Easy difficulty level?

[shirtsnb]

What, exactly, does difficulty level influence? I've been searching, and there is nothing out there that says "easy means +1 to hit on all die rolls and +1 unit experience" or whatever. The best I found was scenario design instructions that said starting gold and income depend on difficulty level. What else does this affect?

[Gambit]

It affects whatever the scenario designer chooses to make it affect. When you pick a difficulty the scenario designer can set things like "if it's this difficulty do X, otherwise do Y".

In mainline this is pretty much only enemy recruit lists and starting gold. While I'm not sure about any user-made content out there, there is no mainline campaign that chooses to skew the random numbers based on difficulty.

What's interesting is that the engine itself doesn't even understand difficulty. You can have as many as you want, and you can name them Vanilla, Strawberry, Chocolate, and Rhubarb. To the engine this is all the same as Very Easy, Easy, Medium, and Hard. The decisions are all up to the scenario designer how they take advantage of that.

[shirtsnb]

How do you tell what changes at each difficulty level?

[Ceres]

The difficulties of a campaign are defined in its _main.cfg. And then you put

Code: Select all

#ifdef EASY  ##the difficulty names depend on how you call them
recruit=Bowman,Spearman
#endif
#ifdef NORMAL
recruit=Bowman,Spearman,Horseman,Fencer
#endif
#ifdef HARD
recruit=Bowman,Spearman,Horseman,Fencer,Duelist,Knight,Longbowman,Swordsman
#endif 

in the scenario files, or whatever you want to change. There's also a macro for it.

[Anonymissimus]

How do you tell what changes at each difficulty level?

No easy way to do this without knowledge of wml and campaign structures. Basically look for #ifdef <chosen difficulty> clauses in the campaign's cfg files like Ceres says. For income and starting gold it's the {GOLD...} and {INCOME...} macros, usually. Other things affected by difficulty are often the numbers and types of wml-generated units such as enemy leaders, the turn limit and available villages.

[Gambit]

If you're asking about doing this while playing, you cannot really find this out from inside the game. But you can't really expect to anymore than you can expect other games to tell you their under-the-hood variable-by-difficulty numbers while playing.

[shirtsnb]

Well, it just seems to me that difficulty level affects very little in the game. I was getting my butt kicked on a campaign (the drake one if you want to know) on normal level, so I changed to easy. I'm still getting my butt kicked. I couldn't tell that anything had changed except my gold. This would also seem to make it much less significant to beat "hard" difficulty level. The game still plays out by the exact same rules, only the starting conditions are altered. This is different from, say, a game of Civilization where difficulty level affects many more variables.

[Anonymissimus]

Well, it just seems to me that difficulty level affects very little in the game. I was getting my butt kicked on a campaign (the drake one if you want to know) on normal level, so I changed to easy. I'm still getting my butt kicked. I couldn't tell that anything had changed except my gold. This would also seem to make it much less significant to beat "hard" difficulty level. The game still plays out by the exact same rules, only the starting conditions are altered. This is different from, say, a game of Civilization where difficulty level affects many more variables.

There is practically nothing in wesnoth that cannot be affected by the chosen difficulty due to wesnoth's unique modifyability. It is however a whole lot of work to create, test and especially balance all of that which is why it usually only affects income and starting gold.

[Kymille]

Just to put it out there, in some ways there are advantages to playing a harder difficulty level.

Generally, speaking, a mainline campaign on a harder setting will give you:

1. Fewer turns to complete the scenario. (Or MORE turns if you have to survive against a large army.]
2. Less starting gold for you.
3. More starting gold for the enemy.
4. Possibly higher level enemies being recruited (such as level-2 trolls instead of level-1).

Although these all plainly make an individual scenario harder for you as a player, over the course of the campaign you will kill more and higher-level enemies (due to #3 and #4) and get much more experience. Since in Wesnoth campaigns you get to recall units, as long as you don't lose too many of your units, which depends on your skill, you should have a much more powerful army to compensate (in part).

[Frankly, I think it makes the "medium" setting much more fun than the "easy" setting: It's easier to get higher level members of your army and easier to replace them if they get killed on "medium."]

[Hulavuta]

Well, it just seems to me that difficulty level affects very little in the game. I was getting my butt kicked on a campaign (the drake one if you want to know) on normal level, so I changed to easy.

Still don't know which one.

I'm still getting my butt kicked. I couldn't tell that anything had changed except my gold. This would also seem to make it much less significant to beat "hard" difficulty level. The game still plays out by the exact same rules, only the starting conditions are altered. This is different from, say, a game of Civilization where difficulty level affects many more variables.

That's true. Most campaigns DON'T change anything besides gold, because there's just too much difficulty(for lack of a better word) in playtesting several difficulties of a game. Most people are too lazy to change much else. If you ask me, difficulty levels should be thrown out entirely in favor of campaign difficulty levels, but meh...

If you want an alternative, and don't mind a little cheating, you can always use debug to give yourself a little gold boost or a few stronger units. When a campaign is too hard, a lot of people use debug with a few limits to beat it (for example, only giving yourself 200 extra gold or only 2 Armageddon Drakes or Ancient Liches)

[Joram]

Well, it just seems to me that difficulty level affects very little in the game. I was getting my butt kicked on a campaign (the drake one if you want to know) on normal level, so I changed to easy. I'm still getting my butt kicked. I couldn't tell that anything had changed except my gold. This would also seem to make it much less significant to beat "hard" difficulty level. The game still plays out by the exact same rules, only the starting conditions are altered. This is different from, say, a game of Civilization where difficulty level affects many more variables.

It sounds to me like you are playing an "add-on" campaign (since I don't know of mainline ones with drakes, unless you are *shudders* playing Northern Rebirth, in which case you should expect to lose). In which case, it is quite conceivable that the difficulties are not balanced well.

I am just starting to work on a campaign, and really don't have the time to playtest it multiple times on each of the three difficulty levels. I therefore am playtesting it on medium, and then skewing the starting gold and turn numbers a bit for easy and hard, and hoping it works out. Once it's finished (as in, all scenarios are written), I'll certainly go back and play it on all difficulties, but at the moment, I'm not. Could be the same in your case.


On the other hand, some campaigns are just darn hard. Especially if they happen to be long. I can beat Descent into Darkness no sweat on hard. The Rise of Wesnoth, on the other hand, gave me incredible amounts of grief for a long time even though the two campaigns are technically the same "difficulty" level. I had to discover special strategies for long campaigns regarding gold management. If you happen to be playing Flight to Freedom, I'd say expect a rough time. I never finished that one, invariably ditching it cause it just got to be to much.


Wesnoth really doesn't have as much variance as other games which range from "this is so easy that it is impossible to lose" to "you have to devote months of your life practicing, use every overpowered combo in the game, and be very lucky" (thinking of some 4X games like Civ II, MOOII, and GalCiv II particularly). So no, there will never be as obvious a difficulty difference. However, there should always be something.

[shirtsnb]

That's true. Most campaigns DON'T change anything besides gold, because there's just too much difficulty(for lack of a better word) in playtesting several difficulties of a game. Most people are too lazy to change much else. If you ask me, difficulty levels should be thrown out entirely in favor of campaign difficulty levels, but meh...

Well, I can speak for all newbies when I say that this information should be in the documentation. I looked and looked and the docs say very little about difficulty level other than it exists.

"Each campaign has a difficulty level: easy, medium (normal), and hard. Some have an extra setting, 'nightmare'. We recommend medium as this level is challenging, but not difficult. You may not change the difficulty during the campaign."

That's the entire amount of information available about difficulty levels. You can understand why I was baffled. The manual doesn't mention difficulty level at all.

[Reepurr]

Easy is easy and hard is hard. What actually happens differs. It can be huge in some campaigns, small in others.

I'd still like to know what you mean by "Drake campaign" though. Do you mean:
• Brave Wings
• Burning Souls
• Story of a Drake Outcast
• Wings of Victory

Anyway, back to difficulties. The common differences are turn limit and gold (gold generally on all sides). Then there are different units the enemy can recruit, followed by possibly different AIs, then different amounts of units that start out on the field, and in the case of AToTB for example, even loyal units that don't appear in later levels. There are also more/less dangerous events that could happen, as well as the possibility of terrain more favourable to your enemy being added.

It's just that since Easy is easier than Medium and Medium is easier than Hard...and Hard is easier than Nightmare...they didn't think it was worth mentioning.
EDIT: Also note that to a newbie, all these factors that change across difficulties would be very, very confusing.

[Sapient]

Well, I can speak for all newbies when I say that this information should be in the documentation. I looked and looked and the docs say very little about difficulty level other than it exists.

Thanks for posting this suggestion, but I would like to know what is your proposal for a better way to describe difficulty levels in the manual? The quote you gave from Hulavuta certainly wouldn't work.

[shirtsnb]

What is my proposal? My proposal is that information about what changes at each level be available to the player. I'm the one who doesn't know anything, remember? How on Earth am I supposed to write, eh?