is Wesnoth too hard to be fun...?

[bioman]

@ Ansbach: Playing on medium can sometimes be easier than playing on easy as your units will level up quick due to the increased amount of villains.

On the other hand, when playing an especially big campaign on easy, you need to level up more wisely - something that can be very hard to do...

[kiet]

But that doesn´t mean it´s easier to play hard since if you do that,it simple will be too many enemies for you to kill.

[williamager]

The randomness of the game is a major factor - you cannot plan effectively. When at a crucial moment your mage decides to miss with all attacks, or your knight gets pummeled while charging, despite having 60 or 70 % to hit.. that is the time where you grind your teeth and load.
So: either the AI should have a little less resources (as to allow you to win with decent planning and suboptimal luck) or the randomness should be reduced - let's say with the damage based around a bell curve, and average damage being REALLY likely. A minimum and a maximum damage done/taken should be guaranteed according to the terrain and units participating.

You need to have backup plans. If the arrack is crucial, you should have other units that can attack if your mage fails. If you can't do so, you wait. You shouldn't have your knight in a position where a bad charge can lead to a high Chance to Kill for the enemy, and should have units that can defend the knight if he is heavily wounded in a charge.

Chance is a fundamental element in Wesnoth, and has to be carefully considered in your strategy. Don't depend upon your luck - plan for having suboptimal luck, and you will fare much better.

[MCP]

MP is good in wesnoth. They keep updating/balancing the game, plus it is pretty much platform independent. Pretty close to perfect MP.
Only problem is too many players cause too much delay in turns.

It's like chess though, eventually you get faster.


Campaigns have always been slightly boring. The strategy generally becomes apparant after one play of the map boiling down to either of these categories:
1. I created a strategy which will virtually gaurantee me victory, barring near impossible bad luck. Sometimes this strategy is not so readily apparant.
2. I need a virtually impossible amount of good luck to win this, [censored] it.

As long as humans are not the opponent I've always been able to fall into those categories in any game.

[JW]

Only problem is too many players cause too much delay in turns.

It's like chess though, eventually you get faster.

If you host games you can add a timer. Also, in chess, masters usually think longer than amateurs because they think out far more moves in far greater depth. Your simile on that one is incorrect.

[podunk]

[/quote] You need to have backup plans. If the arrack is crucial, you should have other units that can attack if your mage fails. If you can't do so, you wait. You shouldn't have your knight in a position where a bad charge can lead to a high Chance to Kill for the enemy, and should have units that can defend the knight if he is heavily wounded in a charge.

Chance is a fundamental element in Wesnoth, and has to be carefully considered in your strategy. Don't depend upon your luck - plan for having suboptimal luck, and you will fare much better.[/quote]
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Darn if i know! I downloaded 1.1.7 because everyone was saying it was going to be more balanced than 1.0.2, and it seems the new balance is that it's harder to hit the enemies.

So I started on medium - I won in 1.0.2 in medium - not gracefully, not well, with a lot of frustration but I did get to the end with out having to do the endless save and load stuff.

So I started on medium here, and it began so nice! 140 gold to start IoA, had a horseman with 47 hp for goodness sakes, several archers close to going up that were 32 hp or above, a 39 hp fighter ready to advance, and the wolf riders and one level one archer just cleaned me out.

There was one orchish archer - I was driving from the river to cut the orcs off from the villages in the northwest and there was a level 1 archer there. Daylight (afternoon), he's on grass land and I hit him with my 47 hp horseman - this would turn him to a knight - right? Nothing, not a scratch. So I hit him with my loyal horseman. Nothing. I completely surrounded the dude and he lived through it all.

So all of a sudden it's dusk, I'm out of formation and here come the wolf riders and a troll whelp, and the guy shoots my 47 hp horseman and hits all of them and I ended up losing my 47 hp horseman and my 39 hp fighter.

I shrugged it off and went on to SoE, and did good, good tactics, waited when I should have waited, lured the critters into my ground at my time, had a bunch of money, had a Shyde, a white mage, another mage 1 point from red, a captain, 2 knights, 2 avengers and a hero.

I did good on Crossroads, PoW - advanced a lot of people, but only had 340+ gold - and got my clock cleaned on the Revenge scene. Revenats just no longer die, they are impossible to kill. Either the map is smaller or the walking dead are faster. You can no longer wait til dawn to fight either the blue or the yellow before the walking dead get there. Before the time the white mage from the isle of the damned appeared I was cleaned out again.

I played and replayed the scene for 5 hours last night and using different tactics. Using up a bunch of my good units almost cleaned out the blues (southwest fort) and I would have been able to get in the fort and use the hills for defense and made it til the end - but why bother?

I just deleted all my saves, if I play again I'll start over.

Very frustrating, I'm usually pretty good at games like this.

[podunk]

By the way - left something out.

The new version is much better looking. The new music is better than the old, as well as the sound effects. It's a nice game, you folks must have worked your butts off and it shows!

Is there anyway to turn off auto save? I nosed around some of the config files and didn't see anything.

[Elvish_Star]

To come back on topic, I think that there is one specific thing in Wesnoth that is too hard to be fun while playing campaigns. This is the fact that in any scenario you might be doomed from the beginning without knowing it. Especially if you have insufficient gold/units. Perhaps a "min gold amount" should be awarded in easy/medium, and the computer might hint an idea about whether you have 80%, 100%, 120%, 150% of the leveled units necessary to win the scenario.

[podunk]

Well, it's not all bad! Just gotta hold your mouth right. 380 gold and I won Revenge of the Princess going away

I started over, and changed tactics. It seems you need to play a lot more aggressively, For instance, when I break through a line and see there is a choke point ahead I rush to block the choke point with ZOC and let my wounded and healers/magic users deal with the stragglers rather than resolving all the fights then advancing. Which ends up slowing you down on advancements for your fighting units some because your you lose a lot more wounded but advances your healers and magic users *much* faster so it seems a good trade.

When you first become able to recruit a unit, the first few are always high hit point units (except for magic users - who have become *very* wimpy), and are usually either quick or strong. When you protect them and expend your low hit point units to soften the critters up they advance to some very strong useful units.

Hanging back in the woods or hills waiting for the period when your opponents are -25% in damage doesn't seem to work as well, especially when there is more than one team of critters? When I try this now I lose the money battle and they get so many villages that their income gets to great to overcome.

So! Advancing a "quick" mage to Mage of light comes in very handy. When I have a battle line I move Konrad *and* the Mage of Light down the line in battle, this takes away the +25% damage for chaotic units plus gives the leadership thing from Konrad. Don't know what I'll do when I get to the scenes where there are multiple lawful leaders, but I'm sure I'll figure it out.

Monsters are tougher for sure, but if you can conserve and advance your first early recruits of a unit (47 hit point horsemen and dwarfs come to mind) so are you.

Something I don't understand though - this may be a bug? Used to be in Valley of Death The Princesses revenge I could take my loyal knight, give him the North Holy water and park him on a village. The Wraiths would attack, he would kill them in at most 2 strikes, he would advance to Grand Knight and I would go up and knock off the North bad guy with him. Now wraiths kill him? I advanced him to a paladin this time, and he still couldn't kill Wraiths at all, I barely got him out alive.

So anyway! I like it! This is a much better game than it was - fix the auto save thing and I'll buy it.

[Nimiria]

I really like this game, but its really very hard in the campaigns because of this frustrating turn limit all the time and that speed/rush is a must to get some gold for the next scenario.

It would be fine if there could be a way to setup the campaign to have no turn limits (except those maps where you have to survive for X turns) and/or get a minimum of gold each map to have the possibillity to win with, so quick winnig could give a fine bonus but would be no must to win a later map.

Both would be great, so if you like it to take you time with building an army and atack, it would be much more fun them, and if you are quick you still have a bonus of gold as a reward.

[DoctorJ]

So: either the AI should have a little less resources (as to allow you to win with decent planning and suboptimal luck) or the randomness should be reduced - let's say with the damage based around a bell curve, and average damage being REALLY likely.

When i play it seems that the random number generator is biased in favor of the AI. My units miss much more often than would be indicated by the stated hit percentage, while the enemy hits much more often than they should. An extreme example happened during the Bay of Pearls. As Dave Barry used to say, i'm not making this up. I had a Naga surrounded by six Mermen. All six Mermen missed every time, while the Naga managed to get two blows in against each Merman. If it wasn't for the ability to load saves, i would long ago have quit this game as being unwinnable.

[Nimiria]

I agree, the AI propably has better chances. Very often my troops miss with 60 %, let us say3 units with each 4 hits, and all they can do together is one, just one (from 12!) hits, while the AI has 40 % and hits with 7 from 9 hits...

Against the AI I have this hmmm strange hit/miss very often. Even 2 mages miss with 70 % almost all atacks against a half dead unit. Something must be there that imrpoves the AIs luck ;p

One time I had 4 Fighter units with 3 and 4 atacks against one unit from the AI with 60 % chance to hit, the unit just needed 2 hits to go down, all 4 together just did one hit and the AI super unit missed a mix from 40 - 60 % just one time, so after this fight it still was there and 4 of my units where taken half down.. thats not fair

[JW]

Could somebody PLEASE change the title of this thread so that "to hard" -> "too hard" please?

Also, over the course of a long campaign you will get really bad runs of luck. I don't have a problem with this. My problem is that I never get really good runs of luck. My good luck is always mild at best.

[neroden]

The engine is not too hard: it's very flexible. Some of the campaigns and scenarios.... that's another matter.

More "not-too-hard" campaigns would definitely be nice. Tale of Two Brothers on 'easy' is genuinely pretty easy; South Guard on 'easy' is a pretty comfortable difficulty for me.

HTTT unfortunately absolutely requires save-restore methods to win, because there are a number of very uncompromising points. In a good "not-too-hard" campaign, if you have particularly bad luck or judgement in one scenario, but still manage to beat it, you should usually be able to recover from the setback fairly easily: the subsequent scenarios should be harder but not impossible. Whereas the advice for HTTT is "if you can't beat a scenario, go back and replay the previous one." That's BORING. If I get that advice, I'm more inclined to hack the savefile to add in whatever I was "supposed" to get from the previous scenario, 'cause replaying it just after I won it fairly well is not my idea of fun.

[Sly]

Whereas the advice for HTTT is "if you can't beat a scenario, go back and replay the previous one." That's BORING. If I get that advice, I'm more inclined to hack the savefile to add in whatever I was "supposed" to get from the previous scenario, 'cause replaying it just after I won it fairly well is not my idea of fun.

Honing your skills by replaying a known scenario that gone bad is never a bad idea

Whereas I think you're right : for easy campains if you manage to beat a scenario with great difficulties the following one shouldn't be impossible.
But for more RPG or story orientend campains (i.e harder) yes it should