The South Gaurd 'Normal' Setting

[HomerJ]

Just thinking I should throw in my generic comment once again:
It's much more effective to weaken many enemies to low health, then to kill a few. Let them suicide on your retaliation on their turn. Example: don't attack a grunt on plains that has 4hp with an archer when there are better targets. Especially, don't kill a very low health unit with red mages or the likes.

Careful though about these points: do I desperately need the xp for a level? Can the enemy attack without retaliation? Can he retreat to a village the next turn? Is my any low health unit in jeopardy (AI suiciding tactics ftw)?


Edit: Kindly note that this applies mostly to campaigns and not multiplayer.

Greetz
HomerJ

[Ludwig]

Thanks for taking the time to critique! That's some really helpful insight.

[Rya]

Sure...

I do not care, if you've never had it in you to master the game (I seem to recall that you were the person who was designing comp stomps and then wouldn't even play them), but don't spread misinformation or attempt to scare away new players who might become masters down the road.

How is telling players that the game is incredibly difficult an attempt to scare them away? And it's no misinformation, it's just my opinion.

Usually in games the terminology is:
Beginner - You don't need to care about mechanics, you can just rush through for the story, it's impossible to die
Easy - This setting is perfect if you are bad at playing games and new to the game and want a challenge
Normal - This setting is perfect if you are good at playing games and new to the game and want a challenge
Hard - If you've mastered Normal this is the difficulty to go
Nightmare - Silly hard difficulty that is only there to test out the limits of a human

But in Wesnoth it translates completely differently. If you are new, you really need to choose "Beginner", even if you are a good player and not "Normal" like you'd usually do. I just wanted to point this out to make the OP understand how it works in Wesnoth.

But difficulties are not really consistent in Wesnoth anyway. I played all the campaigns on the easiest available mode and couldn't beat most of them (and I'm not generally a bad player, I can beat other games on normal difficulty), but then again some shorters ones seemed really easy and I could beat them even without losing any level 2+ units.

Anyway, if anything is scaring new players away from Wesnoth, it's the randomness and difficulty of the game. Don't believe me? Go to some random gamer community and suggest Wesnoth on their forum. You will get replies from people saying that they'd like it if it wasn't so random and difficult. But the developers will never change anything about it. They'd rather attack people complaining about it before they ever change it.

[Gambit]

Go to some random gamer community and suggest Wesnoth on their forum. You will get replies from people saying that they'd like it if it wasn't so random and difficult.

[citation_needed]

They'd rather attack people complaining about it before they ever change it.

In my experience the anti-randomness folks are quite aggressive. [1][2][3]


Don't you dare continue your misinformed rhetoric in here where a player was asking for help to play better. He wasn't asking for other people to blame for his lack of knowledge with the game. He was asking for tips for playing better.

[Dunno]

I just want to post here again to emphasize that Wesnoth IS NOT extremely hard. I just requires some thinking. And I have really good memories connected with Wesnoth community, I've never been left without answer when I needed it. And I think the size of this thread itself proves I'm right.

[Great_Mage_Atari]

Call me cocky and crazy, but I didn't really have any trouble with that campaign, and here's why:
I leveled up 3 bowman, 2 of which became Lv. 3s.
I also leveled up a Spearman to Royal Guard status.
I also kept the bodyguards that are given to your elf friend.
I got to the water village in the first scenario so I could recruit mermen hunters. Off of that I kept the merman fighter alive and leveled him up into a triton.
I killed off all of the Bandits, Outlaws, and such, so I kept the elves as allies.
Because of my banking and leveling up of various units, I didn't even need to hire the trolls to fight for me to defeat the evil Lich Lord.
I banked insane amounts of gold throughout, so I could have just about as many recall troops as I wanted.

So it really isn't too bad if you play it the correct way. I took to the frontal assault way of life and killed off my enemies as quick as possible to get a bonus of gold.

[therealtylerdurden]

The best strategy in most levels is to let the enemy attack you when you are at your strongest. For HttT that usually involves finding a big forest and sticking a whole lot of elves in there. Take out the first big waves of enemies while sending scouts to villages (thereby depleting the enemies gold and increasing yours to make new fodder)

I haven't been playing for long but I have the most success when I make a bunch of level 1 fodder troops.

I make these fodder troops "lures" so to speak because the enemy AI tends to target the units with the lowest HP. By paying attention to unit movement it is not too hard to make sure that these guys are attacked. When one of my main guys is attacked I will just pull him back behind my wall of fodder troops and let him heal.

I let my higher level troops get the first hits in to weaken the guy to a level where my fodder troops can get the kill. (the fodder troops remaining that is). This starts an endless cycle that just increases the level of your team. Playing on the normal difficulty on HttT I generally don't even recall my level 3 troops (I have like 13 of them and I'm halfway through) nor have I ever needed to use all my gold.


Once you understand this technique and how enemy movement works than the game is not hard. The only downside is this takes a long time and is very cut and paste monotonous, making me dislike most of the generic "kill the leader levels."

[Boldek]

unlike most campaigns, you can choose never to fight with anything other than chaotic. I learned in this campaign to really pay attention the time of day, because those thugs can really be a bother at night. generally that means I did a lot of reatrating and regrouping. and most of the baddies your fight (thugs, footpads, wcs, skellies, theives) for the most part lack ranged attack. I used this to my advantage and put bowman advancement higher in priority to the units, giving a handful of longbowmen and masterbowmen in the first few scenarios. however, when you engage the undeadies more seriously, they don't help a bit, and I had to go back with blade and spear, though recruiting piles of elvish shamans helps cut down on the damage.