Post 13 Sep 2014, 02:19 by Lewin
Some people are being very critical (and sometimes rude) about this campaign, so I would like to make this thread more constructive. grayter clearly wants to improve the campaign and is open to suggestions, he's already posted an update based on reported problems. It's not easy to put together an 11 mission campaign which is bug free, so I don't think it should be judged on the fact that the first version had some bugs (that's partially my fault for including it in the RC as soon as he first sent it to me without letting him test script/AI changes since r5503).
So the main complaints seem to be:
- Too difficult, especially certain missions (did grayter's update fix this? I think this was partially due to bugs or AI changes since r5503).
- Goals aren't clear in some missions: don't harm civilians, capture space, etc. (please make suggestions for how to clarify the goals in the messages)
- Map quality isn't perfect (can be improved with constructive criticism, and IMO the quality is acceptable, but could be improved)
- Gameplay is unconventional: small spaces, dynamic scripts, etc. (why is everyone opposed to something different? Not every KaM battle needs to be in a big open field. Vas' campaign is unconventional too but in different ways. A few missions with limited space is good IMO)
I agree that overall the quality of the campaign seems to be lower than Vas' campaign The Federation of Nyern. But I don't think it's too low to not include it, and grayter is still making improvements. A lot of players ask us by email or Facebook about adding more campaigns. Singleplayer is still very popular and I think if we include this campaign a lot of players will get a lot of fun out of it.
Please post constructive criticism of the campaign, and say what you think should be changed to improve it. Maybe someone can give grayter some more hints to improve the terrain quality? (that often happens when someone posts a new MP map here)
Here is some constructive criticism from me:
- Your English is not perfect (grammatical errors), and I think you should avoid informal language (example: mission 2 "Oh, I forgot") because you're meant to be the leader of an army. If you don't know someone to help you with it I can do some quick corrections
- Your hills are elevated too unevenly. It looks good if you make dark diagonal cracks in the hills. Open TSK/TPR maps in the map editor and compare the hills to yours
- I personally don't like that you used the fast flowing water in most places. It doesn't make sense in many places because there's nothing to make the water flow so fast (e.g. fish ponds in mission 8, beach in the top right mission 6, rivers with swamps/marsh, etc.). In the case of rivers it's also better if you make the water flow around bends. This requires placing tiles by hand unfortunately, magic water can't help with that.