Nice write-up and ideas, and the screenies look good too!

Instead, live the Magyar Conquest on an optimal Tiny-sized map!

Wise choice. Designing a ludakris map (York in BotF, in my case) was one of the most frustrating experiences I've ever had

I'm also quite impressed with your consistent ability to use the tiny mapsize and yet create a wholesome and satisfying experience that most (myself included) would require a far larger map to do. It reminds me of the style of Ingo and aMa, which is always a good thing

I'm up for testing when you're ready. Just got home after finishing exams, so I'll get to your other two WIP scenarios as well!

This has been said before, but if you keep this up we might have to give you Lord Basse's title

I love how you focused on an often ignored subject. Good luck with this!

Nice! I never really got into the AoF Magyar scenario due to the map size. I like how you have grass land without having it look dull or empty, in the first screen.

The Beta is available on Mediafire!

Not bad for a weekend's work


Thank you all for the encouragement.

I'll admit that part of my speed is due to me working with tiny map sizes.

I never liked really epic scenarios that drag too long. My design philosophy is to give players a short (1-2 hour long) but fulfilling experience.

I've also become more minimalist with triggers. My previous scenario (Fall of the Ikko Ikki) featured all of 25 triggers but through AI and map design (not just a pretty map but a tactically interesting one), I hope it is a fun scenario. The Magyar Conquest, due to some gameplay mechanics, has much more, however, but clocks in at under 125 triggers.

I think as a design community, we have become too reliant on triggers to create what often turns into unwieldy gameplay mechanics and it has led to scenarios taking years to complete which is ridiculous. The complicated scenarios are also often no more fun or challenging than Ensemble's! In fact, they can often be frustrating because they are too complicated for most players.

I'll give an example. Because the Magyars were nomadic, I toyed with the idea of using a variation of my cattle herding/grazing/raiding mechanic from Of Cows & Kings with some sort of resettlement mechanic to represent their nomadism. Instead of complicated mechanics that would have been technically impressive but confusing and overwhelming to most players (having to worry more about cows/horses grazing than battles!), I simplified it. Instead, the grazing horses are controlled by a friendly player, are static, and generate resources for the player without management. All the player has to do is defend the horses (situated near his yurts) if he wants to retain the resource source.

And instead of a complicated nomad mechanic, I simply created an objective for the player to build stables over the ruins of his conquests.

I think it's instructive to remember that the most important thing is to make a balanced, challenging, and fun scenario. We shouldn't be designing just for other designers to show off our technical expertise with triggers and tricks.

This has been said before, but if you keep this up we might have to give you Lord Basse's title

I think I have already earned it

Since Dec 2013 when I returned to designing, I have made 13 scenarios over 10 campaigns

I wish I had your motivation to design stuff Keep it up

I'll admit that part of my speed is due to me working with tiny map sizes.

I never liked really epic scenarios that drag too long. My design philosophy is to give players a short (1-2 hour long) but fulfilling experience.

I've also become more minimalist with triggers. My previous scenario (Fall of the Ikko Ikki) featured all of 25 triggers but through AI and map design (not just a pretty map but a tactically interesting one), I hope it is a fun scenario. The Magyar Conquest, due to some gameplay mechanics, has much more, however, but clocks in at under 125 triggers.

I think as a design community, we have become too reliant on triggers to create what often turns into unwieldy gameplay mechanics and it has led to scenarios taking years to complete which is ridiculous. The complicated scenarios are also often no more fun or challenging than Ensemble's! In fact, they can often be frustrating because they are too complicated for most players.

I'll give an example. Because the Magyars were nomadic, I toyed with the idea of using a variation of my cattle herding/grazing/raiding mechanic from Of Cows & Kings with some sort of resettlement mechanic to represent their nomadism. Instead of complicated mechanics that would have been technically impressive but confusing and overwhelming to most players (having to worry more about cows/horses grazing than battles!), I simplified it. Instead, the grazing horses are controlled by a friendly player, are static, and generate resources for the player without management. All the player has to do is defend the horses (situated near his yurts) if he wants to retain the resource source.

And instead of a complicated nomad mechanic, I simply created an objective for the player to build stables over the ruins of his conquests.

I think it's instructive to remember that the most important thing is to make a balanced, challenging, and fun scenario. We shouldn't be designing just for other designers to show off our technical expertise with triggers and tricks.
This has been said before, but if you keep this up we might have to give you Lord Basse's title
I think I have already earned it

Since Dec 2013 when I returned to designing, I have made 13 scenarios over 10 campaign

I sympathize with a lot of this. I personally now only use the small map size. Anything bigger and you end up with big areas of dead space. Small keeps the action packed and forces you to design smaller than you would of, which is always for the better.

I do prefer generally more triggers and modding, but I'm also trying to keep the number of triggers down. I've said it before, but complex trigger systems rarely add to the fun of the scenario. I am aiming for about 250 to 400 triggers for what I'm working on.

Anyway good work!

Hey, so I've played this one through as well. I really like the idea behind it, and I'm impressed by the uniqueness that you put into it. Designing a scenario or campaign on a topic that there is already a scenario on is a tough job and imo you did an excellent job of being historically accurate while being unique and improving on some of the faults of the Honfoglalas scenario. Well done

That being said, here is my feedback:

-The only bug I could find is that the "hoofsteps of the Druzhina are approaching" messages continually fired when you placed units on certain areas, even after I had killed the Boyar squads. It was a little unsettling because each time I saw it I would frantically look around for a squad of Elite Boyars that had come to attack my cavalry archers

-The reinforcements stopped coming after a certain number of kills. Obviously there is a limit to how much one can trigger this system, but more or a notification about the end of the reinforcements (a la scenario 29 of the AoM campaign) would do nicely. Also, it would be nice for the last shipment to be a couple shaman, in case the starting ones were lost

-Which units become upgraded when you build a certain number? I got the heavy cav archer upgrade, and for most of the scenario was building cav archers and light cavalry (I was never really short on food, but cav archers drained my gold) and never got the hussar upgrade despite probably having around 40-50 light cavalry at one point.

-Markets never seemed to grant much plunder. Not sure if this was intentional, but I found it a little odd.

-There were a few spots where enemy units got stuck behind their own buildings. One was in the southwestern green castle complex, where a pikeman got stuck between the barracks and the cliff. Another was in the purple city where a crossbowman (I think, or it may have been a long swordsman) was stuck somehow.

-Off-grid objects and pathfinding- while there were far less issues than in WotB or FotII, there were still some sketchy object placements. In general, the openness of the map meant that this didn't hurt the pathing much, but it is still worth noticing.

-Now on to the main point: the balance needs some serious tweaking. I'm all for challenge, but the number of times I had to restart or reload savestates (which I generally made every 5-10 minutes) was quite excessive. It actually reminded me of testing an early version of the Honfoglalas scenario in BotF (funny, maybe this subject is cursed with balance issues ). This was also on moderate. I don't even want to imagine what hard would be like.

There's a lot of interesting mechanics, but at a certain point the base mechanics of AoK shine above systems or limitations that are meant to create a new experience. For instance, having no TC or eco buildings save for mills was interesting, but it meant that my resource production was not nearly up to par considering that I was fighting 3 AIs with unlimited resources and many buildings (not to mention one being an age ahead of me). That wasn't way too bad though, since I could still hunt/fish and never ran low on wood. The one that I really disliked was that the only way to get gold (other than razings) was to protect the grazing horses. These are spread over too wide an area, and the small mapsize (which imo was too small for the scenario) meant that the enemy had a very small distance to travel before reaching them. I didn't have enough troops to defend all of them, and there was no way of knowing which one was going to be hit, so they were all essentially doomed. I eventually gave up trying to defend them, realizing that it was more cost-effective to gather my troops and defend just the central camp, thereby losing less precious men, than to try to defend my horses, essentially rendering that mechanic null.

The position of your camp is troublesome. It's exactly in the center of the (very open) map, meaning that attacks will be coming from all sides. This makes things interesting, but around 5-10 minutes the first Pecheneg raid arrives and the other AIs conveniently decide to attack at the same time, which at that point in time is impossible to defend. I just barely passed that point after 40 minutes of restarts, but the scripted, absolutely-no-room-for-error path that I had to take really detracted from the experience. Essentially, by sacking 2 monasteries asap, getting the blacksmith upgrades, and building a ton of cav archers and light cavalry/tarkans/knights, I was just barely able to pass the 10 minute mark. Also, ballistics for your cav archers would be a huge help (universities are disabled so there's no way to research it except triggers). I had to marco polo as well to pass this point. It seemed odd because here I was, representing the most fearsome force of raiders flood Europe since the fall of Rome, and yet I could only defend, not raid.

Oddly enough, it then got much easier once I had massed a sufficient force of cav archers and gotten the HCA upgrade. At that point, it wasn't much of a challenge anymore, but rather just a slog through the enemy bases (limited resources meant that I had to proceed slowly) until I won eventually. So essentially: far too hard early on, decent balance but a little slow later, too many mechanics, and the variety of options is a bit of a red herring as the player has to pursue a very specific course of action in order to have a hope at success. AI too strong and player too weak given the map size.

Apologies if this sounds harsh; I don't mean it that way. I just figured it would be best to write as detailed a report as possible so that you could better identify the issues. Don't feel down about the feedback- with a few tweaks this scenario can be as outstanding as all of your other works!

One last comment: in a scenario designed using the AoF expansion about the Magyar invasion of Moravia, I find it odd that you used the Hun civ and not the Magyar civ? I guess the primary reason was for the housing bonus, but that can be achieved through AoKTS by tributing pop space, I believe (or by using invisible houses). Tarkans at stables are nice too (though I never really used them), and cheap cav archers are really nice, but I feel like many of the Magyar attributes would also fit the scenario well (cheaper scout-line, extra range cav archers). Feel free to do what you like but I thought that was a point worth raising.

[This message has been edited by HockeySam18 (edited 12-16-2014 @ 09:17 AM).]

Wow thanks for the very detailed analysis for this scenario and the others! This is great feedback.

A few of the points you mentioned are just bugs I need to fix (Druzhina, light cavalry not upgrading, units stuck).

As for the mechanics, it sounds like the horses problem might be improved by increasing the resource generation from 3 gold per horse pair per minute to something substantially higher. If you were generating 50-100 gold instead of <20 per minute from the horses, it might make it more viable to attempt to defend them. I could also make the Moravians allied with the Magyar Peasants player so only the Pechenegs will attack the horses. What do you think?

It also sounds like I need to boost the gold reward for razing buildings?

As for the map position and feeling defensive, I could reward the player for expanding. I'm thinking something along the lines of constructing buildings inside 'enemy' areas such as the village in the south and the cities provide additional units (conquests have spurred more followers) and/or resources (tributes come from other kingdoms that have heard of your conquests). This would reward the player for expanding elsewhere to slightly more defensible areas.

I could even remove the original camp when the player builds in conquered areas to stress the nomadism and/or remove buildings after each new area is conquered and a stables built over the destroyed castle so the player would effectively rebuild after each city conquest. That might just be a tedious mechanic, though.

I'll also spread out the enemy attacks. I think I set the AIs to attack at the same time without giving it a thought.

You didn't mention it but I'll also add a fail safe for if the player loses his villagers. Maybe on Standard, when the player owns fewer than 0 villagers, villagers spawn.

A lot of these would make the early-mid game more manageable but I'm still brain-storming how to improve the late game since these changes, save the nomadic one, (all equating to more resources) would make the late game very easy. That's a problem I think plaguing the other scenarios, as well. Once the player reaches a critical mass, the challenge is gone. Thinking about how to address this.

What do you think about those ideas? Do you think they would mitigate the problems?

As for the Huns vs Magyars, the houses and building Tarkans without a castle were the main motivations. I restrict the player's unit selection enough already, I wanted to give them another melee fighter focused on razing.

Thank you again for the feedback!

[This message has been edited by Al_Kharn the Great (edited 12-16-2014 @ 03:56 PM).]

Sam is a playtesting Machine

A lot of these would make the early-mid game more manageable but I'm still brain-storming how to improve the late game since these changes, save the nomadic one, (all equating to more resources) would make the late game very easy. That's a problem I think plaguing the other scenarios, as well. Once the player reaches a critical mass, the challenge is gone. Thinking about how to address this.

I think this is a problem that you can find in almost every B&D scenario or campaign. (I still like them very much though! ) Not sure how to counter this, maybe decreased resource income later on and some extra enemy units spawning depending on player army size?

As for the mechanics, it sounds like the horses problem might be improved by increasing the resource generation from 3 gold per horse pair per minute to something substantially higher. If you were generating 50-100 gold instead of <20 per minute from the horses, it might make it more viable to attempt to defend them. I could also make the Moravians allied with the Magyar Peasants player so only the Pechenegs will attack the horses. What do you think?

I like this a lot. A little more gold (both from the horses and razing buildings) would be quite nice, considering that it will also allow a wider variety of units. Having only the Pechenegs attack the horses is also good- it will help a lot with the balance and with historical accuracy. In that case though, I'd move some of the horses away from the Moravians (the two NW groups) and place them somewhere on the frontier with the Pechenegs. I'd also give the horses a little more HP so they don't get killed instantly.

As for the map position and feeling defensive, I could reward the player for expanding. I'm thinking something along the lines of constructing buildings inside 'enemy' areas such as the village in the south and the cities provide additional units (conquests have spurred more followers) and/or resources (tributes come from other kingdoms that have heard of your conquests). This would reward the player for expanding elsewhere to slightly more defensible areas.

Definitely a good idea (y)

I could even remove the original camp when the player builds in conquered areas to stress the nomadism and/or remove buildings after each new area is conquered and a stables built over the destroyed castle so the player would effectively rebuild after each city conquest. That might just be a tedious mechanic, though.

Probably best to not do this. It would be more frustrating than anything else and not really help the gameplay much.

Maybe on Standard, when the player owns fewer than 0 villagers, villagers spawn.

Good idea (maybe spawn more on standard and less on moderate). And maybe on hard, the player gets control of the one cyan villager in the camp when they have no villagers left (so it's a one time thing).

Once the player reaches a critical mass, the challenge is gone. Thinking about how to address this.

I've noticed this too (in the Japanese scenarios I would build hordes of fully upgraded skirmishers and tower my base and never feel threatened). I think you can make the AI train more depending on how many troops the player has, or it would probably be more stable to trigger them extra units if the player has more, like John said. No trebs though :p

As for the Huns vs Magyars, the houses and building Tarkans without a castle were the main motivations. I restrict the player's unit selection enough already, I wanted to give them another melee fighter focused on razing.

Gotcha.

Thank you again for the feedback!

Of course! Glad to help :)

Quoted from Possidon:

Sam is a playtesting Machine

When there's a lot of fun stuff to play, it's easy to be!

With your extensive help, HockeySam, I made many changes.

I also added another source of gold: by maintaining a high kill ratio, the player will receive gold in tribute from other lands at 120, 240, 360, and 500 more kills than losses.

+ By inflicting heavy losses on your enemies for few Magyars lost, you will spread fear, spurring the princes of Europe to exchange tribute for peace (maintain a high kill ratio to receive payments of gold every 10 game minutes)

+ 120 more kills than deaths: tribute from Vlach princes (600 gold)
240 more kills: tribute from the Saxons (1000 gold)
360 more kills: tribute from the Bulgar Khan (1400 gold)
500 more kills: tribute from Caesar (2000 gold)

I don't know if the balance is quite right yet, though, so I'm submitting it for playtesting.

[This message has been edited by Al_Kharn the Great (edited 12-20-2014 @ 12:26 PM).]

That's an ingenious idea. I'll have a look if I can over the next few days.

Thanks.

Turns out the quantity of kills was a little low so I adjusted it. The file has been updated.

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