Recommended playing order for mainline campaigns?

[revolting_peasant]

Is the order in which the mainline campaigns appear also the order in which it is recommended to play them?

If not, what would such an order be? (And what's the rationale for it?) And - why are the campaigns ordered the way they are

[Tad_Carlucci]

In the 1.13 development tree, we've re-ordered the mainline campaigns so that players should be introduced to more concepts before being thrown into HttT. At the Novice level, new order is:

A Tail of Two Brothers
An Orcish Incursion
The South Guard
Heir to the Throne

At the Intermediate level:

Liberty
Legend of Wesmere
Eastern Invasion
The Hammer of Thursagan
Descent into Darkness
Delfador's Memoirs
Dead Water
Secrets of the Ancients

And, finally, at the Expert level:

The Sceptre of Fire
Son of the Black-Eye
The Rise of Wesnoth
Northern Rebirth
Under the Burning Suns

Whether these are "best" is debatable, but I think the re-ordering of the Novice level was a good idea.

[revolting_peasant]

In the 1.13 development tree, we've re-ordered the mainline campaigns so that players should be introduced to more concepts before being thrown into HttT

I still see HttT being first in 1.13.8...

Anyway, you're saying that the major ordering criterion is difficulty. What's the next major criterion, or measure, for ordering? E.g. why is Liberty before the Legend of Wesmere?

Also, perhaps a horizontal bar could separate the groups by expected experience.

[Iris]

He means version 1.13.10, which hasn’t been formally announced yet, and the master branch in the development repository, which is where development releases come from. And just to clarify, the order for the non-Novice campaigns (other than the addition of SoTA) is exactly the same as 1.12.x.