Topic: Amazon campaign playtesting

I've been working on the mission the last two weeks and tried to implement most of the suggested changes here. As requested I've uploaded it through the in-game add-on manager although it might take some time to get approved. I haven´t been able to test the campaign as a downloaded add-on as a result so hopefully everything will work (I did copy it to a fresh install manually and found no problems).

A short summary of the changes is:

• Implemented different difficulties
• A new sidequest with a visual effect and a new objective.
• The width of the map is 16 units smaller speeding up the mission, on top tree locations and height differences have been adjusted so moving east is faster now.
• The time between objectives is dependent on difficulty. The scout reports his trip time the first time around.
• Recaps and 'tips' style messages removed or reworked into story messages.
• 1 woodcutter pre-placed on the east side, this makes expansion a bit easier later on.
• Building Jungle preserver moved to objective 1, speeds up getting a jungle master needed in later objectives. Easy difficulty starts with jungle master and master woodcutter.
• More starting tapir + tapir farm to speed up the game.

In general this should make the mission faster, but the campaign messages also come faster and you have a lot shorter time to complete it even on easy difficulty (still I don't think people will feel very pressured on easy).

Now this will be a long read but here is an in-depth reaction to all the feedback:

hessenfarmer wrote 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.

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.

I will work on posting this through GIT later, for now I've followed the suggestion from tothxa to make a campaign add-on. I'll continue with this until the campaign is more mature. I think full completion will be on the order of months instead of weeks so I don´t want to create a fork yet.

As for the mission itself: a+ b) I've removed all the tips messages and some of the recaps. Were information is recapped it is now presented in a more story-telling fashion. In general I'll try to focus the campaign on people who've at least finished the barbarian campaign.

c) This has been clarified, there is now no more mention of taking only females, because I don't want the story to evolve that sudden. There is some complaining about the ways of the men which will escalate in further missions.

d) I have added a sidequest with quite a drastic effect. It takes place about halfway through the outpost and the end of the mission. This also adds a much requested warehouse and allows for another point in the story to play with timings. I've included some mention of marking the trees, but not tutorial style. To prevent the last part from being to boring I've decreased the map width by 16, so about 3-4 outposts less are needed. I've evened out the terrain at some points so it's somewhat easier to build and therefor quicker. I've thinned out the trees in strategic locations so you don't have to wait for woodcutters as long. There was actually already a sidequest for gathering gold dust, but it's now more consequential and hopefully more noticeable. All timings in the story have been adjusted (more on this later).

e) This has been fixed.

tothxa wrote

I've finished the scenario and I like the story and the great work you put into it too.

I agree with hessenfarmer that you could remove some of the general tutorial texts, even if you target it to be a beginner campaign (like Barbarians). An advisor/friend would indeed be much nicer than the exclamation mark icon, which to me was quite alien to the general style of the game. Also, please make the objective texts (the part that will be shown in the objective menu) short and to the point, only describing the end result, not the actions and steps needed. Those should only be shown in the message box introducing the objective.

The instructions for rare tree plantation/cutter should mention that you may have to wait until the worker gets enough experience, and please don't give step-by-step instructions of select/click/select/etc.

Some suggestions to help keep the player occupied:

• She could make the excuse to the scout to make him wait that she wants to make some gold jewellery to make her a worthy bride for a god: ie. parallel objective with expand/build ship: build a furnace and produce 5 gold bars (possible interlude when furnace is ready).
• As an experienced player, I missed the possibility to build warehouses and a tapir farm to speed up the expansion. These could be enabled either silently for those who want them, or they could be mentioned tutorial-style.

I've removed the mentioned tips icon (exclamation mark) and in general refocused on more experienced players. The scout was already waiting for gold dust and otherwise leaving, but because the timers were so long you would probably not notice (i.e. always have time by then). This has been improved. On hard difficulty, you now need 5 gold dust (not bars). Tapir farms have now been enabled. Mostly silently, with a 1 line mention in the food gathering mission. The starting amount of tapirs is now relative to mission difficulty, but slightly higher on the default medium difficulty. There is a mission to build a warehouse with quite a drastic effect. The warehouse might not even be that useful but it does add a lot more to do. In general the part after the build-up of the outpost and getting to the shipyard is a lot shorter now.

tothxa wrote I finished the scenario in 3 hours and 11 minutes (gametime) in a relaxed way, ie. I didn't feel rushed at all. Actually it wasn't clear to me that there was a time limit until I looked at the code, and it wasn't clear from the story that the long delays between messages were supposed to be the scout's trip time. After all, the villages are quite close to each other on the game map. But I have no idea how this could be made clearer to the player.

The scout trip time is reduced a lot. But some extra timing is added elsewhere to give leeway. On top, the scout now mentions his trip time. Dependent on difficulty it is:

10 minutes on hard, 15 minutes on medium (default), 25 minutes on easy

It also feels more realistic, because 10 or 15 minutes is not that odd for the near village (the scout has to cross a mountain after all.

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Oh and I wondered why the list of strings to translate is so short… Most strings are missing the _ translation markup

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