The destiny of ironheart community campaign absurdness

[(ￗ﹏ￗ )]

Ok so i completed this campaign a week ago and didn't know where to give feedback so i'm posting it here, i don't even know if anyone really cares or if this place is even right for feedback but if anyone's interested here's my feedback
the good:
1. the map and enviornment design are absolutely phenomenal, the way the cities are scaled up in size really make it feel more real and immersive.
2. the rpg quests like elements are awesome.
3. i personally loved the story
the bad:

Only one thing sucks in this campaign and that is the boring monotonous constants fights,
i get that that's how it supposed to feel given the story, your supposed to feel like your on the bad end against hordes of loth, but there has to be a better way to do that right. The way its done is that if you dont savescum, one mistake and you are softlocked and that would probably be fine if you didnt have to do the constant boring monotonous fights again and again which also last very long.

for example mission 2, the bandits before reaching grymm's sister, bad but still fine, the undead in the faey forest, getting more annoying now but it still feels very rewarding to do the prior things. but then the ultimate ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ arrives, constantly respawning loth weilders
with full armies while you have to suicide fight against a neutral army to thin them down so as to progress and the wielders respwan right next to it. maybe its easier to handle all this if one dosen't go into the city to fight grymm and get the spell damage tome, except good luck continously restarting in mission 4 to get atleast 2 spell damage boosting items otherwise i don't think one can last pretty long. All this while there's a time limit on your head and by the time the necromancers start running out of units, your gold reserves would already be depleted. Adding to it the exact same army composition of the enemy with only 2 different builds and man does it go from meaningful and rewarding to meaningless and boring and get it over with already please feelings.

Mission 3 while not ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ still equally boring and monotonous, just one more enemy build type and that's it , it would probably be fine if we fought them once or twice , but again and again same hordes of boring, one mistake and you are soflocked, monotonous battles.

Mission 4, Oh boy this one is a beast of its own, i wonder if anyone other than a caveman like me could even have the time and energy to beat this one, and that's a shame cause the city of windhaven is so nicely designed. most of the missions in this campaign i beat through by restarting after playing a little of the beginning and then savescumming. this mission i was very close to restarting the third time after reaching near the end because of the ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥.

The strategy on it is very simple. restart until you get atleast one spell damage boosting artifact. send elizabeth north with right troops (rana and maybe some bandits producing the right essence) full spell damage boost to fight against the chaos or arcane build weilders. keep swap ready and keep swapping out the troops they dimension door or swap in. later in the mission as the frequency increases keep falling back and swapping from the walls to the inner barricades during battles. similarly send godrick south to defend against the ranged and rats. similarly swapping and onslaught + the other spell destruction and order spell which gives all ranged units + 1 attack is key, first time i sent him north and almost died on seeing the ranged resistances as i thought the case would be similar south and elizabeth cant defend two places at once. Similarly torvald defends the harbor.

In the beginning this all seems good and balanced, though the boring monotonousness is still there, like ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ the elizabeth battles made me wanna cry as i kept waiting for arcane storm and acid cloud to kill the enemy while i keep the ones they swap or dimension door inside in place while ethereal scaling the meele troops or pacifying their troops. but i thought atleast it would not be ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ like mission 2, but oh man it slowly creeps up on you until reaching max climax near the end of the mission.

Near turn 50-55 i dont remember just before getting the prompt to escape to the harbour. you get attacked by 3 ARMIES in ONE turn all in the circumstances of 1. godrick being in the harbour to defend against grymm because torvald does not have the capability do to so anymore near the end (maybe because i built him badly but that essencse leech in the monastery in mission 2 is a TRAP) 2. elizabeth no longer having access to rana troops. I actually abandonded the harbour first time playing around turn 50 and suffered so much when i found out thats where you need to go to, thank god i regularly saved and also defended the harbour upto that point otherwise playing again from the beginning or middle is too much of a chore.

the 3 army attack is enough of a ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ on its own, elizabeth loses most of her essence troops which she no longer has access to and torval, who's also inside to face the 3rd army automatically after elizabeth weakens, also loses most of his army. but then just a couple turns later another army full of high legions attacks you, now normally elizabeth takes these fights except she dosent have anything left and if torvald fights he will not kill even one enemy troop, well ok it takes time for the enemy to capture the fortress, you can head for the harbour during then and by then the objective also changes to the harbour, except when that happens it puts you right back inside the fortress and now you have to fight the defending army to get out, nice. at this point my brain was so exhausted i didnt even know how i got out of those softlocked saves, but somehow made it to the harbour with torvald and elizabeth both with some little troops but oh no, there is still one last thing waiting in the pier and its merkoth with a force that you have to thin out like the neutral army in mission 2 with suicide battles while not having any fortress battlefield advantages and being absolute broke and very little troops, nice.

Somehow using elizabeth to thin his army with spells and torvald to finish the job i finally completed the campaign and god help those who messed up their weilder's builds. This was the experience i had during the playthrough and it was much more painful than i have articulated here. Maybe a bit less and more meaningful battles would be more interesting instead of 25 stacks of bones and seneschals and 100 legionnares every other turn. Maybe i'm just not the target audience of this campaign and just suck that could also totally be possible tho.

[Naruto0408]

haven't played campaign, but think one of the biggest issues with custom campaigns is that they are probably made more with advanced players in mind, so that'd explain the issues such as needing to save scum or how you could soft lock yourself by building wrong

[Jack Blaze]

Originally posted by Naruto0408:

haven't played campaign, but think one of the biggest issues with custom campaigns is that they are probably made more with advanced players in mind, so that'd explain the issues such as needing to save scum or how you could soft lock yourself by building wrong

I'm not sure custom campaigns are that much harder than the official ones. I played through just about all of the ones I could get my hands on and besides maybe one, they weren't particularly that much special difficulty wise

That said, if you're struggling with the later half of the missions for official campaigns...yeah, good chance you'll struggle with some of the custom campaigns too

[(ￗ﹏ￗ )]

Originally posted by Jack Blaze:

Originally posted by Naruto0408:

haven't played campaign, but think one of the biggest issues with custom campaigns is that they are probably made more with advanced players in mind, so that'd explain the issues such as needing to save scum or how you could soft lock yourself by building wrong

I'm not sure custom campaigns are that much harder than the official ones. I played through just about all of the ones I could get my hands on and besides maybe one, they weren't particularly that much special difficulty wise

That said, if you're struggling with the later half of the missions for official campaigns...yeah, good chance you'll struggle with some of the custom campaigns too

i dont mind the savescumming or getting softlocked tho as its the norm on higher difficulties in skirmish or campaigns but the main problem here are the numerous slow slogging and boring battles that you have to constantly redo, fighting one risky or worthy or challenging fight one after another each taking minimum 5-15 minutes as you cant suffer losses, gets boring really fast in this campaign moreso because the neutrals or weilders have the same build all the time. the difficulty is there but i think its maybe done in a very tedious and annoying way instead of something fun, i lost all the motivation to complete the campaign at mission 2 when i found out the enemy weilders respwaning all the time with full army near the doomstack neutral which you have to suicide against to thin out in mission 2, in particular i think mission 2 and 4 have some serious anti fun things in them. Also have you checked this one out, if yes do you remember your experience, all the other community campaigns are a sleepwalk but not this one( or maybe it is and im just bad >-<).

[Doomich]

Oh, hello. I am the author of this campaign.
Thank you for such a detailed and thorough review.
Glad you liked the visual design and story, it took most of the time invested.

Regarding the difficulty, yeah, it should be noted that for custom campaigns we can’t yet choose the difficulty level, and also that I wanted to make the campaign challenging and interesting in battles for those who have already completed official campaigns and matches against AI on high difficulties.

Also on each map there are some tricks to gain an advantage.
For example in mission 2 there are a lot of watchtowers with which you could track the AI's movements, so before the final battle it makes sense to trick them into chasing you around instead of fighting.
In mission 3 you can get a mountainous battlefield if you are close to the high tiles.
In mission 4, all wielders can manage to get a LevelUp tree and visit the university in the harbor to get the tax skill for more income.

Although I tried to make it playable for more players, the idea and my experience could make it even worse because I might not have paid attention to small nuances that seemed obvious to me.

But to be fair, it’s worth noting that due to recent updates, the AI has become smarter and learned new tricks in magic, which also made the campaign even more difficult.
I did some balance tweaks for missions 2 and 3 a couple of weeks ago. Mission 4 is still in question since tweaks were made earlier.
I'm currently replaying the campaign again and will play through mission 4 later to check everything out again.
Also I probably should have included a note about difficulty. I'll add that to the description.

And it’s great that despite experiencing all these difficulties and unfairness, you still overcame them all and completed the campaign! This seems like an achievement.
Probably the final battle turned out to be even more epic for you (hope all the reinforcements from previous missions were useful).
Maybe someday there will be another contest and I can make a Vanir sequel.

Thank you for playing and sharing your impressions, it helps to get a different perspective. You can also visit the official SoC discord server for questions and feedback, or just for discussions.
Cheers.

[(ￗ﹏ￗ )]

Originally posted by Doomich:

Oh, hello. I am the author of this campaign.
Thank you for such a detailed and thorough review.
Glad you liked the visual design and story, it took most of the time invested.

Regarding the difficulty, yeah, it should be noted that for custom campaigns we can’t yet choose the difficulty level, and also that I wanted to make the campaign challenging and interesting in battles for those who have already completed official campaigns and matches against AI on high difficulties.

Also on each map there are some tricks to gain an advantage.
For example in mission 2 there are a lot of watchtowers with which you could track the AI's movements, so before the final battle it makes sense to trick them into chasing you around instead of fighting.
In mission 3 you can get a mountainous battlefield if you are close to the high tiles.
In mission 4, all wielders can manage to get a LevelUp tree and visit the university in the harbor to get the tax skill for more income.

Although I tried to make it playable for more players, the idea and my experience could make it even worse because I might not have paid attention to small nuances that seemed obvious to me.

But to be fair, it’s worth noting that due to recent updates, the AI has become smarter and learned new tricks in magic, which also made the campaign even more difficult.
I did some balance tweaks for missions 2 and 3 a couple of weeks ago. Mission 4 is still in question since tweaks were made earlier.
I'm currently replaying the campaign again and will play through mission 4 later to check everything out again.
Also I probably should have included a note about difficulty. I'll add that to the description.

And it’s great that despite experiencing all these difficulties and unfairness, you still overcame them all and completed the campaign! This seems like an achievement.
Probably the final battle turned out to be even more epic for you (hope all the reinforcements from previous missions were useful).
Maybe someday there will be another contest and I can make a Vanir sequel.

Thank you for playing and sharing your impressions, it helps to get a different perspective. You can also visit the official SoC discord server for questions and feedback, or just for discussions.
Cheers.

Thanks for the reply, yup even with everything going on i did enjoy the campaign the most out of all the community campaigns and the final battle did truly encapsulate the despair theme of the whole campaign and overcoming it truly did feel like an achievement. Also i actually did complete mission 2 by kiting the ai near the end and did look for good terrrain in battles by standing in different spots before battle in mission 3 also i didn't took taxes with elizabeth and godrick because i didn't know if there would be more missions and i didn't want to take the chance of having another useless skill, also i don't know if this is a problem on my end (which it probably is) but round 1 seems bugged as the dialogue and story scenes only start playing out on turn 2 so i had to also waste a turn just waiting in the beginning of mission 4 making it harder for godrick and elizabeth to make it to the harbour and back in time had i wanted to give them the skill. Btw its better not to take my review too seriously and change the campaign too much difficulty wise if it upsets most people who like it after all i am just another random dude giving his thoughts but thanks for listening. And I hope your great skills gets more opportunities to be shown. ദ്ദി ˉ͈̀꒳ˉ͈́ )✧

[Stepfan]

I am currently in mission 4 around turn 17 playing on fair mode. I am decent with tactics but am playing on fair(lazy person). Just like the player above said the story is absolutely superb. I had trouble in 3rd mission but I played each battle until close to end manually and won it with a 14 or so stacks left,3rd campaign was not easy I mean I had an easier time on hardest difficulty in Fantasy General II(I did that to get 100% achievements). Now coming back to mission 4 at turn 17 I am surviving but I got attacked by necro army that well are kinda made unfair. Why? Well necro suicider are level 30 I am level 20(at start was 16 am capped at 20). So i get swarmed by suiciders 10 levels higher than me! But that is ok somewhat. Now the sad part I don't have access to unit caps! So I defend with 20 sword of order stacks versus 100 stack of legionaries. Not all of the enemy necros are over maxed like this but those super stacks screw my defenses and troops. I read what the person above said I need to last until turn 50. No way that is happening I am getting attacked at 3 turns or so by armies both south and north and only 1 of my heros got a good build, while Elizabeth is using command crown and she can't do much with magic(lolth have magic res units). I loaded back and now the enemy attack instant. I think the script or something resets and upgrades difficulty instantly. It must be a bug or something. Now my question is why not allow player to upgrade the limits of troops? I am not sure I can beat the campaign as it is, maybe using some tricks/ AI exploits. I think if you allow players to rise limits you can leave enemy necros suicides as they are. Overall this is the best community campaign and it is on the level of the main campaigns at some points even better(4 combat maps compared to 1 or 2 in main). Suggestions to add maybe some might skills(offence, defense, positioning and so on) at max level in campaign 1 or 2 since in levels 3 and 4 is pain time. I don't have time to move my wielders since the AI constant suicides with his level 30 wielders versus my 16~20. So to sum it up add more buffs in missions 1-2, maybe lower suicide waves in mission 3 and allow unit upgrade caps in mission 4, maybe also lower necro cap to 20.

[Stepfan]

I tried to fight an enemy army with all I had and lost .Those 100/stack legionaries are killing me I can only field 20/stack swords of order.Maybe you planned for the player to loose the city if such an army appears and withdraw?

[Doomich]

@Stepfan
Hey hey.
Hmm, 30 lvl is an "invincible" army that forces you to retreat.
But before that, you should have received a dialogue and updated Objective that would explain the situation.
Have you received dialogue and new objective?

[Doomich]

@Stepfan
Ah, sorry, all "Suiciders" is also 30 lvl, but this is just a number, their skills are much lower. I just forgot to change it.
But It turns out that you have not yet met an invincible army...

I understand that for someone it is too difficult, but it is intentionally configured as Owerwhelming or even higher, to make it interesting and challenging.

Okay, given a huge number of new players, maybe later I will edit all missions and upload the entire campaign separately as Fair difficulty.
I just thought to wait for the feature that would allow the custom campaigns to choose difficulty (as in official campaigns), but it seems so far this feature is not planned, so I will upload this difficulty separately.

I will try to do this until the end of the week, follow the updates in the discord.
And thanks for the feedback, glad you have enjoyed!

[Stepfan]

Originally posted by Doomich:

@Stepfan
Hey hey.
Hmm, 30 lvl is an "invincible" army that forces you to retreat.
But before that, you should have received a dialogue and updated Objective that would explain the situation.
Have you received dialogue and new objective?

I got a message a few rounds back saying someone opened garrison in eastern side and had some neutral mobs spawning there. Killed them and leveled my weaker wielder. Also got an update in quest objective completed. After that in round 15 I think was reinforcements coming some garrison. I sent my weakest wielder to get them and am using them against the army in the screen shots below. I am at turn 17 next turn this army attacks and one more parks next to it in north. In south I am getting another slightly weaker than this army. I only have one wielder with magic resistance. If I defeat this army(somehow) next turn a similar army not sure gonna have troops for that, but I will loose the south town 100%, or I give up on the north but 2 armies will enter than.
This is the screen shot.
https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=3256691613
Now here is a second screen shot to show the resistances
https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=3256692110
Here is what essences he generates per round.
Order 6 from troops 11 in total
Chaos 0 from troops 9 in total(yeah I know sucks to be me)
Destruction 15 from troops 20 in total
Creation 0 from troops 5 in total
Arcana 3 from troops 11 in total.
With such generation he will mop the floor magic wise with me. I countered it with magic resistance on Godric. If I did not pick magic res would be game over now but sadly only for one wielder it came up.
Now of course I will loose hard this battle, even if I somehow beat it with underhanded ways(or some half exploits I have not found yet) others will follow. The fact that units have insane ranged resistance kinda makes archers more or less useless.I am generating order essences a lot of it so I will "pacify" the army but still it feels to much. I thought to report it and if it is not a bug I will continue to try and beat the campaign.
I want to add I don't mind difficult but allow us to have the cap upgrades, you can leave the suiciders as they are. BTW I think the new AI upgrades made the difficulty spike like this.

[Doomich]

@Stepfan
Hmm..
You are using too many archers against undead that intentionally have increased ranged resist.
You only need 1-2 stacks of sappers for double shots and for barricades (to prevent the enemy from teleporting to the walls), and 1-2 stacks of archers to attack seneschals).

The main thing is that shields of order stack each other’s protection, and also try to absorb damage at the gate using garrison footmen, since they are restored for free.
Proper use of Pacify, Erhernal Scales, Blind Hatred, Onslaught will also help a lot.
At the university in the central fortress, try choosing Chaos magic and equip the Talisman of Creation.

Enemies gain additional skills and an essence shield over time, so this will change the tactics a bit.

There are also several Barracks in the city where you can hire/upgrade units at a reduced price.
In the northern part there is also an area for hiring cheap bandits (chaos essence).
Cheap troops will help you save resources for important upgrades.
You can also try restarting the mission to get other artifacts in the market.

This mission is not only about battles but also about resource management.
To increase gold income, before the siege begins you have time to visit the university in the harbor with all Wielders and take taxes.
I also hope you have a reward for helping the Faey in mission 2.

p.s. I tested this in both a fully melee and a hybrid build without using magic resist.
And If everything is still very bad, then wait a little before I make a separate release with reduced difficulty, I hope this will smooth out the painful impressions.
Thank you!

[Stepfan]

Most of the stuff in the list I did. The taxes part no since I only tried once I did not know when attacks happen and so on. My bandits died these troops were from the garrison quest. I do not have troops left alive(this is not the first battle).More like fifth or so. I am losing troops cause only one wielder is good the other 2, one is focused on archery(useless with such odds) and another focused on magic so I win but running low on troops. Restarting to get a decent artifact seems best plan. I might sacrifice a town or 2 should be a good challenge. Will try this map when I have some time in 5 days or so. The idea with 100 legionaries/stack that is well what made me think it was a bug at first. But it seems it was intended for difficulty sake.

[Doomich]

Okay folks, if anyone is interested, I released "Fair" difficulty:
https://mod.io/g/soc/m/the-destiny-of-the-iron-heart-fair

p.s. it would be nice to mark this as an answer.

[haybergm]

Originally posted by Doomich:

Oh, hello. I am the author of this campaign.
Thank you for such a detailed and thorough review.
Glad you liked the visual design and story, it took most of the time invested.

Regarding the difficulty, yeah, it should be noted that for custom campaigns we can’t yet choose the difficulty level, and also that I wanted to make the campaign challenging and interesting in battles for those who have already completed official campaigns and matches against AI on high difficulties.

Also on each map there are some tricks to gain an advantage.
For example in mission 2 there are a lot of watchtowers with which you could track the AI's movements, so before the final battle it makes sense to trick them into chasing you around instead of fighting.
In mission 3 you can get a mountainous battlefield if you are close to the high tiles.
In mission 4, all wielders can manage to get a LevelUp tree and visit the university in the harbor to get the tax skill for more income.

Although I tried to make it playable for more players, the idea and my experience could make it even worse because I might not have paid attention to small nuances that seemed obvious to me.

But to be fair, it’s worth noting that due to recent updates, the AI has become smarter and learned new tricks in magic, which also made the campaign even more difficult.
I did some balance tweaks for missions 2 and 3 a couple of weeks ago. Mission 4 is still in question since tweaks were made earlier.
I'm currently replaying the campaign again and will play through mission 4 later to check everything out again.
Also I probably should have included a note about difficulty. I'll add that to the description.

And it’s great that despite experiencing all these difficulties and unfairness, you still overcame them all and completed the campaign! This seems like an achievement.
Probably the final battle turned out to be even more epic for you (hope all the reinforcements from previous missions were useful).
Maybe someday there will be another contest and I can make a Vanir sequel.

Thank you for playing and sharing your impressions, it helps to get a different perspective. You can also visit the official SoC discord server for questions and feedback, or just for discussions.
Cheers.

Hi there, in missión 3 I can´t find the mountainous battlefield that you talk about, Imho the battles are too hard for me^^, could anyone tell where exactly should i wait for the 4 battles in a row to get any kind of field advantage, thank you.

[Doomich]

@haybergm
Hey, just stand next to a tile that is higher than yours, usually an edge or a tall 1-tile piece of the highest height that you sometimes encounter along the way.