Skip to content

The Fall from Grace

#20
Auto-translated
Rommy
IVI4

I registered on the forum just to leave a review, because the scenario has too few positive ones. I liked the map — you can tell a lot of effort went into it. At first I didn't think I'd finish it all the way through (I learned from the comments that it's very hard), I was just curious how far I'd get.
The hardest fights were against Wulfstan (after which I realized just how useful the AI's favorite spell is here...) and Kujin (it's hard to even describe how I got through that one).
The most useful things I did, which allowed me to beat the scenario, were:

Spoiler

Deflect Missile / mass Deflect Missile, thanks to which only my shooters weren't being hit, and not deploying peasants in the fights against Ilaya and Zehir — without that, the enemies would wipe me out before my turn even came

About the final boss

I was also intrigued by who the final boss would be (I read the spoiler), and kept guessing who it might be. I bet on the real Isabel — she did take part in the battle for the Claw canonically, even if only in a cutscene, and she was bound to show up. So I was in for a disappointment)

Good luck with your future projects

Finally, the first documented playthrough of the map! Thanks for a proper review — all facts, no whining about supposedly inflated difficulty. I've played through it many times myself without using the Deflect Missile bug, only using mass Deflect Missile. I wanted to add Isabel, but it's unclear where to put her — all her allies are crushed, and Freyda is gone. In the original story, she wouldn't have accomplished anything without her allies and Freyda; she'd have stayed rotting in the dungeon, or her feeble attempts at rebellion (and without her soul and sound mind, at that) would have been crushed by the Red forces.

"Documented" is a strong word. I don't have any solid proof, just screenshots of the results of the last three battles and save files, which isn't very informative (but I'll keep them just in case: https://disk.yandex.ru/d/R2wL_0NRjvCIYg).
Since we're on the subject, let me also note what I liked.
— The locations are as close as possible to those from the original campaign. Not only are map fragments recreated, but the same scripts are used as well (for example, Curse of the Netherworld over the garrison and the sunset effect before the fight with Arantir).
— Battlefield design. Some fights have interesting details in the background. This stands out especially in the battle against Wulfstan: zealots and warriors are locked in melee, shooters are attacking, masters of the spear are firing from the walls, a half-destroyed garrison stands in the middle of the battlefield, and behind it you can see those very catapults that breached it in the cutscene. Beautiful! Too bad the later battles don't have that.
— Scripts in battles. First, the computer's heroes here don't spam single-target Deflect Missile, but cast quite serious and dangerous spells (the kind they almost never use in Tribes of the East), actively use mass buffs and racial abilities. Second, on top of that, the enemy hero can cast something before the battle or cast several spells at once (for example, seven right at the start). Third, all sorts of surprises can happen during the fight itself, both bad and good: sometimes the enemy summons someone, sometimes reinforcements arrive for you. All of this adds variety compared to the usual PvE fights.
— The very concept of fights with a preset skill build, army, and spells. Paradoxically, the lack of a strategic component is exactly what added variety for me. In this concept, the map reminds me of the "Knowledge is Power" scenario. I got to try builds and creature upgrades I don't usually play with. For example, I knew it made sense for the Knight to take "Master of Fire" — to halve the enemies' defense — but I'd never try something like that in a normal game. At first I thought the skill changes were story-driven (like, turning to the dark side, so light weakens but darkness and chaos appear), but no, it's more of a gameplay convention. Many of the local builds can't even be assembled in a normal game, so the game offers a somewhat unique experience.
But, as it seemed to me, while in the first half of the scenario every battle played out differently, starting from Gotai and to the end the build didn't really change, and I no longer had to use any new tactical tricks, unfortunately.
As for how balanced the fights themselves turned out, I can't say, since I'm not much of an expert on that. Some fights seemed much harder to me than the ones that followed. But at least they're all beatable. Luck and starting initiative have a huge impact on the outcome of a battle, and that's a roulette. Slight changes in how you play through, and luck works differently. Don't deploy one of your stacks — and creatures act in a different order, and you might get a chance to have them killed on something of the enemy's before someone else kills them. Fortunately, there are autosaves (sometimes I made manual ones too, to skip cutscenes), so you can retry endlessly. But how anyone could beat these fights on the first try, I can't imagine.