Battle for Westnoth Feedback

[shackleton1]

Hi!

I just finished the Battle for Wesnoth scenario.

Thanks for a very fun game! The scenarios were really good. The story was good. Picking up magic items was a really nice touch

I have a few suggestions. Feel free to disregard, just my thoughts.

1) Undo Move

Allow "undo" on missions with fog if you do not discover a unit. I can understand not wanting ability to undo when you discover an enemy unit, but it gets annoying that you can't undo a move when you are just rearranging your units and in the process you "discovered" a tile that was empty. The ability to undo such moves wouldn't aid cheating since you wouldn't be able to undo if you discovered a unit; and save/load already allows such behaviour.

2) Recruitment

Allow more character units to recruit troops. I found it was never worth using the main character, even when I gave him a magic sword and had him up to level 3. If you needed troops and he was in the battle line, he would have to go all the way back to the castle, and he's not very fast... It would be more fun if you could leave someone else in the castle. (Forgive me if I made some kind of error here.. I realise now that I didn't try comprehensively with the other characters... but I'm fairly sure I tried it once or twice early on and it wasn't possible...)

3) Experience

The way that experience works I found to be a little restrictive. Preservation of your experienced units is key. For me, this was a bit of a drag. It meant I had to be constantly cautious. Gambling just wasn't worth it. Although you could be aggressive to a fashion, I always fell into the temptation to micromanage the battle in order to preserve my experienced units. Although this did add to the challenge, and although my efforts were well rewarded, I thought this did detract from the fun sometimes.

Perhaps you might consider allowing experienced units to be replaced after the battle. I.e. if you lose a level 3 unit, you can promote one of your other units to level 3.

I think this might allow for a better balance between offensive and defensive play. Offensive play = more experience because you kill more units. Defensive play = less risk of suddenly finding you've wasted all your best units and can't get them replaced until the next battle.

4) Time Limit

The time limit system is very good and well balanced. However, I think the campaign could benefit from a few battles where the time doesn't matter; where you could really take your time. I loved the really time intensive scenarios where the enemy were closing in and you just had to get to the other side; but on some of the more battle like scenarios I found the time limit to detract a little from the fun. There was no point in master strategies and tactical choices often fell by the wayside when weighed against a few extra turns of gold bonus.

Thanks again for the great game! I will be enthusiastically playing the other campaigns

[pauxlo]

I have a few suggestions. Feel free to disregard, just my thoughts.

1) Undo Move

Allow "undo" on missions with fog if you do not discover a unit. I can understand not wanting ability to undo when you discover an enemy unit, but it gets annoying that you can't undo a move when you are just rearranging your units and in the process you "discovered" a tile that was empty. The ability to undo such moves wouldn't aid cheating since you wouldn't be able to undo if you discovered a unit; and save/load already allows such behaviour.

The thing is, that knowing the fact that there is _no_ enemy unit may also be valueable information.
Have a look at the context menu (right mouse click) - there is a option to turn off the fog updating, which enables you to undo your moves.

Paŭlo

[Dameon]

I am another player new to Wesnoth and want to start by saying how amazed I am at how good this game looks, plays, sounds, and feels for an open source project. I've played a variety of open source games, and this stands head and shoulders above the rest IMO. The idea that I can actually create campaigns once I am more familiar with the interface is something that excites me a great deal, too.

However, there is one thing about the game that drives me crazy. I am a veteran of old-school tactical RPGs (Shining Force, X-Com, etc). In the games I've played, when units die during a battle typically one of two things could happen:

1) They could be resurrected after the battle
2) You could replace them with units of similar strength after the battle

In Wesnoth though, it is something new:

3) Replace them with weaker units while the AI suffers no such restriction

I understand the general nature of soldiers and armies in a strategy game, and when I played my first campaign I found myself losing 1-2 units a battle. Fine, I thought, not a big deal. However, by the time I got to the 5th or 6th scenario of the campaign, about half of my units were new recruits/level 1 and the other half were experienced survivors. The AI, however, was able to recruit units starting at level 2-3. This made the battles progressively more difficult as the AI always had a general level advantage over me. It got to the point where it was simply no longer fun to play for that reason.

I decided to start the campaign again, and this time with my lesson learned, I now simply revert back to the previous turn whenever one of my units dies. This allowed me to start on equal footing with the AI in later scenarios and I'm having more fun overall now. I'm hardly a tactical novice, of course, but even at my most cautious luck and the RNG can sometimes cause units to die unexpectedly. I want it to be clear that I am 100% in favor of the RNG (ie the luck factor) and of units dying as part of any battle. It just seems silly to me that my army actually gets weaker as the scenarios progress if I allow even 1-2 veterans to die during any given battle (it adds up, after all), while at the same time the AI's armies are getting stronger. Sure, I could win with only a handful of experienced units, but that necessitates constantly sacrificing weak units and always playing defensively. I hate that my strategy is boxed in/limited like that.

As I said, I'm new here and have no idea if this argument has been made before, and/or if I'm just beating a dead horse. In the grand scheme of things, I love this game and with the ability to revert to a previous turn to save experienced units built in, I can play it and still have fun. I just really wish I had the chance to try more offensive/aggressive tactics, and even, yes, to have units die, without drastically weakening my army in future battles of the same campaign.

[Soliton]

However, there is one thing about the game that drives me crazy. I am a veteran of old-school tactical RPGs (Shining Force, X-Com, etc). In the games I've played, when units die during a battle typically one of two things could happen:

1) They could be resurrected after the battle
2) You could replace them with units of similar strength after the battle

What version of X-Com did you play?

[shackleton1]

Ah! The X-com games! I played the Enemy Unknown and Terror in the Deep (first and second ones). They were great I recently picked the whole series up again on steam, although I haven't managed to get into the later versions.

There's an open source remake of enemy unknown somewhere...

They also had experience gained by units, and a lot of your men died so you'd lose experienced men. However, the difference between an experienced soldier and an inexperienced soldier was very slight. You felt a slight twinge of regret when your captain walked slap bang into an ambush, but it had a negligible impact on your next battle.

Battle for Wesnoth, the difference is very large, particularly when considering hitpoints. I like the big difference, it's nice, but without a means of (quickly) replacing the unit it does mean you have to spend a lot of time preserving them.

Alternatively, you could smooth out the hitpoints between different levels of units. I'm not sure of exact numbers, but my impression is that higher level units have twice or more the hitpoints of level 1 units. This makes an enormous difference; simply because they can stand up to a few attacks, giving you a chance to retreat them before they get smushed.

Always the way with forum posts, you reread it and realise you didn't explain very well...

Regarding point 4) above... there was never any point in, say, circling around north so that your elves could take advantage of the forest. This is because of the time limit.

[Dameon]

Ah! The X-com games! I played the Enemy Unknown and Terror in the Deep (first and second ones). They were great I recently picked the whole series up again on steam, although I haven't managed to get into the later versions.

There's an open source remake of enemy unknown somewhere...

They also had experience gained by units, and a lot of your men died so you'd lose experienced men. However, the difference between an experienced soldier and an inexperienced soldier was very slight. You felt a slight twinge of regret when your captain walked slap bang into an ambush, but it had a negligible impact on your next battle.

Battle for Wesnoth, the difference is very large, particularly when considering hitpoints. I like the big difference, it's nice, but without a means of (quickly) replacing the unit it does mean you have to spend a lot of time preserving them.

I played Enemy Unknown back in the day as well, and also picked it up on Steam when it came out late last year. That's what got me back into this tactical gaming binge I am on right now. As you said with X-Com there wasn't a huge difference between newer and more experienced soldiers, and even with that being the case, when your experienced soldiers died it would lead to promotions of other units to take their place. As with Wesnoth, there was a fair amount of luck involved, but it worked well because the punishment for being unlucky wasn't as severe as it is in this game. The enemies in X-Com gradually got stronger, but it was usually through things like psionic strength/armor values/etc, and the way you countered that was mainly through research and technological advancement. It was really a very nice balance overall which is why the game is such a classic.

Wesnoth reminds me more of a tactical RPG, of the Shining Force/Vandal Hearts variety. It is in no doubt partially due to the fantasy setting, which is one of the things that drew me to this game. Even with only three levels for your characters, though, the strength difference is significant between the various levels, and if you don't play cautious/defensive overall, you are going to be suffering in the long run during a campaign. The RPG elements of this game are clearly present (class promotions, magic items, leader death = scenario failure), but my belief is if you are going to have tangible unit progression you need to have a way to resurrect or effectively replace those units if they die. Without that the available effective strategies you can use in battles are really quite limited, IMO.

[Turuk]

Hi!

I just finished the Battle for Wesnoth scenario.

Thanks for a very fun game! The scenarios were really good. The story was good. Picking up magic items was a really nice touch

I have a few suggestions. Feel free to disregard, just my thoughts.

1) Undo Move

Allow "undo" on missions with fog if you do not discover a unit. I can understand not wanting ability to undo when you discover an enemy unit, but it gets annoying that you can't undo a move when you are just rearranging your units and in the process you "discovered" a tile that was empty. The ability to undo such moves wouldn't aid cheating since you wouldn't be able to undo if you discovered a unit; and save/load already allows such behaviour.

2) Recruitment

Allow more character units to recruit troops. I found it was never worth using the main character, even when I gave him a magic sword and had him up to level 3. If you needed troops and he was in the battle line, he would have to go all the way back to the castle, and he's not very fast... It would be more fun if you could leave someone else in the castle. (Forgive me if I made some kind of error here.. I realise now that I didn't try comprehensively with the other characters... but I'm fairly sure I tried it once or twice early on and it wasn't possible...)

3) Experience

The way that experience works I found to be a little restrictive. Preservation of your experienced units is key. For me, this was a bit of a drag. It meant I had to be constantly cautious. Gambling just wasn't worth it. Although you could be aggressive to a fashion, I always fell into the temptation to micromanage the battle in order to preserve my experienced units. Although this did add to the challenge, and although my efforts were well rewarded, I thought this did detract from the fun sometimes.

Perhaps you might consider allowing experienced units to be replaced after the battle. I.e. if you lose a level 3 unit, you can promote one of your other units to level 3.

I think this might allow for a better balance between offensive and defensive play. Offensive play = more experience because you kill more units. Defensive play = less risk of suddenly finding you've wasted all your best units and can't get them replaced until the next battle.

4) Time Limit

The time limit system is very good and well balanced. However, I think the campaign could benefit from a few battles where the time doesn't matter; where you could really take your time. I loved the really time intensive scenarios where the enemy were closing in and you just had to get to the other side; but on some of the more battle like scenarios I found the time limit to detract a little from the fun. There was no point in master strategies and tactical choices often fell by the wayside when weighed against a few extra turns of gold bonus.

Thanks again for the great game! I will be enthusiastically playing the other campaigns

I'm currently reading through the past week of threads since I'm coming back from vacation, so I apologize if these are too short.

1) Already mentioned to you, use delay shroud update, it will work for you.
2) Do a search for multiple leaders, two leaders, or more leader recruits. You will see that this has been brought up and discuss before, with not much success given the current game engine.
3) This could be coded into a UMC campaign possibly, but not into mainline, as it would significantly alter how the game would be played.
4) One of the major factors of the game is weighing experience gained versus gold gained and running against the time. Choose a lower difficulty setting if you find it too restrictive for you, or else you can also edit the game files themselves by altering the WML (just use find for the turn limit).

As for Dameon's idea on resurrecting units, do a search on that for well, you can see that it has been decided long ago that it will not be accepted into mainline.

[Joram]

Regarding experienced units dieing: Recruit a lot of cannon fodder.

Footpads are excellent in this regard. They are relatively cheap, they are hard to hit, they have both attack types, and they are fast.

In campaigns, I generally recruit 2-4 footpads just to take hits. The AI will almost always attack a footpad, if given a choice. I usually use them to cover my retreat at night (when the enemy is doing the most damage; during the day, shields are usually not needed).

Since the AI prefers footpads, you don't even have to put them in front. A line of V-F-V will mean that the two enemies in front of the footpad will attack it, thus giving them one less space from which to target your veterans. As veteran units are usually taken down by 2-3 enemies, depriving them of one space to attack your unit can make the difference between life and death.

Other units can be used, but I have come to prefer footpads over all others as cannon fodder (However, I'm naturally biased towards fast units)

One more note in the footpads favor is that generally I use them at night, to slow up the advancing orcs/undead. If I were to use Elvish Fighters or Spearmen, they wouldn't do so well as far as return damage.

I used to be a survival freak, and if I lost a good unit, I'd go back and redo it. On the flip side, I had a very high sense of honor, and didn't like to "auto-save", so I'd usually just start the scenario over (or go back to turns 3-4). It got really wearying after a while, as I had to play every scenario 5-6 times before moving on.

But since then, I've started using cannon fodder (I've also learned that letting a unit die now and then isn't such a bad thing ); so everything is going along much nicer.

EDIT: I don't think that allowing you to upgrade units at the end of a scenario to replace the ones you lost is a good idea, because it would, imo, make unit death essentially meaningless.

[Dameon]

I am not surprised the idea has come up before and been rejected, but I figured I'd put my two cents in anyway rather than dig through lots of old forums posts. Really, with the extremely well-designed and user friendly autosave ability that allows you to replay any given turn, it's not difficult to avoid losing veterans. I understand what Joram says about having a high sense of honor; to me it's that very code that prevents me from recruiting Star Trek-like "redshirts" (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Redshirt_(character)) just for the purpose of getting them killed so my veterans can survive. As long as I use ZOCs wisely, hold my line, and move injured units back to heal, I usually only end up losing a unit if I have particularly bad luck and it's not hard to go back a turn and prevent it from happening. While I'd prefer to let the bad luck stand as I actually like that aspect of the game, the penalty of not having enough veteran units seems far too severe in a longer campaign and would force me to entirely change my core strategy in favor of recruiting redshirts, which I am loathe to do.

I really do enjoy the way the game is designed and appreciate all the work that has gone into making it successful. The objectives are dynamic and unique, and the story is interesting and fun to follow. Even when I found this aspect of the game I don't like, the designers have helpfully put in features that let me avoid it, play the way I want to and have fun doing so. The great thing is that if I go play multiplayer (once I have a bit more experience with learning about the various armies/units), both sides start with the same resources so this issue doesn't exist in that aspect of the game. I applaud the versatility that went into designing this game that allows every user to play it the way they want to during the solo experience and look forward to testing out my skills against real people once I've developed them a bit.

[Turuk]

I am not surprised the idea has come up before and been rejected, but I figured I'd put my two cents in anyway rather than dig through lots of old forums posts

Do not be surprised then if you are not met with a cordial response, as users are encouraged to search and avoid bringing up old topics for precisely the reasons you have run into. Rehashing an old argument or idea yet again serves little purpose.


As for not having enough veteran units, this could be a matter of your play style, as you have noted that you do not like losing even level 1 units as cannon fodder in order to protect the others. This is a game based on combat and warfare, so death and loss of units is inevitable... but you are free to alter the code and/or save and load the game to your heart's desire.

[Dalkor]

Multiplayer games alleviate all the problems you've brought up.

Shroud reveal delay allows you to undo any move.
Certain smaller maps allow you to use your leader in battle and still keep him within range of the keep. (Hamlets, not Isar's. Isar's is evil.)
The games are one-offs so who's left after the battle doesn't matter.
There is no turn limit.

Try out some skirmish games against AI, or take yourself to the multiplayer server and see if you enjoy that face of the game more than the campaigns.

[Dameon]

Do not be surprised then if you are not met with a cordial response, as users are encouraged to search and avoid bringing up old topics for precisely the reasons you have run into. Rehashing an old argument or idea yet again serves little purpose.

I disagree with you here. Even people who have taken part in a discussion about a particular topic before may be willing to do so again with newer members of the community. By doing so, they are engaging us and making us feel more welcome. If reading about the same topic which you personally have seen discussed to death bothers you, it's simple enough for you to avoid answering it. I don't like the idea of veterans being less than cordial to newer members who want to discuss various aspects of the game. After all, I'm willing to bet that in the time since the game has come out the vast majority of the various topics that CAN be discussed have been at some point. Saying "let's not rehash this again" serves little purpose other than to stifle community growth.

[Turuk]

I disagree with you here. Even people who have taken part in a discussion about a particular topic before may be willing to do so again with newer members of the community. By doing so, they are engaging us and making us feel more welcome. If reading about the same topic which you personally have seen discussed to death bothers you, it's simple enough for you to avoid answering it. I don't like the idea of veterans being less than cordial to newer members who want to discuss various aspects of the game. After all, I'm willing to bet that in the time since the game has come out the vast majority of the various topics that CAN be discussed have been at some point. Saying "let's not rehash this again" serves little purpose other than to stifle community growth.

Actually, I would say that I have been cordial so far in regards to this entire discussion, and in no way did I imply that veterans are obligated to be less than cordial, as if this was mandated, just that that is likely to happen. I also did not say that discussion of various aspects of the game was frowned upon, but specifically arguments or ideas about Wesnoth that have been discussed and talked about endlessly before, particularly when a conclusion was reached. This serves little purpose but to take away from the forward progress of the game by sidetracking it.

So having people not rehash the same argument actually serves to encourage growth, as it motivates the user to either find a new take on the discussion or to leave it alone to pursue a line of thinking that would actually advance the game. It is noted that if a user has some new angle or take on the idea then they can make an effort to post it, but what purpose would it make to raise the same points yet again? That is why we have the Frequently Proposed Ideas.

[thespaceinvader]

Regarding #4: there's plenty of games where there's no time limit in single play. It's just that they tend to be end-scenario levels. there's only one that i can think of that has one in the middle, and that's Northern Rebirth, the level 'the Pursuit'. BUt most campaigns end on a bit free-for-all with no time limit. It's fun, and a chance to bust out all those level 3 units you've been sitting waiting to use =D