BfW is a game that relies on save-scumming too much

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TrashMan
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Re: BfW is a game that relies on save-scumming too much

Post by TrashMan »

Aldarisvet wrote: February 26th, 2019, 10:32 am It is not about "your heroes grind through huge numbers of low-level bad guys". I do not mean that heroes and loyal units must be so "fat" that they could not be killed at all. I do not like the idea of overpowered heroes myself. If you imply "Legend of the Invincibles", no, I never played that campaign and I do not like that concept.
A unit can be powerful and vulnerable. The difference is on the number of mistakes and bad rolls it takes.
ATM I am playing some campaigns with the no RNG mod and the feel is much better.
Any unit (including heroes) can usually survive a turn even under unfavorable conditions. Some can survive when sorounded and attacked by 4-5 units. Sure, they will have no health remaining, but they will be alive and you have one turn to save them.

But the issues is also power scaling. The power difference between levels. The smaller it is, the more fair is seems.

It is about the fact that the importance of villages is close to zero in later stages of mainline campaigns.
That depends, if you don't have healers, villages are vital.
Look, after about kinda 5 scenarios you main heroes reaches lvl3 and they cannot advance further. The same about most of your veterans. This kills the main interest of the game - to advance you heroes. Given that UtBS was a breakthrough for Wesnoth that partly solved the existing problems. But that breakthrough was made a decade or more ago?
Custom AMLAS with different upgrade paths solve this issue.
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Re: BfW is a game that relies on save-scumming too much

Post by Konrad2 »

TrashMan wrote: February 26th, 2019, 10:44 am What is the point of heroes then? Having units that you put into some corner and hide them? Doesn't sound very heroic!
It should be extremely difficult to kill a unit in one turn, especially heroes. You need to have some room for errors, a turn to react and save them.
And your hero can appear to be a safe place, but it turns out it's not. Let's say the enemy can't approach because another unit is in the way. And then THAT units gets killed despite the odds and suddenly your hero is open to attacks.
Or what about units that are invisible in certain conditions and you get ambushed?
Your complaint hints at a possible explanation for heroes.
They teach you to play careful and think about what you are doing. To only take risks you can mitigate. (And in singleplayer it teaches you how to manipulate the ai.)
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Re: BfW is a game that relies on save-scumming too much

Post by TrashMan »

sergey wrote: February 26th, 2019, 9:06 am Perhaps Wesnoth has higher entry threshold than many other strategy games?
No.
There are far more complex and demanding strategy games out there.
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Re: BfW is a game that relies on save-scumming too much

Post by TrashMan »

Aldarisvet wrote: February 25th, 2019, 5:07 pm Heh. Every multiplayer player knows that you should never put your leader in the situation in which he/she even theoretically can be killed.
Same about heroes and loyal units in campaigns. One should learn to play the game first. Playing campaigns and playing multiplayer are two different realities, and this is not about Wesnoth only, it is about every game. One passed several campaigns on hard using save&loads and think he is an expert in Wesnoth after that? A grave mistake of a novice player it is.
Some of us don't care about copetetive play and find no enjoyment in their heroes and loyals hiding in the map corner. What's the point of even having such a hero unit? The player can just as well be a disembodied invisible commander from most RTS games.


Your complaint hints at a possible explanation for heroes.
They teach you to play careful and think about what you are doing. To only take risks you can mitigate. (And in singleplayer it teaches you how to manipulate the ai.)
That sound like after-the-fact rationalization and is utterly unsatisfying.
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Re: BfW is a game that relies on save-scumming too much

Post by Konrad2 »

Your complaint hints at a possible explanation for heroes.
They teach you to play careful and think about what you are doing. To only take risks you can mitigate. (And in singleplayer it teaches you how to manipulate the ai.)
That sound like after-the-fact rationalization and is utterly unsatisfying.
Again, a difference in opinion. Because it is very satisfying to me and probably for a lot of other people too. Learning is cool. :D

Anyway, it all boils down to 'I don't like this and this about Wesnoth, please change it for everyone'.
But as you can see, there are multiple opinions about the matter. So maybe leave it at 'I don't like this and this about Wesnoth', without the 'please change it for everyone'?

EDIT:
Adding all downloads of variations of 'different/no luck' add-ons, I get something around 3600. This is certainly not the majority of Wesnoth players.
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Re: BfW is a game that relies on save-scumming too much

Post by Aldarisvet »

TrashMan wrote: February 26th, 2019, 10:59 am Some of us don't care about copetetive play and find no enjoyment in their heroes and loyals hiding in the map corner. What's the point of even having such a hero unit? The player can just as well be a disembodied invisible commander from most RTS games.
I suggest your problem is that you think than Wesnoth RNG creates too much instability.
That is not true. Probably you simply do not know how to play correctly. Ever seen replays of expert players playing Wesnoth?

I myself passed TRoW on the hardest difficulty recruiting only mages relatively without reloads. I got MANY mages killed during that but I was not risking heroes. Heroes can fight but they must be covered by a meat and this meat must not be killed in one turn so the enemy could overrun a hero.
Playing TRoW that way was extremely hard and because of that it was interesting for me (by this I do not mean that I am a strong Wesnoth player).
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Re: BfW is a game that relies on save-scumming too much

Post by sergey »

TrashMan, actually I don't like what you are suggesting. Lvl3 royal guard can hold a crowd of peasants for a long time. But royal guard will be quickly finished by several royal guards. And peasant will be quickly finished by several peasants. That doesn't look like a Wesnoth issue to me.
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Re: BfW is a game that relies on save-scumming too much

Post by Ruvaak »

If you want to play without RNG, I made a mod who combine lot of changes, "Advance Wesnoth Wars", including no RNG, based on No Randomless Mod but adding some features (for example, strikes number are proportional to hitpoints, advacing a level recover partial HP only and keep the bad status, etc). It works for SP & MP, changes apply to AI though it don't take theses changes so much in considerations for now.

I'm not against RNG, more mitiged, but I wanted to try a gameplay different (the mod was, first of all, for me), and without RNG, there's not that "emotional pick" of incertitude, like gambling, triggered. But it's more tactical and more fair, at least try it on MP.
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Re: BfW is a game that relies on save-scumming too much

Post by Aldarisvet »

Actually after some time of thinking about it... absolutely suddenly for myself I decided that topicstarter is right about RNG.
I got that RNG system creates really a lot of problems and misunderstandings but no fun at all. Simply this complexity provides nothing good. It provides high deviations of battles result (in the short term) but simply there is nothing good with it. Some says that this feature makes Wesnoth what it is but this is just not true. It is obviosly not RNG system what made Wesnoth what it is now, conversely, it became what it is despite of RNG.

The game must not be something to appease mathematicians with their knowledge of paradoxes of probability theory. I myself got a sound mathematical base during education so I find nothing wrong with what can happen with probability in Wesnoth.

But really if you have 4*4 attacks against a unit with 70% defence the result of the attack should be always simply 16*0.3=4.8, which is roughly 5. And that is all. Deviations to this result are just excessive. You have to get that result that you earned strategically, and there is no fun to get randomly a better or worse result than that.

The success on playing this game depends in a very high degree in the way you put your units. And RNG component is simply a boring hindrance you have to take into account... And I do not mention about a cry people created in Steam... People just cannot formulate correctly what they dont like.

However I still continue to think that the problem of Wesnoth is not in that RNG case but absoultely boring monotone gameplay against AI (in mainline campaigns firstly) because a player always forced to reproduce a same tactics against a stupid AI - holding frontline and rotate wonding units.
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Re: BfW is a game that relies on save-scumming too much

Post by josteph »

Plenty of games have an element of randomness. Generally, in these games a good player will win most of the time, despite the randomness. That's because there is an element of skill to those games as well.

You clearly think RNG isn't fun. I would recommend that you play with mods that change combat mechanics to reduce randomness, for example by dealing damage equal to the expected damage or by changing unit stats to reduce variance of combat outcomes. There are several such mods on the add-ons server.

Regarding the AI, I'm not sure what can be done other than implement a smarter AI (who's going to do that?) or make MP campaigns where all sides are controlled by humans.
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Re: BfW is a game that relies on save-scumming too much

Post by Shiki »

I had some thought on this a while ago as well. There are people who say RNG is unfair, and there are people who say it's just maths and the human preception which bad at guessing. Both are right:
- Mathematically, the RNG is good for a battle.
- However, one bad outcome is not equal to a good outcome of one battle. Because the unit, which you lose, is a leveled up one, which needed many good battles to become what is it.

It's the fact that you can not just recruit a new unit equal to the one you lost which makes it unfair.

As an example, lets forget all this things like terrain modifiers and such and say you have a unit which has a 80% chance to kill and a 20% to die. The chance to kill and survive are probably what you want to know when deciding to attack. 80 - 20 sounds good, and is good. That means, your unit kills 4 times as many units. But... you needed to level the unit which you have. And losing a leveled unit hurts. And when you get the 20% case, you think it's so unfair, because it was just 20%.
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Re: BfW is a game that relies on save-scumming too much

Post by Aldarisvet »

josteph wrote: March 30th, 2019, 9:11 pm
Regarding the AI, I'm not sure what can be done other than implement a smarter AI (who's going to do that?) or make MP campaigns where all sides are controlled by humans.
Actually a lot can be done. The main thing is not to provide to both sides features that only human can use effectively. For example, almost every mainline campaign relies on healers deeply (except Liberty as I remember for what I like Liberty and of course DiD and SotA because undead do not have healers). Kinda developers of campaigns sought this frontline/rotate/heal system is a golden standard that must be in every campaign. But this leads to monotone gameplay. The worst thing is that UMC creators given that just follows this standard and reproduce the same lame gameplay mechanics.

There are ways to make a gameplay interesting and removing healers is just one of the methods.
josteph wrote: March 30th, 2019, 9:11 pm Plenty of games have an element of randomness. Generally, in these games a good player will win most of the time, despite the randomness. That's because there is an element of skill to those games as well.
We all know that.
But somehow it appeared that people do not cry on RNG system of other games, but they cry about Wesnoth RNG. I think that this a reason to think out why it is so.

I may add that I myself mostly play old/republished games on D&D system. But despite dices are the very core of D&D system when I play I do not pay attention on RNG at all. Except very rare cases, for example when you want to polymorph a dragon into a squirrel and so you have to reduce saving throws of a dragon deeply to get real chances to get a spell to success.
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Re: BfW is a game that relies on save-scumming too much

Post by Xalzar »

Aldarisvet wrote: March 30th, 2019, 8:21 pm I got that RNG system creates really a lot of problems and misunderstandings but no fun at all. Simply this complexity provides nothing good. It provides high deviations of battles result (in the short term) but simply there is nothing good with it. Some says that this feature makes Wesnoth what it is but this is just not true. It is obviosly not RNG system what made Wesnoth what it is now, conversely, it became what it is despite of RNG.
[...]
But really if you have 4*4 attacks against a unit with 70% defence the result of the attack should be always simply 16*0.3=4.8, which is roughly 5. And that is all. Deviations to this result are just excessive. You have to get that result that you earned strategically, and there is no fun to get randomly a better or worse result than that.
The problem with Wesnoth RNG is the low number of "dice" throws, which seriously skews results from expected values.
The number of attacks ("the throws") of units are quite few, so streaks of good or bad luck are quite common, and the "feast or famine" effect is quite strong (an attack hits completely or misses completely; a unit is alive and can attack in full strenght and block with zoc or is dead and cannot attack or keep zoc). If by absurd we multiply the number of attacks by 10, the results would be more coherent with expectations (not feasible).

Mitigators for these effects feel quite sparse sometimes, or not meaningful enough: most of the times the dice is all that matters.
In games like DnD stats, positioning or clever tricks can mitigate the damage of bad rolls; in games like Warhammer the number of dice throws are often high, multiple and the results mitigated by abilities and stratagems.
Aldarisvet wrote: March 30th, 2019, 8:21 pm The success on playing this game depends in a very high degree in the way you put your units. And RNG component is simply a boring hindrance you have to take into account... And I do not mention about a cry people created in Steam... People just cannot formulate correctly what they dont like.
I agree. After all, what attracted me to this game were mostly the story and the tactical and positional decisions, not the RNG in particular. :P
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Re: BfW is a game that relies on save-scumming too much

Post by Yomar »

I don't find anything wrong in RNGs, but it would really help if the rolls would be more consistent.
Too often I saw streaks of unreallistics hits or misses.
Like a druid allways been able to slow an unit on 70% def., a swordsman missing all hits on a Wose in a village with 20% def.
And that time when I saw 3 Elvish archers killed in forests with 70% def. in a row by Grunts.
Other times a footpad surviving after beign attacked by all sides from Elven fighters on a village, and they have 4 hits each.
Things are worser when an expensive unit misses, I explain, just the other day I saw a game of Rebels vs Rebels, and this mage missed the Wose with all 3 attacks, then second and third mage missed both 2 out of 3 so out of 9 hits they hit only 3 times, result, next turn there were 3 dead mages.
Same happened to me, my first mage missed 3 times and second 2 times, third one again 2 misses, next turn I ended up with 2 dead mages an 1 badly wounded, in the end I won only because his units were faar away from base and I had more units in that spot.
In the end, I think that skill counts, but in this game luck can beat skill sometime.
So the best player is both skillful and lucky.
I mean between two players of about the same skill, the luckier one wins, and sometime a worser player can win against a better one with enought luck.
Just look at Ladder games, to find examples, I have also replays.
Like a player that was completely destroying a noob, but then an unit coming from nowhere (cause he was out of his sight range) reaches his leader hits with all attacks and kills him.
He lost, even if he had more villages and killed a ton of enemy units and loosing only few.
So, I don't say to get rid of the luck element, but I agree with who says to make things more "consistent".
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