Legend of Wesmere: AI's side controlled by player & other

[Freem]

Hello.

I am not sure if this is a bug or intended, but on LoW from wesnoth 1.12.16 (from Debian's backports) the player have control over a lot of sides, that I think should be controlled by AI.
It happens in scenarios n° 3, 7, and 12 at least (for now, I didn't played other ones, and tbh, I think I won't: it's very annoying). Those scenarios are the ones where Ka'lian's defenders plays, and at first I thought it might be normal (since it was always Ka'lian's defenders), but considering the fact that in the 12th you also control the human side, I think it's a bug.
And, honestly, if it is not, it should be changed, because controlling Ka'lian's defenders and loyalists as different sides from Kalenz's ones makes the game a lot easier (hello multiple heals per turn thanks to town + druid + white mage, or hello concerted rush on a single side to clean it quickly and then kill other bosses), and annoying (many more units to recruit and control, I'm not really fond of controlling several huge armies, really).
I have no idea about if this impact or not the dwarves in scenario 7, since I killed enough units before the dwarf can go help me. Obviously, with my OP Ka'lian's army from scenario 3, killing the orcs was sooo easy...

Also, in 12th scenario ("alliance" probably), Kalenz says 2 times the "we are too divided, but anyway I'll take every guy I can" dialog: once at 1st turn, that dialog is triggered by Galtrid, and the second one at turn 9, when the units Kalenz made stay at Ka'lian comes back. This is what made me come here to report, since it makes it obvious to me that this whole "play all sides" is a bug: the dialog is probably triggered by the fact the player gains control over something, I guess.

In scenario 3 ("Ka'lian under attack", I guess), one of the orc's leaders never really move it's army (the one on east river) . This made things easier (only need to manage 1 enemy at first), harder (since you need to force the orc to move, on a hard terrain for elves) and more annoying (it would have been nice, if the orc player was at least using the terrain for real). I think this might be triggered by some directives to the AI, because I remember giving orders to an AI side in another scenario (13th of Northern Rebirth, confrontation I guess) I made a dwarf side idle by asking it to be defensive and not giving it target (in fact, it was even worth since the dwarf skipped a recruitment turn... could have been dangerous considering the wave he was facing). This is just a guess, though.

There is also something that I find simply annoying:
Divided recruitments: while the idea could be interesting, I find it more annoying than useful, because you can still move bosses around to recruit more troops of a kind anyway, and it makes the recalling tedious since you need to actively move the mouse cursor on a free hexe to know the full list of recalls. So, if you want to keep that idea, good, but I would suggest to merge the castles, and put several dungeons in it. And if you fear that this will make things too easy to recruit/recall a lot of troops of the same kind, well, just reduce the number of hexes.

Also, there might be a bug for dwarves runesmith: dwarf warrior have 38hp, runesmith 40 (only 2 more? really?), runemaster 48. Seriously?

There are other minor things in the annoying category, but they were a consequence of me controlling multiple sides: at scenario 7, losing my 3 best units meant losing all my guys with leadership (I only had 2 lvl 3 of those, since things were so fast to win because of controlling Ka'lian's army) which led me to have no way to help having usable dwarves. Scenario 8 ("bounty hunters"?) was then very, very hard with all those saurians fast and lvl 3 against a lvl 1 army (ok, I had few lvl 2, and my hero elves were level 3, but still...) forcing me to just recruit nothing and run. Again, if I was not controlling the probable AI's sides, this would not have happened because the previous scenarios would have been much longer, and I would not have leveled Ka'lian's army but mine.

I'm posting this here, since it is not possible to create topics in what I guess would have been the good place, and the topics there are about wesnoth 1.10 if I understand correctly.

[Inky]

I think controlling the extra sides was an intentional change in Wesnoth 1.12, but I agree that it becomes much too tedious especially in Human alliance where you control the elves, dwarves, more elves AND humans.

While we're at it, here are some more annoyances with LoW:

• In several scenarios (Elves' Last Stand, Cliffs of Thoria), the alternate objectives are still confusing and many people have posted saying they thought they had to do both.
• In several scenarios the dialogue does not fit. E.g. The dwarves showing up at the end of Elves' Last Stand talking about the battle ahead; Kalenz telling the Council how they fought side by side with the dwarves in Council of Hard Choices; the orc in human alliance talking about the reinforcements which have been removed, etc.
• The last few scenarios of this campaign have always been extremely easy, even with Human Alliance the way it was before where you would lose almost every single veteran on that scenario. Now with the new Human Alliance, the scenarios following it have become easier still, and not at all the kind of difficulty you would expect from the Hard difficulty level.
• The way the shared enemy sides recruit (e.g. in Elves' Last Stand, Human Alliance), where each leader takes turns recruiting one unit and the screen scrolls to each in turn, makes the enemy turns literally unwatchable unless Skip AI moves is checked in preferences / skip animations is used for replays.

Legend of Wesmere used to be one of my favorite campaigns, despite having some balance issues and a couple overly large battles. Unfortunately I feel that the 1.12 version only made the balance issues worse and the large battles even more tedious. I feel too many changes were made without testing in 1.12 and then the campaign sort of got abandoned, so the newly introduced issues never got fixed despite being pointed out by several players.