Topic: Amazon campaign playtesting

Hello everyone,

I'm a new player who has been experimenting with the map editor. I noticed there is no campaign for the amazon tribe yet, so I've decided to work on one. I have a working version of the first mission and I would like some feedback on it. If anyone has time to play-test it that would be great.

Here are some things I'd like to get feedback on:

• Is the story clear enough to follow and is it clear for you as a player what you should be doing?
• Did you feel you had enough time time to complete the mission successfully? How rushed did you feel?
• What difficulty level would you give the mission?
• What do you think of the icons/pictures used in the story messages?
• This first mission (by design) shares a strong resemblance with Atlantean mission 2. Does this bother you?

Here is some information about my campaign ideas:

This first mission is meant as an introduction to the amazons and some of their unique mechanics (mostly rare trees and rope) and some of their economy (mostly the food hierarchy. Recruiting soldiers will be part of the second mission. There are males in the campaign story. I know the amazons are supposed to be a female only tribe. This is part of the story. The general idea is that the campaign tells the story of how they become a female only tribe, so it starts out with having men as well.

It's hard to make a proper story about the amazons, since they take ideas from 3 unrelated sources:

1) The amazons are female only, which fits the traditional Greek myth about the amazons. However, these female warriors were located in modern day Turkey, quite close to Greece and have nothing to do with the amazon river.

2) The backstory of the Widelands amazons talks about the amazon river, which would suggest an Inca type tribe, maybe Maya/Aztecs could work, but Inca culture would be the best fit.

3) The in-game tribe members look like Africans. This makes some sense in the modern world, after the transatlantic slave trade, but makes no sense in relation to any tribe around the amazon river or the mythical amazons that the tribe seems based on.

Since the tribes wares and buildings are clearly based on their Amazon river background, I've used that starting point and made the faces and cultural references mostly based on that region.

If there is anything else you'd like to know just ask me.

You can find and download the map here: download.

I don´t know if there is a better place to upload maps, I don´t want to use the ingame map editor yet because this is not the final version.

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tothxa wrote

Hi DyingSettler and welcome to Widelands.

At least I hope this is not just some very elaborate spam... because your link does not point to an actual downloadable file.

If you'd like to share your scenario (and expand it later to a campaign), please upload it as a campaign add-on. You don't need to worry that it's not final, because add-ons can be updated anytime.

Hey Tothxa,

thank you for the quick reply. I've fixed the link, apparently the old one only worked when logged into Limewire.

And I'll use the campaign add-on option in the future. For other maps/add-ons I kept seeing different versions so I thought that would get quite messy.

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hi DyingSettler,
a warm welcome from my side as well.
I did play the complete scenario and I have to say I was really impressed. However as always I have some remarks:
1. As the scenario ia already quite mature and we do surely miss one you might provide it via our git development system. we are hosted on Github and Codeberg, whatever you like better. If you are not familiar with git have a look at our Git Wikipage.
2. In fact the amazons are all based on one single source (i.e. the reports of the monk Carvjal of the Mission of Francisco de Orellana), thus we are somewhat free in the definitionof the tribes storylines. However there had been already made some decisions by the Definition of their lore. So the campaign needs to fit into that. So far it seems the current version at least doe not contradict and thus would be fully acceptabel to me.
3. Now for the mission itself:
a) IMHO we do not need to tell the player the obvious, so we should not say that this is a tutorial which tells them how to play amazons, and the system of objectives is also known to each player due to our tutorials. So we should strip out the parts we could savely assume to already known from the mission.
b) rather then distinguishing between tips and storyline I would prefer if the tips and tricks would have been provided by storyline itself. You could for example introduce a best friend or senior female adviser for the female hero, that provides her (and thus the player) with them. that would create more density in the story itself.
c) In the end it seems like the young daughter is leading the whole outpost to flee, while in fact she plans only to take the females with her, as it can be assumed that there are still males in the outpost fraction, maybe this could be made a bit more conspirative ( only thinking about it rather then speaking, speaking or whispering only to her female advisor, or something similar).
d) in the beginning the scenario starts slowly. In the middle it is quite busy, but in the end it is quite a bit boring just to build some towers and wait for the woodcutters. First this would be a good point to explain the feature to mark trees for removal tom the player, as it would be beneficial to already cut only the necessary trees, and it would help to have some side quest during this time like gathering some gold dust or other materials for the fututre to take it onboard as well. You might have a look on the frisian campaign how the carry over would work.
e) Somewthing in the definition of the scouts speech did create a lua richtext error in my test.
4. the images are very good. did you make them yourself? else we need to be sure that they do fit with our license.

Hopre that helps and I would love to see that (and maybe more missions) in the game.

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Sigh... I was afraid they were made by AI...

Well, as far as I know, we don't have an explicite policy for AI generated contributions, but speaking for myself only, I'd be extremely cautious regarding the copyright status of them, regardless of whatever the owner of the AI may claim (at the moment... and it's not only the possibility of them changing their minds, but also of all the copyright holders whose rights they ignored during their training coming after them).

OTOH we're only speaking of a few pictures that we can easily remove if things start to turn in a wrong direction... but not from git history...

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I can paint the campaign's loading screen and characters (when they "speak") using watercolors. If I understand it correctly: 1. are they all women? 2. Are they south american natives (and not Greek)?

Just so I know what to paint exactly...

If someone could give me the names, gender (if not all females), and their rank (e.g. general, soldier etc), I can create their portraits.

For the loading screen I'm thinking a south american pyramid in the jungle.

Ex-developer, ex-tech-journalist, now an artist and a cat mom of 6.

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