Alternative campaign's mechanics approach

[Aldarisvet]

Well, guys, of course level1-level3 system is more sustainable than, for example, level1-level5 system. Because if level5 dies, he would be unreplaceable, and if level3 dies, you can still can susbstitute it, advance some stacked level2. So if you have extra money during the campaign, of course you can recruit more level1, and give them chance to level up eventually. Of course there can be situations where level1 are demanded. As cheap units with high mobility (in case they have lot of turns) or just as cannon meat. In my campaign in the last scenario (really large map there with kinda 50-60 villages) I use saurian skirmishers as life shields vs dangerous enemy saurian magicians with teleportation. Enemy AI units teleports from the village, easely kills cheap skirmishers that came close to them or to the village, then your turn comes, you kill all lured enemy units with battlemages, then safely take the village and no one will teleport from it more (I even have absolutely no idea if someone ever guessed about this tactics). But if you need all your firepower, there is no way that, for example, a Mage can substitute an Archmage.

Still the fact is that at some moment at the campaign your units meet the ceiling. They cannot advance further. And now comes a philosophical question, why units in any game ever have to advance? In fact that have nothing with tactics, it is about player's fun. People like something advances because it something new, unknown, some transformation, something to explore. And tactically playing level1 units vs level1 of AI is absoulutely the same as playing level3 units vs level3 units of AI. And as soon you investigate all units lines you became bored (so why ever making all this unit trees for common units?). Now compare this level1-3 system with modern MMORPG systems where you can advance to level 90, explore damned hundreds of special abilities and so on. So there is no surprise that LotI is quite popular. People like diversity and right to choose different tactics.

For sure, Wesnoth is not a game very suitable for RPG things. From the beginning I thought that attempts to bring too much RPG elements to the game is not the way I like. I its a strategy at least, if I want to play RPG game, I would play an RPG game, really. But I retried Age of Wonders I recently and saw that common units there are not advance radically, but that looks fine. They can be recalled, however. Main interest is in heroes advance system. Very common to things that was firstly presented in UtBS. The problems with Age of Wonders is that that game have really developed economy system and AI is too weak to manage it. And in Wesnoth an economy is much easier.

So my formula is - many heroes, all of them (or at least most of them) can recruit one type of level0 units that can advance to level1 only, developed upgrade tree for each hero in UtBS-style with special abilities (like leadership) related to units they can recruit. Others can have their formulas, of course.

After more thinking I got that I do not even let level0 units to advance to level1. I rather will create some level0 unit that would have ZOC as a trait. And made a cheaper cost for recalling.

[Sire]

The problem I see with campaigns, after working a bit on mine, is the nature of snowballing. Unlike stand-alone scenarios, campaigns usually...

1: Grant veterans available for recall.
2: Grant carryover gold from the previous scenario.
3: Grant "bonus" gold for finishing the scenario early. (This is in place so players don't have to wait for the last turn to get all of the income from houses, which is related to item 2.)

In my opinion, the defining feature of campaigns is the ability to recall previous units and watching them grow stronger. When I play Wesnoth, I want a core legion of veterans, not an army of disposable nobodies. However, the ability of having veterans as well as carryover gold and bonus gold can have a snowball effect as a player who is doing well continues to do well while a player suffering will continue to suffer and may need to restart from the beginning.

Personally, I would suggest getting rid of carryover gold and bonus gold, focusing just on veterans for recall purposes. To prevent abuse, perhaps have a system in place that filters out units that have no experience (to prevent players from getting easy Horsemen [23g] for example, or Mages [20g] with desirable traits]). Then, the creator designs a scenario and a campaign with this in mind, so there is a static amount of gold available with the only variance being what is recalled. If one wants more lower level play, increase the EXP threshold for promoting a unit, making higher tier units much more valuable.

Of course, this is but an idea, and I'm sure creators can have their own solutions for their campaigns. However, while we can theorycraft a guideline for all campaigns, it is but a guideline, each campaign will have to be adjusted to accommodate their unique differences.

[Velensk]

I can see that you have your formula. If I'm too far off topic by expressing why it isn't something for me and discussing alternate ways to deal with the challenge of making campaigns interesting I apologize but I did not believe that was the case.

Personally my biggest issue with the level-up system in wesnoth is that with a few exceptions I'd almost always rather my units stay at level 2 than advance to lvl 3 (or if we're really just optimizing with no semblance of sense I wish they all stayed just about to go to lvl 3 until I wanted them to level up). I generally need/want at most 2-3 level 3s except in real crunch scenarios and/or finales but having some level 2s mixed in with your level ones can give you a hard point or a point breaker. I'd never want a system that goes up to lvl 5 or whatever as I have never wanted the battle to be so much about how 'leveled' my troops are so much as to be about how I can use the tools I have to accomplish the objective.

Although I somewhat disagree that battles between high level units are the same as battles between low level units (a few minor but significant changes, especially in the relative value of healing, villages, and terrain) I feel it's more important to draw attention to the fact that in general I find that in most well designed wesnoth scenarios and armies, unit levels aren't homogenous. There is tactics and texture to how you formation and use an army with range of levels against an army with a diverse range of levels. And there are plenty of situations (especially in campaigns that give you access to either leadership, slow, charge, or backstab) where low level units can easily outpreform higher level units when controlled by the player. As it happens a mage can substitute for an archmage if it's day and you have level 3 leadership.

As for why units advance: It allows you to have a much wider diversity of unit styles without vastly increasing the number of base recruits, it adds another interesting priority to how you handle your tactics, and it provides a feeling of continuity and gives you something to care about if you choose. It also represents 3 distinct levels of troops (green, veteran, and elite) in a relatively fixed scale. Sure there are a few legends that stick out above the rest but we aren't dealing with people not super-saiyans here.
-It also allows you to customize your army slightly (as an example, I regularly use lancers which other people feel are a waste in campaigns as they are killers but can't level so they siphon xp but I find lancers are fine because I don't want more level 3s but I do want a lvl 2 that's really fast that can take advantage of leadership that has the highest damage per hex in the game even without leadership). Now this aspect would actually be improved by having extra levels and more units but I can't say I consider it enough reason to want endless level expansion.

[Otengam]

Having not played any UMC campaigns I probably shouldn't comment about those. From the mainline campaigns, I have experienced many of the issues brought up here.

I dislike campaign scenarios which are essentially super-rich AIs forcing save-reload. As mentioned by other people this is due to AI limitations and someday the AIs might be written better. For now, I don't think the solution is to handicap the player to low level units. To counter unfun, we must focus on what is fun.

It's obvious that different people want different things. To me, the fun scenarios are ones that force me to think differently and surprise me. I don't mean suddenly adding in a new enemy AI player!
Fun:

• Progression and choice
  No denying it, I love the diverging advancements from gaining XP it's one of the reasons I play Wesnoth instead of some other game like Civ. Different units being able to do different things: Slow special or Damage? Fire Damage or Teleporting Arcane? Admittedly it is hard to give options without one option being optimal and the others sub.
• Defeating overwhelming odds by observing a weakness
  Bottlenecks from caves. It's not an amazingly new tactic but it's fun watching the cheating supersized AI army struggle to wipe you out with just 4 units (2 tanks, 1 healer and rotate in a 3rd unit whilst levelling them)
  Plague touch and rotating ghosts. Grow my involuntarily loyal counter army.
• Combining newly learnt tactics from previous scenarios
  Choosing better units for tanking or bottlenecking. Choosing better guerilla units: Teleporter or Hit and Run special?
• Scenario specific game mechanics
  Something like Survival Fusion (not a campaign thing).
  Trigger swamp tiles with hidden enemy units. I feel the dev is having a laugh at my expense every time I unintentionally trigger a well placed enemy unit but then afterwards you can see the not obvious paths to take and wonder if there was even an enemy unit there to avoid to begin with!
  A scenario just for levelling units for their unique ability not just for pure damage (perhaps force a restriction on max levelled recallables for one scenario only).
  RPG items. At minimum, I do appreciate even that 1 small "Holy Water" to make units more unique and valuable.
• Rofl-stomp reward scenarios
  There should be a reward scenario where you've built up unique units and grown your army so that you can feel powerful at the end. The whole progression thing should feel like it's worth something.

Ultimately, it's not 1 specific mechanic that makes campaigns enjoyable. Good campaigns will have different things for different scenarios and then swap them back around. In my opinion leave the multiplayer super army battles to large multiplayer maps or only if the plot really demands it. It's the learning and adapting part that keeps players interested in the story-based campaigns not the giant army AIs forcing players to constantly save-reload. Of course, you do have the let the player win...eventually but not because they're spending hours reloading.

*cough* FORCE_CHANCE_TO_HIT *cough*

[Aldarisvet]

Velensk, I got things you wrote, that is intresting. However it is more about complex management and not about fun. I doubt that most players would be too good players to understand such things. Moreover, mainline campaigns do not show that potential of level1-level3 system that you describe. It is much easier to recall best units you have, smash through AI defences, kill the enemy leader and just get early finish bonus than make such tricks you mentioned. To discover that complex potential you described, you should not make a campaign 'of some race', instead you should gradually giving to the player more and more new type of units through the campaign, with so way that newly given type with level1 units should be more useful in current circumstances that all the previous level3 veterans.

But people like advancements, they like to cherish their best fighters. I personally like Shydes and I better will throw experience to my lovely units to get them more so needed HP with ALMA's, than rise more 'reserve' shydes. For me top-level units are lovely heroes (remember, they even have names!), I cannot afford losing them. At least that was for me when I was playing Wesnoth early and was not contaminated with that rational approach when every level3 unit is dispensable/expendable because with some probability it can be killed. Emotions makes the game, not some deep strategic things that only Velensk or Taptap would understand.

So in fact the fun still in unit's advancement process. That because some people wanted more level4, level5 units and so on. As your group of veterans stopped to advance, the fun ends. And this happens quite quickly actually. Now that is the reason why many likes UtBS system, it just prolongs the fun.

Now what I suggest is to admit that people like cherishing their lovely units and like to choose the ways to advance them, to have a freedom in it, to have fun in the investigation process. But to get more fun, instead of core veterans you have to advance you can have a lot of core heroes you have to advance. Now I got an idea that it should be really many heroes like 10 available to the player, which you can even recall at the certain scenario or not recall. So it would be a shift from recalling veterans to recalling heroes. Each hero, as I wrote before, have 1) UtBS-style upgrade system 2) One type of unit he can recruit. So making choice which heroes you will recall for certain scenario you also choose which types of units you will recruit in the game. Now I even do not exclude that some heroes would be able to recruit level1 or higher units, as soon that units would not be able to be recalled. Also to prevent a situation in which every time a player recruits all heroes he have, that heroes should have big enough support price, and also heroes must not be really tough fighters, they should be good leaders. Now I think that my system really has great potential. It provides totally another gamplay, but in fact formally it is not going far from mainline, it does require only WML coding that is already available in mainline campaigns.

I just got that my new system suggests 3-level hierarchical system. At the first level there is a super-hero, main campaign's hero, that can recall ordinary heroes (in most cases he will do this at the first turn of every scenario, some, loyal, heroes can be recalled by default). At the second level there are heroes that can recruit units. And common (expendable) units are at the third level.

[kjn]

I'm far from a veteran player, but to me there are several ways to ways to keep down the value of the elite all-L3 (or L2) army, both depending on the scenario and on the game itself.

One way would be to include flanking or surrounded penalties. Say that a unit has enemy units on sides 1-3, and then they get a 25% malus on the damage they do during defense, and 50% if they have it on side 1-4 (ie units on the opposite sides). Offensive damage would be unchanged, but it would give a real incentive to try to surround enemy units in order to conserve XP, especially when fighting higher-level units.

Another is good scenario design. One reason I like "The Bay of Pearls" in HttT is that you have several partially conflicting goals: win the sea battle, defeat the sea orc leader, conserve your loyal mermen, level some mermen up, fetch the storm trident, and try to free the rest of the mermen in the northwest. Make a scenario where you have to solve several different problems, and you need numbers for all the problems.

Introduce a penalty for going negative gold. Right now there is no real malus (except possibly in the next scenario) for going negative gold, which doesn't sit right with me. That's why I liked the idea of "Battle Against Time", with a fixed amount of gold for the entire campaign, but this can be handled in several different ways.

[Velensk]

Aldarisvet: I basically learned these principles by playing the mainline campaigns. If there is an issue with it and the mainline campaigns it's that most of the mainline campaigns are easy enough that you don't have to play this way and/or have many scenarios where you do just need to start with a heavy recall of level 3s (missions in tight areas and the like). It's not actually complicated and it doesn't require staggering of recruits, it just takes keeping an eye on your upkeep relative to the amount of force you need to win. I grant that many people may not find it as fun but if they are finding it fun to just run their veterans into the ground then is there an issue making things interesting?

Actually, thinking it over, I think you're right about it. People who think that's all there is to it tend to get bored and there's a good reason why UtBS regularly gets praised among many players but it's not that the alternative is unfun or some overly complicated system, it's that it's unintuitive to their instincts.

[taptap]

There certainly are scenarios in mainline I don't like, but not one requires saveload. People, seriously stop saveloading, you are killing your own enjoyment. The choice of difficulty is there for a reason. Less saveloading = more fun, more longevity (you can come back to the same campaign on higher difficulty later) and more appreciation for the game. Why even discuss game mechanics, when you blast through challenges before you with autowin mode? Why not click through a graphic novel instead?

Personally, I would suggest getting rid of carryover gold and bonus gold, focusing just on veterans for recall purposes.

While you obviously can do this if you want (IftU/AtS effectively does it at times with its one turn recalls only scenarios), you remove a significant chunk of gameplay that way. Maybe it is a part you don't appreciate anyway, but something is lost. Resource management in Wesnoth is very simplified for good reasons, but if I would look for fresh alternative mechanics I would rather take one that handles it innovatively than one that removes it altogether.

Interesting mechanics
- Cities of the Frontier (single scenario) features the standing down of experienced soldiers to reduce upkeep. (They stay on recall list.)
- The Founding of Borstep has hunting. (It heals a little, but could be a resource as well.)
- You could play scenarios with herds of (reindeer, horse, sheep, cattle, camels) and depend on them for upkeep (and or even income). I would definitely use this if I were to make Khalifate campaign.
- A single scenario I saw featured cutting down forests for profit.
- You could feature useful mercenaries throughout your campaign (Panther Lord is pretty unique in giving a choice of useful cross-faction mercenaries btw.), which would leave you the moment you can't pay their upkeep and turn negative. (Of course the whole campaign needs to be balanced differently than most current campaigns for that to work.)
- Buildings / units that reduce / pay upkeep but don't earn gold, part addition, part substitute for current villages. (Would probably be required to work with previous idea, so you don't go deeply negative no matter what at the start of scenario.)

I would like a campaign where you lead a mercenary company and pick contracts (on some sort of strategy map), recruit, stand down, worrying about resources the whole time and when you wasted the moneys given for the contract and your own gold, you are done and have to retire. You could even end up playing the same maps vs. different factions from different positions. Of course it would be difficult to make a workable "strategy map", that has a life of its own and isn't just a glorified scenario selection (like in A New Order). The only campaign going somewhat in that direction is probably The Altaz Mariners. You could even give them different upkeep schedules (daily, weekly, whatever), so you need to take the lucrative job to pay your company next friday etc.

[Velensk]

I would like a campaign where you lead a mercenary company and pick contracts (on some sort of strategy map), recruit, stand down, worrying about resources the whole time and when you wasted the moneys given for the contract and your own gold, you are done and have to retire. You could even end up playing the same maps vs. different factions from different positions. Of course it would be difficult to make a workable "strategy map", that has a life of its own and isn't just a glorified scenario selection (like in A New Order). The only campaign going somewhat in that direction is probably The Altaz Mariners. You could even give them different upkeep schedules (daily, weekly, whatever), so you need to take the lucrative job to pay your company next friday etc.

Going with the mercenary theme you could make it so that moving around on the main map costs you money, thus giving it a life in the form of making proximity important. You could also add random encounters via mechanics similar to the ships in Saving Elensofar (possibly with random maps generated based on the terrain you're standing on).

[skeptical_troll]

Well, reading through this thread it seems that there are actually a lot of ways to make scenarios varied and interesting, despite of the limits of the AI. It would be nice if all the alternatives suggested here could be summarized in a short guide for authors.

If I may add my two cents, what I find sometimes boring in campaigns is the endless repetition of the scenario structure RECRUIT ARMY -> SET THE LINE -> DESTROY ENEMY WAVES -> HUNT AND FINISH OFF THE LONELY ENEMY LEADERS. The third is obviously the fun part, the first two are interesting from a strategical point of view, the last one is generally tedious, and in my opinions should be avoided, but usually at the end of a scenario a player does not care much as he's just happy of winning. There is nothing particularly bad about this sequence, but I think it is overused in most campaigns, UMC included (and I am myself guilty to some extent), and I find it harms what the optimal fighting pace could be, slowing it down too often (and it is deadly boring if also the opponents are always the same kind of units).
I wonder for example why there are so few scenarios starting 'in medias res', where you begin in the middle of an ongoing fight, with some given units, and you have little time to set a front line.

Note that this is a different problem than how the actual fight proceeds, i.e. which kind of units and tactic you employ.

[Velensk]

One thing I will say, is that I feel many (though not all) scenarios would benefit from having the AI leaders take to the field when they're out of gold and so far into debt that their forces wouldn't even come as a trickle. If I ever do another pass on Count Kromire, that is one thing I'd look at. Of course, this does have the issue that the AI could misplace it's leader and have it be taken out early but I still think that it'd feel better than the current situation where the leaders just sit there while your already victories army slowly advances.

[Aldarisvet]

If I may add my two cents, what I find sometimes boring in campaigns is the endless repetition of the scenario structure RECRUIT ARMY -> SET THE LINE -> DESTROY ENEMY WAVES -> HUNT AND FINISH OFF THE LONELY ENEMY LEADERS.

Sure, I was complaining on this issue for months.
Often an author compensate AI's stupidness by giving him much more gold. Wrong way. Still the player continue holding a line reacting on this and AI stupidly continue to attack line. But if AI gets too much gold he probably would do enough damage to break frontline_rotate_heal system. A player would be just get lack of not-so-wounded units and the line will crush with deaths of defenders. Or player starts using save&loads. Nothing fun in it.

I found that much better not to give AI much gold, but give him other types of advance.

First point - give AI more mobile units than yours. That means that AI units in average must have significally more MP, also have better mobility on terrain. So for him is much easier to get villages and also to circumvent player's defence lines.
Second point - player's units must not have zones of control (except rare units as heroes).

After this a player would not be able to make frontline_rotate_heal.

[Otengam]

I've found that another tactic that's staple is to out fund the AI. Early on it's easy to see the AI building large armies then stopping/slowing down until they get some villages but they'll never feel as threatening after their burst gold is gone.

An interesting twist to this might be to have the AI switch recruitables part way through and then re-fund the AI again. For example for the first x turns use your example Aldarisvet of mobility units, then when the AI runs out of gold again or the AI reaches a certain condition (I don't know crossing the river + gold low) then it'll somehow find a whole bunch of gold and an encampment to start recruiting again BUT it'll get a new selection of recruitable units. Instead of mobility ones maybe switch to a defensive bottleneck min-max strategy to out-turn the player and force them to lose because they couldn't kill the AI in time.

I just think there are many ways to make scenarios interesting without going all-in with just 1 play style that one might think is different for now but eventually you'll get bored of anyway.

[Inky]

But to get more fun, instead of core veterans you have to advance you can have a lot of core heroes you have to advance. Now I got an idea that it should be really many heroes like 10 available to the player, which you can even recall at the certain scenario or not recall. So it would be a shift from recalling veterans to recalling heroes. Each hero, as I wrote before, have 1) UtBS-style upgrade system 2) One type of unit he can recruit.

Have you tried Legend of the Invincibles? It's an extremely fun UMC (which I'd highly recommend!) where you can choose various AMLA paths to customize all your units, and you generally don't have to worry about losing your favorite veterans because you can give them good equipment to help them survive. Also you can give your units weapons with different types of plague so it's kind of like they can recruit


On the original topic: I think campaigns end up being more interesting if you let veterans die, because it means your recall list is always changing, and since you constantly have to level up new units to replace them you still get a sense of progression even late in a campaign.

I can sympathize with getting really attached to the high level veterans though (confession: when I first started playing Wesnoth I couldn't stand losing veterans and saveloaded every single time one died, which was a very often! But I soon got bored of playing this way because I felt that nothing I did mattered.) Maybe someone could make a "casual" mod like Fire Emblem where veterans will retreat to the recall list instead of dying, that way you could keep your favorite veterans but still couldn't be too reckless with them.

[Otengam]

How about the idea that recall list size is limited? There's a lot of talk about variable recall costs but how about the amount of units actually recallable? There would need to be a filter and sorting of some sort. Perhaps even better, an interface or way for the player to choose which units gets to move forward aside from the campaign heroes. In other words, set a recall list of a certain size (decided by the campaign developer) and the player chooses which units gets a "recall slot" for the next scenario.

Limiting the number of recalls is a better way for the campaign developer to control subsequent scenarios and avoid feeling the need to over-fund the AI opponent. It would be up to the developer to give hints as to what units would be helpful for the next scenarios and make the players consider more carefully rather than just make early finish gold the deciding factor.