Posts from World selection.

Map Name: ChoiceOTW1
Map Type: Scenario
Two-Level Map: No
Number of Players: 2vs1vs1
Map Size: Large
Map Author: Ornstein Dragonslayer

Map Description: Emperor Regor ascended the Imperial throne. What was once a peaceful trading state has gradually transformed into the warlike Videss Empire. The Empire has begun a total expansion of its borders, and no one can restrain it. Not yet...
The Dark Elves are located far south of the Empire's borders, but as practice shows, their conquest is only a matter of time. The Dark Elf King sends his warlord, Talares, to the border Northern outpost – a point where the lands of four states converge: the Elven, Dark Elf, Videss Empire, and Demon realms. Your task is to find out why Regor started this, in your opinion, senseless war. To learn the motivation and, if possible, prevent this invasion.

From the Author: I would like to thank everyone involved in creating my map. First of all, our dear forum, as well as Ment, }{0TT@6bI4, and AlekseyS.
I also thank my friends who are not on the forum but helped me create some of the content! VampireMetallHead is the voice actor.
And, I hope I have time to participate in the Remix contest!

Installation: Unzip the archive, move the .h5m file to the Maps folder, and put the .pak file in the data folder.

Have a nice game!

Current map version: v0.97

0.91 - Fixed a bug where capturing cities did not lead to victory. If you have already started playing the old version, that's okay. Just know that if you capture all the Imperial cities, you win.
0.92 - Adjusted the "density" of the Elven territory. General Darlton arrives later, his army is reduced by ~20%. Sir Gilford arrives later, his army is reduced by ~20%. The garrison army at the first Imperial city is reduced by ~20%.
0.93 - Fixed a bug where the death of the main character did not lead to defeat. Now, the location of the three liches is revealed on the map after the cutscene.
0.94 - The AI of the Demon and Human factions has been changed so that they fight each other and pay less attention to the player and their ally (more testing is needed). The starting location has been expanded: several artifacts and altars with spells have been added in the area. Now, on Hero difficulty, the player does not start "naked." The armies of the first Demon and Imperial garrisons have been reduced. "Freezing Wind" has been banned.
0.95 - Human reinforcements have been removed. The second player has been strengthened. The fourth player has been weakened. A critical bug that caused the game to crash when loading/starting a week has been fixed. Now, all bosses are immune to magic. Now, Ensla has a name, as it should!
0.96 - Minor bugs fixed. Two additional native creature dwellings have been added to the starting location.
0.97 - Fixed errors in terrain passability; All enemy garrisons have been weakened by ~30%; bosses have been weakened by ~30%; the "Wall of Steel" spell has been banned; the "Freezing Wind" spell is available; more bonuses and artifacts have been added to the map, and a mentor has been added. The enemy hero in the final battle has been strengthened.

You can attach both the map and the pak archive to a single zip folder on the forum.

What are the difficulties with installing your map? Download the file, then rename it and install it in the data folder. Is there no simpler way?

It's incredibly complicated to install.

The map version has been updated to v0.92 – the changes are aimed at making the game more enjoyable and fixing some bugs. I look forward to your feedback. Have fun playing!

Overall, it's not bad. The cutscenes, bosses, and the general concept are good, along with the added spice of random crashes at the end of the week.

Overall, it's not bad. The cutscenes, bosses, and the general concept are good, with a little extra spice in the form of random crashes at the end of the week.

What kind of crashes are you talking about? I fixed everything! If it crashes at the beginning of the week, try playing differently the day before the crash. As a rule, this works. In any case, thank you for your feedback! I hope you found and completed all the secondary quests.

Added 1 hour 45 minutes ago
Those who have completed it, or are at least in the process, please let me know. Your impressions and opinions are important to me. Thank you!

Played for a month and quit. It felt uncomfortable being among knights with huge muscles and tons of hit points. My hero is level 13, but they are all level 20+, and how am I supposed to survive (there's no dark magic, and chaos is incomplete)? Also, when visiting the purple tent (regardless of which hero does it), my hero loses the dragon, and the quest is considered failed. Is this a bug or a feature? Question: did the author play through their own map?

I played for a month and then quit. It felt uncomfortable being among knights with huge muscles and tons of hit points. My hero is level 13, and they are all level 20 or higher, and how am I supposed to survive (there's no Dark Magic, and Chaos is incomplete)? Also, when visiting the purple tent (no matter which hero I use), my hero loses the dragon, and the quest is considered failed. Is this a bug or a feature? Question: did the author even play through their own map?

Thank you for your feedback. I would like to clarify - were you playing the latest version of the map? Yes, it's a feature - it's logical that if a condition is failed, then the quest is also failed. The question is, does the game end at that point? If not, then everything is fine.
Regarding the difficulty - do I understand correctly that you went through the northern path to the garrison in the first month and encountered resistance in the form of strong knights there? Can I hear your suggestions for improving the gameplay?

Added 1 hour 5 minutes ago
I also want to add that the map was not properly tested by anyone except me, so there may be such problems with the difficulty.

Walkthrough of the "Choice of Worlds" scenario (hero difficulty): https://youtu.be/7rvUoZMPLRk

Added 19 hours 16 minutes ago
The scenario wasn't very good; there are many terrain bugs (many areas are impassable, and some can be bypassed), the dialogues are overloaded with unnecessary words, and it's dark as pitch. There's no mentor. The main character turned out to be a fighter who relies on machines instead of magic. But he still managed to defeat a lot of enemies, despite the huge number of garrisons. The map could have been much more interesting, but it still needs to be refined. It's misleading (I don't remember where I read it) that "leaders are immune to magic"? And the dragon caused confusion at the beginning. It shouldn't say that the world will stop if he dies when they themselves set up his death. Thank you for the game.

There’s a chance that there are many issues specifically in the EWA version (since you played through it on that version, right?). Simply removing one “blocktiles” in the properties of the Christmas tree will open up all the Christmas trees on the map to your paths.

Thanks to the author for the map. The map is wonderful, and the voice acting is simply divine)
I'm attaching one of my last saves.
https://drive.google.com/file/d/11VnkP09 ... =sharing
It seems there are some bugs. I played 0.96 on 3.1 without any mods. I didn't see any reinforcements arriving for the humu and the demon, and they behaved quite passively. There are areas in the elf's lands that cannot be reached, and some kind of mage pyramid that is also inaccessible. The ship cannot be bought.
The Liches said nothing after everyone was defeated, as if nothing had happened (though I dealt with 1 first, then 3, then 2)
The vampire quest worked well, seemingly as intended. After the first victory at the crypt, there were no more battles, although the message was ambiguous; if there was supposed to be another fight there, who knows, but the quest ended and the reward was given.
It would be better to make the mage quest mandatory, otherwise you can finish the mission and miss a very high-quality voiced cinematic.
I also thought the ghost was bugged—he kept reviving, then just died pointlessly somehow (I thought there might be a secret where you place a nightmare horse or open gates with demons, basically blocking it some way like in the "Heart of the Night" map with the elementals). It's hard to implement that trick, of course, but I would have liked to see it here.
Maybe everything is great and I just encountered some bug.
Thanks to the author, the map is 100% quality; with the right build, it plays easily and with pleasure.

The map turned out to be convoluted, and the embellishments are all in the wrong direction. I've never liked the dark design of the map. The supposed benefit of the ally remains a mystery to me. He only creates unnecessary hustle and bustle and throws in minor annoyances for the player. The dialogues, in my opinion, are strange. And the quest distribution is as "obscure" as possible. None of the complaints are particularly serious, but it is this that creates an "unfriendly" atmosphere for the map. I disliked the main concept of the scenario even more. The Necromancer is denied access to half of the higher-level "darkness" and "chaos" spells. Even his staff was taken away. For some reason, they are forcing a "summoning" playstyle, which is completely unsuitable for the Warlock in this situation. The main character is sent to different corners of the map to gather reinforcements, thereby wasting precious time.

This contradicts the very spirit of the game, where speed and aggression are the keys to success. In the end, it turned out to be a "meat grinder" game, not magic versus might. The final hero can only oppose the player with a large number of troops; he doesn't want to cast any spells.
After struggling with the author's version, I restarted, took Lestat as the main character, and completed the map on "hero" difficulty in 35 days. The map gets a three out of five. After some refinement, it might turn out well.

P.S. The "holes" in the map are present regardless of the EWA mod. I played on a clean version of the game and encountered all the same shortcomings that I already wrote about. raspisnoy

Released patch 0.97, rebalanced the forces on the map, changed the landscape, and added a mentor. I hope the walkthrough will be more enjoyable.

Greetings) I've completed this scenario and want to share my impressions. Overall, the map is good, and based on my general feelings, I'd give it a 3.7  out of 5, and below I'll explain why I think so, and what I did where and how — in short, let's go.

In my understanding, the map is divided into roughly two or three stages

1. It's simply a map we play as a map — as trite as that sounds, the task is not trivial: defeat the insolent humans who extinguish everything and everyone...

2. Quests — which, despite possibly being overloaded with text and not being displayed as side quests as such (except for the quest with the hut and the mad mage), and of which there are roughly three, in my playthrough of this scenario I had already completed them after leaving one main knight in one castle, and then calmly did all those side quests...

All in order...

About our main objectives — "Vayshan" must survive and not lose our town, and right off the bat, I want to throw a stone at the author's garden, because this condition doesn't work. Even though I tried not to give up the town, I somehow forgot to teleport to town and, out of curiosity, decided to see what happens if the town is given up — and lo and behold, the game continues as if this objective doesn't even work (the installation conditions are met, the client is clean)



Don't lose Asteria — no questions there, since it's a conditional analogue of the campaign where we weren't supposed to lose Malassa's daughter, but unfortunately, as soon as we approach those strange crystals where liches are casting something, our "friend" is turned into a Bone Dragon, and I actually feel sorry for her — not only is she the only tier 7 unit of our faction, and there won't be any more, but they took even that one. I thought, well, it's nothing, just need to smack one dragon, but it's not that simple — the stats are tweaked and abilities changed. Still, no problems arose: Chaos + Lord of Ice, and we just keep hitting on cooldown, and when the Hunters can finish it off with melee, we do. And I think, aha, so there are more surprises like this hidden away, I need to stay on my toes...

Overall, across the map, there were almost no problems, except for that area behind the elf's castle, where I understand you need a ship, but there isn't one, and it can't be summoned. Most likely, when blue was fighting green or vice versa, that's when the only ship was lost, although I didn't notice whether it was there from the start...

It's convenient that right at the start in the tavern you can see who we'll be dealing with — jumping ahead, the lady is quite tough... Although you could immediately show what they did to her...


She's actually a serious opponent — just the total stats of 123 alone look intimidating, but thankfully she sits in her castle like a dummy, and we'll return to her in more detail closer to the finale...

The main problem on the map was CRUZER (Laszlo), whom I led around the map in circles for a long time, because by weeks 4-5 he's unstoppable, and there's a lot of meat. Thankfully, he has no logistics and doesn't always move at full speed, so you can keep him entertained for quite a while. Let me put it this way — from time to time I tried to beat him with the main character, but it didn't work out, but eventually, gritting my teeth and with losses I found unacceptable, he gets taken down, and then you can calmly do whatever you want on the map, and send your own roaches to chase the other weak troublemakers... Especially when you have Sinitar and Lethos at high level — no roach with a weekly growth can withstand that, and the bot's so-called "cores" ran out. The hero himself isn't that dangerous per se, but even though I was higher level and had better stats, the amount of meat was quite hard to outdo. I didn't scout Laszlo himself, because by the time of the battle I had already visited the mentor — though not to radically change my build, but just to take mentorship to train the roaches that would bite hard (Lethos — Decay + crystals, Sinitar — empowered Chain Lightning with a fork)

At the time of the battle with Cruzer, my "Vayshan" looked like this (I took mentorship later) — CP respectively (I'll attach replays of both failed and successful attempts)

 

Allies and demons — I understand that by design, this Cruzer was supposed to take out the demon, take out the elf, and then come to us. Overall, he seemed to be doing that, up to a point — though he didn't fully take out the demon, only capturing one castle and leaving Morbos in the bottom corner castle, which is also quite good, and also gave me some headache figuring out how to take it down while minimizing losses, though it's not strictly necessary...



The presence of the demon and elf on the map — at first the demon ran around with one hero, heading closer to the human, but once Cruzer took him out, I didn't really notice him on the map anymore, and I wish he'd kept him entertained more. The elf, in turn, also occasionally diverted attention, though most often he'd clean up everything I'd broken through — the main thing is to grab the two mines first)) because until he's taken out, they'll be his)) But overall, he also diverted some attention and stole what we hadn't managed to grab ourselves, which was a bit annoying, honestly

Moving on to the quest part — overall, the idea with the mini-bosses is quite interesting, especially the quest chain with the mage, to whom we give the necromancy book, and he goes and resurrects two dragons — what a scoundrel, a villain, a rogue — we helped you, and you treat us like this... Well, never mind

The first quest I started doing, after clearing the map of irritants, was the quest with the lost husband
- The idea is great — everything is described, told, maybe even excessively. There's Ebba who jokingly said her husband is a slacker, and then go to the mage friend with whom they often drink, and he gave him a book, and he went and locked himself in a crypt and turned into a powerful vampire, whom (at this stage we kicked around easily) we then returned to the hut, thought we needed to save him, but he'd already healed himself. We laughed, sat around, had some drinks, and got a nice set


- The chain with the lich sorcerers, the villains who do unspeakable things to dragons (also good), but again, with such a level and army, you don't really feel them anymore, but still, it's cool


- And the one I liked the most was with Artat, the old man who has nothing to give but would like to receive artifacts. First, we're greeted by spectres (one of which even shoots) — cool animation, by the way))



- And then the old man went berserk, saying something like "here are two dragons, go and defeat them" — cool that one has infinite invisibility? well, more precisely, he has at least 2-3 charges?))
and accordingly, that's Logens and Astrida (who at the beginning was telling about the second one, that he could cast spells — if spellcasting meant invisibility, then okay)


- And we seemingly won, and then the old man goes, "opa, I'm an imba phoenix, I'll bend everyone over, cleanse the lands of demons, elves, and humans — you came to my yard to impose your own order..."


and for completing this chain, they give a tasty set of artifacts — if only I'd had the ring in the first month, everything would've been easier and faster, but oh well, I wasn't in a hurry anyway)

Time to sum up:
I liked the map — it seems like a lot of stuff is piled on, but it's fine overall. The only thing that bothered me was that some passages need to be looked for, stared at, or a resource pile blocked the path and I didn't notice — oops, go around...
- The cool gorge with golems that just stand there while you walk along the path — they stand and watch, and you go kiting a legion of golems with your 30 Furries — slow, but a good XP boost + a Tome of Power lying around there (I think)



- VOICE ACTING IN CUTSCENES — seems like a small thing, but it's nice. Though there aren't many scenes, they exist. The only issue is that in the scene where we kill Vays, the screaming peasants drown out the voice acting (yes, I know there's some mod to increase dialogue volume, but I don't have it installed)
- After the final victory, they could've made some kind of cinematic, because you win and that's it
- By the final battle, my character looked like this (yes, we don't have tier 7 units, but we have two to choose from — either Angels or Horned Demons; we don't count elves since there's only one of them and those dragons aren't upgraded)


Despite a slight drop in stats, she goes down quite calmly (got it on the first try, though near the end, for fun, I almost killed myself with Armageddon + luck), and accordingly, between the red boots, an Earth boost
In the end, we have

Thanks to the author for this map — I'll definitely play another work by this author too) 
p.s. If it seems like there's a lot of non-elf meat, the secret is simple — in the castle, a hero with a gathering bonus + almost all non-elf stuff was fed into the pit, and that yielded around +10 Furries, +6 Boars; if I hadn't also fed the angels and had stopped feeding them earlier, there would've been more of them)