Constructive observations re subtle, peceived design flaws

[oaq]

I have enjoyed Wesnoth for years. I still do. If I believed that the game, or at any rate its principal Heir to the Throne campaign, suffered what I thought were a few significant, fundamental design problems, would you take offense?

1. The player loses too much when an optional loyal character like Haldiel happens to be slain. Or, if you prefer, looking at the same problem the other way, the player gains too much when an optional loyal character like Haldiel happens not to be slain. Play is brittle in this sense.
2. Surprise story elements are fun but antistrategic. If one has played a scenario before, and has met the surprise, then one will play the whole scenario as though one had advance knowledge of the surprise, which is not very immersive. I have no idea how one fixes this, because I like the surprises very much; but I also like the strategy. The surprises and the strategy do not happily mix.
3. Some scenarios, like Isle of the Damned at hard difficulty, depend as far as I know
   Spoiler:

   on a desperate strike of the player by a small, isolated, mobile force at the end of the scenario.
   Such action is substantially luck-based, which is all right as far as it goes; but at the end of a long scenario, with all its strategy, tactics and skill, with the player's time all spent, it is irritating to see everything be determined by a die roll. Of course, a close-fought scenario might quite naturally be determined by a die roll at the end, but that is not what I meant.
4. The player who loses a scenario has a choice: he can restart the scenario; or he can regard the war as lost and restart the campaign. I express no opinion here as to which is the better style. However, is it possible for a developer to balance a campaign toward both styles? I doubt it. If not, then shouldn't the documentation state for which style campaign play is balanced? Did the developers have in mind that the honorable player would probably start over the scenario, or the campaign? It does not say.

The above is not adverse criticism. If it is uninteresting criticism to you, then you can ignore it. Obviously, I like your game very much, or I should not still be playing it after all these years. Notwithstanding, my experience with the game has gradually revealed what seem to be some design flaws, flaws which would not have been obvious to the designer at first. If these are flaws, can any of them now be mitigated?

It may be that this game is now too old, too stable, with too many familiar players and not enough active development man-hours, to do anything regarding the above. Or maybe the above are impossible in principle to fix. Or maybe they are not flaws at all. Still, if my observations in the matter, formed over a period of years, interest someone who is inclined to do something about them, I thought that they were worth a post; so there you have them.

Thanks for reading.

[taptap]

Loyals: Yes, very important, maybe even harmful to balance. Heir to the Throne has however so many, that losing a few here and there probably does not matter that much. I expect most people restart the scenario when they lose important loyals, and in a way that is bad. (I do.)

Surprise: It is known. There are even guides for new campaigns where tomato surprises are explicitly discouraged, yet in mainline they still exist.

Isle of the Damned: No. 1) You do not need to kill both opponents to win the scenario. 2) It is quite possible. (I take the southern leader with several merfolk and play the center slowly with foot units.)

Conduct: The assumption in almost all campaigns is you start again from the scenario start if you lose a scenario. Save-loads within the scenario are discouraged. Starting the whole campaign again sounds decidedly unfun if you lose once in a while... If you want to play with such a conduct I would choose campaigns wisely (not too long, not too hard, possibly one I know already).

[zookeeper]

That's all valid critique, no problem with that.

The player loses too much when an optional loyal character like Haldiel happens to be slain. Or, if you prefer, looking at the same problem the other way, the player gains too much when an optional loyal character like Haldiel happens not to be slain. Play is brittle in this sense.

Sure. Although I'd argue the bigger problem in losing loyal units isn't necessarily in losing valuable units, but the potential for missing content. Unless you already know the campaign, you usually can't know whether that unit will later on have some kind of speaking role or other purpose, so you naturally don't want to risk missing out on that. Whenever possible, mutually exclusive branching should be the preferred means of missing out on content. That's kind of hard to apply to loyal units though, especially when they often don't have any story purpose.

Surprise story elements are fun but antistrategic. If one has played a scenario before, and has met the surprise, then one will play the whole scenario as though one had advance knowledge of the surprise, which is not very immersive. I have no idea how one fixes this, because I like the surprises very much; but I also like the strategy. The surprises and the strategy do not happily mix.

Certainly. However, there's two kinds of surprises: ones which happen without warning and give you no time to react, and ones which do. Only the former kind are the problematic ones, and I'm of the opinion that almost all of them could be changed to the latter kind. For example, surprise enemy reinforcements can be dynamically spawned far enough from the player to give them a chance to react (instead of spawning in a fixed location, which might result in an instant loss), a surprise monster hiding in a cave/temple/whatever can be clearly hinted at in dialogue (instead of no warning). Of course, foreknowledge about a scenario can always be abused to some extent, but even that can be somewhat mitigated by randomizing times and locations.

So, I'd say that in most cases there's nothing insurmountable about fixing those kind of problems, but it can be surprisingly complicated to do in the context of an existing scenario, because one change easily leads to a need to change something else too, which necessitates a yet another change elsewhere, and so on. That we still have so many unpleasant surprises in the mainline campaigns is pretty much just a matter of there not being enough people with the skills, time and interest to fix them in a way that doesn't introduce other kinds of problems.

The player who loses a scenario has a choice: he can restart the scenario; or he can regard the war as lost and restart the campaign. I express no opinion here as to which is the better style. However, is it possible for a developer to balance a campaign toward both styles? I doubt it. If not, then shouldn't the documentation state for which style campaign play is balanced? Did the developers have in mind that the honorable player would probably start over the scenario, or the campaign? It does not say.

The game is definitely not designed or balanced with "if you lose, restart the whole campaign" in mind, and almost no one plays that way.

I'm pretty sure people are naturally inclined to just load an autosave and replay a turn or two. Always restarting the whole scenario is something that I believe only experienced players tend to do, and they ought to be able to decide for themselves how they prefer to play. Only actual saveloading (to get better combat results, or whatever) is discouraged, because it's a habit that tends to suck the fun right out. Maybe that should be mentioned more prominently somewhere.

[kjn]

Good questions, oaq (I really enjoyed and benefitted from your earlier posts about strategy and operational planning, too).

(1) Yes, I agree that loyals are a problem. To me, there are problems with both storytelling, balance, and player investment with the loyals in campaigns. Perhaps the best solution would be the most radical: to remove them altogether.

(2) I agree with zookeeper here. I'd also think about planning for surprises versus knowing about surprises. To take Isle of the Damned as an example, right now the hiding spots are fixed at each difficulty level, but they ought to be randomised for each game.

(3) In a way, the luck-based thing goes for all assassination strategies. You can do things to stack the dice, but any strategy where you depend on a few units to kill a single unit on a specific turn will in some way come down to the roll of the die. The Isle of the Damned just happens to be a very blatant example of such if one wants to reach all the benefits of choosing that path, but the same ie true of eg your plan to gain Simyr in Blackwater Port. Perhaps the problem here is less in the assassination strategy, as in the huge benefit of beating a specific scenario in a specific way?

(4) To me, this ties partly into the Loyal trait, that the strategic element (in the form of recall list building) is poorly tied to the tactical and operational game that Wesnoth is at core. The core game is tactical and operational, and it's very hard to build a campaign strategy without prior knowledge of the campaign.

[nuorc]

A lot of what you all have written for me boils down to good storytelling and active maintenance.

the game, or at any rate its principal Heir to the Throne campaign

It's interesting that you put it this way. There are ongoing discussions about the mainline campaigns, their quality or if they should be included in the game at all. But I also think that some of your criticism is mainly valid for this campaign, not the game in general.

The player loses too much when an optional loyal character like Haldiel happens to be slain.

Storytelling/balance. If a loyal unit is crucial for the story make it a hero, if it isn't succeeding in the campaign shouldn't depend on that unit.

at hard difficulty

In my view, playing at hard means you're looking for a challenge; so I got little sympathy if you find yourself in a pickle.

The player who loses a scenario has a choice: he can restart the scenario; or he can regard the war as lost and restart the campaign.

There's all kinds of possibilities and I think the validity of each should mainly be judged by the individual player. For me it's also a matter of motivation in the situation if I 'just re-roll a throw of the die', go back a few turns, restart the scenario or whatever. I believe it's also pretty common to go back a few scenarios if you're stuck in a campaign, usually because you find out that you don't have enough x or y (gold, leveled units, cav, magical attacks...). Again, good storytelling and balance would hardly get players in those situations, imho.

Notwithstanding, my experience with the game has gradually revealed what seem to be some design flaws, flaws which would not have been obvious to the designer at first. If these are flaws, can any of them now be mitigated?

It may be that this game is now too old, too stable, with too many familiar players and not enough active development man-hours, to do anything regarding the above.

I guess some of them are flaws which could be mitigated, but players have to give constructive feedback and the active maintainers have to incorporate it.

Spoiler:

After ~three years of lurking I signed on to this forum because I was enraged by a mainline scenario; judging by some later posts over the following years the main reason for my rant seemed to have been addressed. 'Progress' seemed slow and nontransparent to me, but it was changed.

On the other hand, I had quite some contact with Dugi, mostly regarding LotI; he for example changed spawns or moved an enemy castle one hex south because I 'complained'. And he frequently incorporates players' feedback, making things harder or easier (sometimes depending on the difficulty level)... But key for that, again: he gets detailed feedback (and suggestions) and he actively maintains the campaign.

@kjn:

Spoiler:

To me, there are problems with both storytelling, balance, and player investment with the loyals in campaigns. Perhaps the best solution would be the most radical: to remove them altogether.

While I agree with the first part, you're radical solution seems to radical for me. There's different ways of implementing loyal units and I don't see any reason why 'loyal' as a random trait should be removed. (Why not 'fast' or 'intelligent'?)

To take Isle of the Damned as an example, right now the hiding spots are fixed at each difficulty level, but they ought to be randomised for each game.

Did you post that in the feedback thread, too?

To me, this ties partly into the Loyal trait, that the strategic element (in the form of recall list building) is poorly tied to the tactical and operational game that Wesnoth is at core. The core game is tactical and operational, and it's very hard to build a campaign strategy without prior knowledge of the campaign.

I believe I played various campaigns where it felt like there was an 'organic flow', so I don't really agree. ('Get a few of everything & then go with what works best' usually works for me. )

[zookeeper]

To take Isle of the Damned as an example, right now the hiding spots are fixed at each difficulty level, but they ought to be randomised for each game.

Actually, they are randomized. On each difficulty level, there's two possible setups for the temples.

[oaq]

Good questions, oaq (I really enjoyed and benefitted from your earlier posts about strategy and operational planning, too).

I am astonished that any active player actually remembers my earlier posts, years ago, about strategy and operational planning. You made my day.

Your observations are subtle. A newcomer to the game would probably not grasp your observations' import, but in light of play experience, I think that I understand them.

Since my own open-source development time is fully invested in other projects, I am merely a player at Wesnoth, not a developer. Therefore, naturally, whether I think your observations subtle or whether I think that I understand them has little value. Still, you explained it better than I did.

So, as long as you and I are chatting: It had not occurred to me to eliminate loyals altogether. That would indeed be a radical change. I have no idea how that would play out; but, then, I have no solution to the perceived flaws, either. Radical changes are unlikely and undesirable for obvious reasons. Nevertheless, yours remains a thought-provoking idea.

Your final observation, number 4, is even more interesting. It seems extremely subtle, yet significant for that very reason. I don't know if I can add an intelligent comment to it, though. Your number 4 is an observation which had never before occurred to me.

[Aldarisvet]

Actually the most astounding tomato surprise in the mainline is the appearing of mass ghouls-ghasts in one scenario of the Northern Rebirth. There so damned much of them appearing from the infected river. I cannot imagine that someome would not reload at least some turns back after that if he is not prepeared. That was at the beginning of me playing Wesnoth and I used reloads very often so I found nothing bad in that tomato surprise. Just was a bit disappointed I need more time. In RPG games like Baldurs Gate you often have to reload a lot because you have no idea what opponents you would meet, so first you see what spells opponents have, then you prepear conter-spells. Not fair but all play that style in such games. Still that ghast surprise was shock and beyond all limits, I started over a scenario after that as I remember.

Hmm. And what really made me angry is an appearing of Dark Assassin in the UtBS. I felt that was totally stupid and unfair.

[Inky]

oaq: I can still remember reading your "strategy illustration to HttT" years ago - I found it very entertaining and informative!

Surprises: I agree; I think TRoW and UtBS especially suffer from arbitrary triggered events without warning. Players have already written about these in the feedback forums, but there seems to be a general reluctance to make major changes to mainline campaigns.

Loyals: I think the overimportance of loyals is generally not due to the loyal trait itself but how certain campaigns handle them. For example: auto recalling them every scenario (very common), making them available when your other units aren't (Legend of Wesmere), or even giving them their own side (Northern Rebirth).
I think loyal units work best as a bonus unit (like Simyr from HttT) which is fun to have but doesn't really affect gameplay. The really useful ones mind as well be heroes (that way they could get more characterization / dialogue).

[kjn]

Yeah, I quite realise that removing Loyal units from the campaigns would require quite a bit of rebalancing of them - that's part of why it's such a radical change. (Note: I'm only talking about campaigns here, not other game types.) I am not actually proposing it more as saying that it should be considered. Some campaigns seems to do well with no or very few loyal units (like "An Orcish Incursion").

Thinking some more about it, the trouble with Loyal is that it helps you field more units. All other traits make you field a marginally better unit within your budget; Loyal allows you to break the budget.

@oaq: I'm actually somewhat new to Wesnoth - I played it a bit several years ago, but returned to it this spring. I don't consider myself a very good player, just quite good at analytical thinking. But I found your old articles - as well as inky's recent ones - to be among the best in the forum on scenario planning and in how strategy, operations, and tactics tie together in Wesnoth.

[Velensk]

I mostly remember the last time you were talking about 'replaying campaigns from the start if you lose'. Still seems like a silly way to take things to me. If you want an 'arcade' style wesnoth campaign, then what you're probably looking for is something like World Conquest 1p (which is short and random enough that it's fine to restart every time you lose).

The more interesting topic is if you can figure out good ways fix these flaws without introducing more egregious ones. The static nature of the campaigns giving those who have foreknowledge of the campaigns can be seen as a problem if you find it immersion breaking to lose a scenario and then try again using the knowledge you've achieved. Randomizing campaigns somewhat takes a bit of work and generates a few other problems but it might help fix some of these issues. However, most people don't find it too much of an issue to just retry the challenge especially as a campaign can make it so that even if you know what's coming it can still be sufficiently challenging. Although I am like that as well I actually like the idea of randomizing campaigns for different reasons but even if this kind of thing made both of us happy (and I'm not sure what you think) it would still be a flaw to other people.

I think loyal units are fine. What isn't fine is when a campaign wants to have a huge cast of characters and make them all loyal. You can build your tactics around protecting a few key units without taking many risks, it's once you start trying to keep all your units alive that wesnoth becomes frustrating. Loyal units let you get around the inherent problems of a actually using all those lvl 3s that you develop. I think it's also generally a bad idea to have optional loyal units hidden in places they won't be found.

I'm can't say the strategic planning thing feels like too big a deal to me but I don't remember the specifics of what you said. I'll give my take on it and perhaps you could explain it to me better. From my view, in very few campaigns will you find yourself in a situation where if you focus on coming out of each scenario with as much raw power as you can muster (versatility in recruiting options, and gold [note: number of high level units should almost never be as much an issue as the variety of options your leveled units give you except maybe early in a campaign] rarely will you ever be lacking what you need for a mission. If the campaign requires you to heavily focus on a niche or limited option.

[kjn]

I think randomisation can be done in several campaigns to help keep them somewhat unpredictable (which is probably the best word to describe what we are looking for).

On the highest level we have something like The Sceptre of Fire in HttT; I imagine unpredictability at that level will be very rare. But scenarios can be made more unpredictable in other ways:

1. Randomise the recruitment pattern in various ways. Eg, in TVoD in HttT all the liches always recruit in the same pattern (eg mainly walking corpses to the east). What if the three recruitment patterns moved around? (Okay, making TVoD harder might not be the best idea, but you get the idea.)
2. Randomise the villages where specials appear (like Uncle Somf in TDD).
3. Randomise the turns when some event (positive or negative) occurs; going up or down one turn should probably suffice.

[taptap]

I think randomisation can be done in several campaigns to help keep them somewhat unpredictable (which is probably the best word to describe what we are looking for).

On the highest level we have something like The Sceptre of Fire in HttT; I imagine unpredictability at that level will be very rare. But scenarios can be made more unpredictable in other ways:

1. Randomise the recruitment pattern in various ways. Eg, in TVoD in HttT all the liches always recruit in the same pattern (eg mainly walking corpses to the east). What if the three recruitment patterns moved around? (Okay, making TVoD harder might not be the best idea, but you get the idea.)
2. Randomise the villages where specials appear (like Uncle Somf in TDD).
3. Randomise the turns when some event (positive or negative) occurs; going up or down one turn should probably suffice.

Instead of "randomising" mainline campaigns consider playing the plentiful user made campaigns available as add-ons, many of them are really good, some easily better than much of mainline.

[kjn]

Instead of "randomising" mainline campaigns consider playing the plentiful user made campaigns available as add-ons, many of them are really good, some easily better than much of mainline.

I'm sorry to say this, but this advice is part of a mindset common in the Linux world, that I consider very unhelpful and at times damaging. That is, once something subpar or similar is identified, the answer is always "use this little piece instead".

I can see several possible reasons for why increasing replayability and quality of the mainline campaigns to be very desirable:

• They have a much higher visibility than the addon campaigns, both in-game and out-of-game; ie newcovers to Wesnoth are far more likely to start with the mainline campaigns and judge the game based on them
• They set the standard in quality and content for the addon campaigns
• It can be quite hard to find the good addon campaigns; there are many of them, many are unfinished, and the quality is quite varying

Now, there can be several good reasons to not change the mainline campaigns in some way, but the presence of the addon campaigns is not one of them.

[Pentarctagon]

Not to mention that there isn't currently any particularly good way to know how good an add-on campaign is without actually playing through it.