Funny things you did as a beginner

[roushi-kun]

i used to charge horsemen at night against skeletons, and wonder why does the melee attack of skel archers are equal to the attack of horsemen

[Bob_The_Mighty]

Before I discovered WML I made several 'rpg' scenarios using only the map editor and the power of chat. I used to host these games and narrate the story by typing furiously to the other players in olde-english syntax, placing labels to represent dialogue and hoping to god that the ai did something vaguely threatening.

It was rather tedious after the fifth or sixth game. Upon discovering the [message] tag I felt rather like an idiot. In comparison, coding WML is actually very time-effective.

[TheJM]

So, uh, all three have never really learned how to play the game effectively so that you do not have to debug or reload all the time? It might make it more fun then doing the same battle for an hour just to get the result you want. 1000 hit points, changing unit sides, making your own army. Wow.

No no, of course now we don't do any save reloading any more. (Ok, once in three battles, maybe I do it. Last time I did that when my loyal Ulf standing on a castle lost against a goblin with 1 hp, of course 99.9% to win.) I meant we did that a bit later than the things I mentioned before. It's only my sister who is at that stage right now.

Another funny thing: I really had a hard time trying to win the valley of death. First I recalled all my veterans, after having lost it, I tried to recruit as many elfish fighters as possible and then I thought I was very smart: I looked wich of the units I could recruit had the most hp per gold and I found out it was the mermen. Then I walked into the hills, because that's where all units have a better defense and was really sad that most were already killed on their way to the hills and that I didn't win it that time either. Then I thought, that this battle was impossible, because I had already chosen the mathematically best possible strategy and it didn't work.

Another thing I only learned recently was that I always expended all my money in campaigns. Of course, they were exceptions, if it was really clear that I didn't need a lot, if I had really a lot of money or if it was really necessary to enter the next battle with a lot of money, but it was the usual procedure to expend all my money.

The funny thing is, recruiting a bunch of mermen on that one actually is a strategy I've used, and won with. I was smart enough to leave them in the moat around the castle, though.

I'm not really sure what all newbieish mistakes I made (or make, I haven't been playing for a really long time..), but at least one comes to mind.

Horsemen. In caves. Tons of save reloading because of horrible strategy (I still save reload every once in a while. ). Um.. Not getting any mages on my first play through HttT because they take too much exp and are too weak (I'm not a huge fan of mages actually, they don't fit my playing style as well [ok, I love white mages. xD]). Completely ignoring the day/night cycle.

[Orac]

Well, for a first post I decided to drop in here...

As a new player (I've been playing since Wesnoth had that weird orange logo ) I ignored the XP system completely. Each game I simply recruited more units and charged them at the enemy. It worked through the whole of HttT, something I don't quite understand.
I also ignored the percentages on everything. I ignored the differences in terrain. Heck, if it existed it was a fair bet that I would ignore it.
Only when I played through A New Threat (I really liked that campaign) did I begin to understand anything about Wesnoth. Whatever happened to those beautiful Dark Elves?

[Turuk]

Exactly what difficulty were you playing on that you got away with ignoring everything?

As to the campaign you mentioned, it is long abandoned. A New Threat

[Orac]

Exactly what difficulty were you playing on that you got away with ignoring everything?

As to the campaign you mentioned, it is long abandoned. A New Threat

I played on Easy.
Sad to hear about A New Threat - It had very nice sprites.
Now I'm at a more advanced level of play. I understand most things, including not to get into an argument about the luck system

[Civhai]

@LemonTea: No, actually, it wasn't that either. The Ulf had his full resilient hp. It was really 99.99% or something like that.

I can't add such a lot about myself any more, but today, as we accused her of using so much that it is really boring, my sister stated that she only uses debug commands if it is really necessary because saveloading would take too long. You can imagine how my brother and I laughed.

But actually, since I've never played a single battle against her although she lives in the same house and since my brother and I are working hard on our era and have to playtest it a lot, I challenged her for a battle, which she declined, because she doesn't know wesnoth, only wesnoth -d.

I remember that I had a lot of trouble with siege of Elensefar and even now after having played HttT more than five times, I never manage to save one of those thieves. Ok, except for the rogue, I didn't try too hard the last time and of course, I did manage to save the rogue most times. Ok, in my saveloading time, I managed to save all of them, but you can't compare that.

[docrock]

so, here they are:

- playing HttT and loosing in the first scenario coz i wanted to kill the orcs and relied on my allies to help me in that
- thinking that allies would grab the overall tactical layout and support me (yes, this is a deficit of mine)
- attempting to do ranged attacks over more than one hex

and then ... one day ... i did my first mp vs my kids. my son is just stuck to dwarves somehow and i like to play undead. my daughter loves the tree-shaggers because "the shamans, druids, shydes, enchantresses and so on do look sooooooo cool, like they were manga". so, we got a 3p battle with undead, dwarves and elves. i got a good start coz of all the bats i fielded (take villages early i thought, get the gold, recruit and own them). so basically, we had an army of bats and skeleton archers vs an army of dwarvish fighters and thunderers and an army of ... shamans. i was shocked when my daughter owned us both after like 30 turns (playing unlimited turns on a big random map) coz i had played through all the mainline campaigns on default difficulty when she did that and she played BfW for like the second time. it was after that event that i did really start to think about ToD and terrain, traits and special attacks like "magical" and "slow".
after that, they always told me "undead 4tl". the only thing that excused me for some reason was that i am regular poster here and the kids told me "well, it's rather cool to read your contributions as you really managed to play through all of these campaigns several times, we'd never have the patience for that, we just go pvp right now". i felt a bit old that day and the only thing i could say was "at least you're learning english that way".
besides that: pvp 4tw

[DEATH_is_undead]

First time playing HttT, I thought the sign was a palm tree

[panzervb]

"Aww man look at these cute people I'll recruit 5 heavy infantry and pummel those loosely-jointed skeletons into submission!"
5 turns later:
"Whada these undead are OP they killed my 3 heavy infantrys sofast!"
End game:
"Well, this sucks."

After my first game (was playing at local game)

[TheMasterOfBattle]

Hehe, I didn't factor time of day that much in and only played as drakes (well, that is still kind of true but not the point ) I seem to recall always doing the attack for the most damage regardless of retal, for example. I used to ranged DA's at night with burners and augurs.

[Limabean]

I spent all my time saveloading when I could have just used debug!

[DEATH_is_undead]

I used to never let my leader near an enemy unit... Or even Delfandor in HttT. I only used them when I had no other units.

[TheJM]

Heh, I was guilty of that too. Leader = stay out of battle and recruit!

[woodmouse]

I didn't realise that gold was used to recruit units.
I didn't realise that villages gave income.
I didn't realise that only leaders can recruit.
(and hundreds of more things)