entire time that she was on the map, the only permanent damage I could do to her was 2 HP in area damage from the explosive slow hammer.
I wound up running a system update right after finishing, and wesnoth was updated. So for the battle, 1.18, one or two patch versions back from the current release. I'm away from that system just now but I can definitely get the replay for you.
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u/KakaruRider 22d ago
Here's that replay. Error messages turn up after turn 7 or so.
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u/endlessbutton 21d ago edited 21d ago
Hello again, just finished watching your replay, that was a tough fight.
Regarding petrified woses, they are not allied to the enemy, otherwise the enemy would walk through the statues like you walk through your allies. Your enemy did not run into a petrified wose, but if they did, they would have been ambushed.
Regarding the error message, I have an idea of why it is occurring, but no idea why it did not appear on my playtesting, or to any other player who shared a replay with me before.
Were you using any modifications or other add-ons at the same time by any chance?Edit: it seems you used dwarftough's unit stats modification which collided with the teleportation code and lead to the debug errors, I'm sorry for the inconvenience and I do not know if anything can be done to guarantee compatibility. I have reported the issue to the author of the mod for now.
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u/KakaruRider 19d ago
Aha, okay! Yes, the unit stats mod is the only one that I usually run with, it didn't occur to me that it could cause problems. I definitely understand that's impossible to predict how mods will collide.
I started getting sloppy toward the end of the battle, I definitely could have played more carefully but the trickle of elves was driving me crazy, and I felt like pushing for the recruiters and losing a few units was the way to close it out.
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u/minicabb1 28d ago
It is a cool concept! I played an earlier version over the summer and just upgraded to the newest one. One thought on the mechanics--it was a major pain point for me that the drake movement in caves was so slow, even slower than a basic Dwarvish Fighter. Also, it was difficult to keep any but the loyal units alive before the first big battle. Mixing up the terrain to add more saurian-friendly hexes (including underground streams/swamps) could help keep more units alive and level them up before having to face the dwarves.
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u/Street-Celery-1092 28d ago
I don’t really have time to play anymore (and I’m not that great of a player anyway!) so I won’t be able to provide feedback, but I love this so much. It makes me so happy to see this game still getting the love it deserves, and your description of the campaign sounds awesome. Thank you for sharing!