Knights and Merchants.net Forum

Hi,

just played 1 mission on An Empire Destroyed

I beat all my enemies (even when missing script message said "you can not hold this castle, run " or somthing like that, i have Czech translation)

soo.......now what?


(r6720 of course)

you won? you are not supposed to win.. you can continue by losing the 2nd/3rd wave. i''ll notfiy my scripters to make the last wave impossible to beat. thanks for the report! congratulations on winning though, i barely won so i thought adding some extyra troops would do the trick.

Haha! Can't win because he won.

Yes you're supposed to lose :s it'll be improved in the next version

Disco next time before you make some "unbeatable" missions public, better first write to cmowla to test it

I recall playing World Racing 2 and it had such a mission where you had to "loose to win". It cause A LOT of confusion among players.

We are so used to common consequences, that they rarely wait till Store/Castle/School are demolished before trying to restart the mission.

Was my problem here also, when Disco sent me his campaign for pretesting I was reloading a Save, before I even got the winning/loosing screen, because I was like "Man, I´m so bad. I have to stop these soldiers"

i actually did but cmowla had no time.

As far as I remember, I have beaten all soldiers also once, but this was like the first versoin and you added way more soldiers later on.

However what about a nice script with infite soldiers coming?

Like if 0 soldiers from Player x,y,z alive (All enemies are dead) sent the wave again Should fix the problem, so it´s really unbeatable Haha

I think you may had made a poor mission design decision. I can totally see people trying to win because they expect to be able to. What about making a cutscene at some point, when massive hordes of enemy troops attack but you cannot do anything and the player is given the task of protecting the long and reading him out of the city?

A simplier solution would be to simply explicitly tell the player that this mission is not supposed to be won (which you did, but maybe it wasn't clear enough?) while making it actually unwinnable (with endless enemy waves and no food nor reinforcements for the player, as already suggested).

As for the mission design, Blizzard did the same with the Protoss' last stand in Starcraft 2, where the mission objective was something along the lines of "Survive until the enemy wipes you out completely" (or "fight to the last", or something like that).
And it was, in my opinion, one of the best missions in the campaign, so I disagree with those saying that the idea of a mission won by losing it is bad, sorry.

Explicitly telling a player that he is supposed to lose? From a story standpoint, that is a very bad option. It is simple, but simple is often not best.

If you want to keep the "lose to win" then infinite soldiers is of course the best. However, sado's idea is also very sound.

It's your campaign, you do what you want

Well, Blizzard did the same in Starcraft 2, and it turned out well enough...

So the player gets a message saying "(Your barracks must be destroyed to win.)"? Sounds like a spoiler to me.

You don't get it. Infinite soldiers might make some people simply ragequit...