Chapter/Campaign Bugs

I've had a lot of fun playing through the campaign and chapters, but I've also encountered a couple of bugs and problems too. I'll start with the campaign, which is basically just too hard. I've said some of this stuff in another thread but I'll put it here as well so that the issues can be easily sorted.

Heroes with levels in the tens have been easily defeated by the campaign. I would imagine the player would need a really high level hero to get past the first scenario (poor level 1 starter heroes! ). I think all that needs to be done with the scenarios' difficulty is to decrease the number of spawned units. There are also a couple of other problems I've had with the campaign. The first one is where the AI tend to waste their heroes on the uber Daemon towers and the second depends upon whether or not the player tells an AI hero to follow them. If they do, the player's hero will have a really hard time attempting to construct buildings as the AI hero will obstruct the building's footprint.

All of the chapters I've played have been working except for the Orc one. There are a couple of random events in the chapter which the player instantly loses because their hero never spawns. The two in particular which I had this problem on was the Griffin Ambush event and the Attacked by Ghouls event. The latter also has an additional problem as the player's race will be Knight instead of Orc. Entering chat with the Ancient Giant is also causing a problem for me. The window pops up, but no dialogue is initiated. I can't do anything to cancel or close the chat, I end up having to F4. Lastly, certain maps like the Undead invasion one in the Wood Elf chapter are made considerably harder because all the pre-placed units retain their stats from 1.03.24. The Undead generally ravage the Wood Elf AI and could be too hard but I can't tell yet due to Phoenix .

Joe the Bartender wrote:

I would imagine the player would need a really high level hero to get past the first scenario (poor level 1 starter heroes! ).

Which do you mean by first scenario?  I just created a new hero (Fey Tinker) and started the campaign (which I had never played before) and took the first choice (go to the pass).  And my brand new hero couldn't even heal himself by drinking potions because of the healing bug I meantioned in the other bug thread.  (I didn't realize that bug was going to affect even brand new heroes.)  The scenario seemed rather easy to me (though having sprites was useful -- I used them to scout and clear the way to the initial resources rather than the heroes - especially since I couldn't heal myself and natural healing with a brand new level 1 hero is painfully slow even at "very fast" game speed).  If anything, the "problem" with that scenario was that I didn't hardly get attacked at all, so my crystal towers weren't generating nearly enough crystal to support a good Fey army (though the dwarves did get hit a bit - nothing they couldn't handle with a bit of sprite support).  I finished the scenario having lost only 1 building (a tower -- and that loss was a stupid mistake on my part) and 6 troops.

(And then after playing that one single campaign scenario I get the message that that's the end of the campaign.)

One thing that bugged me about the scenario was that the diplomacy button didn't work.  I know dwarves like their metal and I had extra metal coming in (and my brand new hero didn't know any spells yet so I couldn't even transmute it to something useful to me) and I couldn't give the excess metal to my allies.

I think it was the one where the player has to reinforce their position and survive waves of Daemon troops for 30 mins. It's all right for the first 10-20 mins or so but about 30 Salamanders, 5 Nightmares, 10 Imps and 5 Daemons all spawn at once and were easily capable of taking down everything I and the AI had.

*** SPOILERS ***

I just played that scenario.  (First I deleted my entire "\Users\<user>\Documents\The Protectors" directory to try to get rid of the healing bug -- don't know if that worked yet because my hero never got injured.)  I started with yet another brand new Fey Tinker.  On my first attempt I did the "say nothing" option (meaning, don't make them share resources and don't do some other option I can't remember).  That seems to be a huge mistake that you don't have any way of knowing is a mistake until you start playing and find that your only options are 1) do without any resources, 2) steal another hero's entire set of resources or 3) try to take out a demon base with just your hero.  So I just aborted out of that attempt very early and restarted it.  (The game actually gave me a level up so my second attempt was with a level 2 hero rather than level 1, but I don't think one level made a huge difference).

On my second attempt I picked "share resources" so I (and everyone else) had something to work with.  I started by building a base and some towers right at the top pass, so demons coming through there would get OBLITERATED by my towers.  Then I started making sprites and built some more base and towers at the top of the ramp to the raised area between the two passes.  After getting that partially set up I realized I (probably) made yet another mistake -- I (probably) should have reinforced the pre-made dwarven mortars at both passes to keep them alive.  The south mortar got destroyed before I got around to reinforcing it, but I managed to keep the north one safe.  I then started getting ready to tower up the south pass, but had to build a bunch of dummy buildings first to support more tower stuffing troops.  It was at that point that I started taking a stack of sprites out on the offensive, both on their own and supporting the dwarves - we succeeded in knocking out several demon buildings.  It was mostly a symbolic gesture, though given more time (more than the 30 minutes) I'm sure we could have eventually rolled over the demons completely (assuming the waves didn't escalate out of control).  I eventually got towers set up at the south pass.

In the end I had 5 towers at the north pass in a 2x3 shape (no tower at left-center spot), completely walled in except one square on the left side.  Same exact structure at the south pass, two towers by the north mortar, two towers where the south mortar used to be, and 4 towers (behind a wall) at the top of the ramp.  All towers were fully stuffed.  I also had 24 sprites in 3 groups of 8, one group at each pass and one in the center.

I found the demons to be a bit underwhelming.  The only building of mine they managed to take down was a single tower, and that was fairly early in the game when I only had 3 towers total and didn't have them walled up yet.  I took out 327 demon troops (my 4 allies combined took out another 366).  The demons only took out 6 of my troops.  The only time they did any real damage was before I got the south pass covered -- they got two or three waves through there and attacked the nearby dwarven base.  I tried to minimize that damage by sending sprites to help get rid of them.  The last wave of demons could probably have been twice the size and I still don't think they would have been able to take out any of my towers at that point (though I would have lost more sprites to imps).

So I would say that as long as you take the "share resources" option, concentrate on defense (this is a "survival" scenario after all), and take advantage of the provided choke points, the scenario doesn't seem that difficult.  (Without proper resources though it might be hopeless as the AI sucks at setting up defenses so it's up to the player to do that.)

I've played the map again, this time as the Fey with Building proficiency (fast builder perk) and it was like playing a completely different game. I chose to share resources unlike last time which meant I had no problems whatsoever. Fast Builder perk + sharing resources swings the chance of victory so heavily in the player's favour. Sprites seem to be one of the best anti-Daemon units around too. They're easy to access and cost less than Sylphs, which doesn't make any sense to me. Sprites supersede Sylphs as soon as the keep reaches level 2, which is going to be quite early considering the incredibly low cost to reach new keep levels.

When I was with the Minotaurs, I was having massive resource problems as well as production ones. The building footprints didn't help either. I imagine a lot of the problem I was having was due to lack of resources, slow building construction and much worse AI. In that game, the AI almost died out immediately.

Races aside, the map is made so much easier when resource sharing is enabled. The problem with this is that players may not know that sharing resources essentially allows the player to win. Without the resources, I'm not sure if winning is possible without a really high level hero. I think that resource sharing should be done by default, otherwise there may be players which get stuck and frustrated on the map, wondering what they are doing wrong.

First off, the campaign is made for "any hero" - that implies any hero level. Some heroes will have an easier time than others based on their proficiency, race, class, perks and naturally no. of levels.

Secondly, the campaign is not made for an easy "clean" run. What is released as of now is only the beginning of the campaign, so it's compelling for the player to just reset and try again, but the main idea of the campaign is to MAKE MISTAKES AND LEARN FROM THEM. If you fail the first time, maybe you will be able to win the second time (provided it's a replayable scenario - like in this case). You will not want to reset the whole campaign just because you failed a mission.

*SPOILER ALERT*
Thirdly, this scenario leaves you without starting mines ONLY IF all your companions are alive. In this case you can "steal" some mines or simply wait for a comrade to fall to the daemons. If one of your companions is perma dead (i.e. got him killed in a prior mission), this scenario will start with neutral mines for you to grab. Depending on who/ how many comrades died, the difficulty will vary.
On a personal note, I noticed that killing Fallan in the pass and then trying to "fortify your position" without resource sharing makes the scenario SUBSTANTIALLY easier than the case were Fallan is alive. Similarly, worst-case scenario is when you try fortifying when Xanthos is perma dead, since the defending towers and mortars are nonexistent.

Topic moved to suggestions for further debate.

I understand and agree with that. My only concern is that it may not be easy to recognise when/how the player has made a mistake.

So what do you suggest? A small hint from one of your companions before making the choice? An -ask for suggestions- option is made just for that, provided you have smart companions. Or do you have something else in mind?

Is it possible to display a hint on the defeat screen or force the hint box to open displaying the appropriate hint back on the campaign map?