Problems with Gold and the Leveling System in BfW?

[Caphriel]

If you crash your car in a racing game and lose, are you going to complain that all the walls, scenery, and traffic need to be removed? No. You're going to wait for your car to respawn and then try to make up lost time.

Not sure if you were responding to me or the OP originally, but my complaint was that in Wesnoth, you can't see the wall (the nasty surprise in the next scenario that you needed to prepare for in advance) until you've hit it. After driving a lot of maps, you can start to take reasonably good guesses as to where the next wall is going to be, but until you've driving this particular course, you're still going to smash your car up unavoidably a few times. You can avoid this by driving very slow and carefully, but you'll still lose the race.

Does that analogy work? I'll try another one.

A Wesnoth campaign is like a racing game where you must play a certain number of maps in sequence, and if you come in first, you proceed to the next map. However, to proceed to certain maps, your cumulative prior time must be less than some value, which you find out when reaching that map. Then you must start over and try again, if your time wasn't low enough. This time is sometimes much lower than the sum of what is needed to win each individual race.

[Gambit]

Well there we have it. Solutions for both before and after your veteran unit dies car crashes.

No one has complained about veteran units dying. Are you intentionally trolling?

Oi! Accuse me of trolling? That's ironic in this particular circumstance.
He said there's too much emphasis on leveling up units. And then they die and you can't win because you don't have any. And then he suggested we fix this "problem" by allowing you to recruit all level units. He is expressing discontent (definition of "complain") with units dying and how much their deaths affect the outcome of the game.

Caphriel: Mostly the OP.
Though I see what you're saying about how it is hard to balance not crashing with with winning the race. Now with the word "hard" we're back on the topic of difficulty. Yes it is difficult. But isn't that what makes it fun?

[Daracos]

thinking about it i had an idea.
experienced troops cost 3 gold (or 2) per round. thats okay, they demand a higher wage than newbies. but why do they cost 20 gold to recall, while a normal elvish swordsman cost 14.

i think a new recruit needs proper training, weapons and armour, or a horse. that would be an investment. but he doesnt need high wages because he is a newb that explains 1 gold per turn.

so why dont you make recalling cheaper, lets say 10 or 15 gold. because already equipped and experienced soldiers would not need all the starting money newbies would do.
i know that realism doesnt matter. it was just a thought.
it might solve the gold problem or at least make it less grave (considered the fact, it is grave).

is there any link between scenario starting gold and difficulty level?

[Caphriel]

Though I see what you're saying about how it is hard to balance not crashing with with winning the race. Now with the word "hard" we're back on the topic of difficulty. Yes it is difficult. But isn't that what makes it fun?

That's a matter of taste It's not to my personal taste, but that's why I play multiplayer.

[thespaceinvader]

Daracos: because recalls are a single fixed price for any unit - level 1, 2, 3 or 4. Sure, you waste a little money compared to buying a new level one (in some cases, for anything costing 20 or more new, you're better off with recalls, you don't lose money, you get perhaps a little experience, and you know the traits) but you get a unit with a reasonable amount of XP. And if you're getting anything that costs over 20, or more than level 1, you're saving cash.

[drwilly]

By the way, i don't think that recruiting higher level units is a solution for this, as the prices are designed such that normally your forces are more powerful recruiting only level 1's.

Is that so?
Recruiting a Mage costs 20 gold, recalling a Great Mage costs ... 20 gold.

Now I know what you're going to say, a Great Mage costs more upkeep. In practice this is very often simply irrelevant, because all you neey to do to win a scenario is fight off an initial onslaught. After that the map is pretty much yours and you can re-gain the money you spent on your high level units and their upkeep.
This happens on all maps where your opponent has a lot of starting money (initial onslaught) or you yourself start with little money (because Mage/Great Mage both cost 20g to recruit/recall)

[Daracos]

yeah i actually dont see a problem with all this.
i think having played a game for one week or so doesnt not give you the right complaining about its balance or imbalance or beeing too difficult. i think you need to get used to it first by playing various campaigns and scenarios.
normally when u start playing excessivly against human players. any ai is just ridiculously easy to defeat.

i think people shouldnt worry so much about the levels of their units. when you try to focus on one unit to level it up, you tend to play inefficiently overall because you get attached to that unit and dont mind other losses just for "that" unit to get the exp.
but if you dont care for levels and just play as effectively as possible with all units, even newbs, that the levels come easy for all of them you soon have plenty of lvl 2 and lvl 3 units.

i also think its totally true that upkeep is a major factor when you recruit troops. in the beginning of a scenario you have not many villages so you need cheap units which are fast to go and claim some. so when the light infantry and cavalry has won some ground, the heavy forces come in to secure it.
thats how i play at the moment.
i really had many scenarios where the -12 gold per turn have cut my turn limit to much less than the scenarios official turn limit. so this is where economy and troop composition come into play. and i like it!

edit: also where is your imagination folks. have you ever thought about how hard it is to move an army through an entire continent? yeah thats not making you any richer every day that passes. you have to worry about how to feed all that men and how to keep them motivated. yep if you fail at that, all tactical finesse might be invane.

[silent]

to the OP

If your difficulty extends from a particular scenario(s), try posting in the strategies and tips section your problem, starting gold, recall list and anything else which may allow us to help you through the difficulty.

[Gambit]

By the way, i don't think that recruiting higher level units is a solution for this, as the prices are designed such that normally your forces are more powerful recruiting only level 1's.

Is that so?
Recruiting a Mage costs 20 gold, recalling a Great Mage costs ... 20 gold.

"recruiting higher level units" (What yogibear said) != "recalling a Great Mage" (What you said)

If you were to actually recruit a Great Mage (not recall) it would cost you 72 gold. Which is enough spearmen to surround and kill it in one turn if your luck is good.
This is why the current system trumps recruiting high level units. The tradeoff in the size of your army is just too high.

[fozzy]

I generally agree that recruiting a higher level unit is not cost efficient on a scenario basis (as it's currently implemented), but in a campaign's scope, it's different and might be worth it.

Those 5 spearmen will cost at least 70 gold next scenario, and perhaps more if you choose to recall some. The Great Mage will cost 20 gold the next time you recall the unit. Higher level units on the recall list are money in the bank for later scenarios because the recall cost is so much cheaper.

[Gestalt]

The game is not only a strategy game for each individual scenario, but also you have to have a strategy across a whole campaign. Thus, getting the right units (and gold) for later scenarios is part of the strategy.

Unfortunately, anyone playing a campaign for the first time, especially playing Wesnoth for the first time, has no foundation to formulate a strategy such as that. You can't formulate a meaningful strategy in a total information blackout, which is what missions you've never done always are. Experienced players learn some heuristics, and can generalize from previous campaigns, but given that you have no idea what you'll be fighting next scenario, much less five scenarios down the line, you can't really make any long term plan other than "get as much gold as possible and level a balanced army."

And even given some experience with Wesnoth, the player could think they're doing fine, finishing each scenario with a bit of bonus gold and a couple new experienced units, and then they hit a scenario that shows they're not doing good enough.

A good example of this problem was Wesmere, where

Spoiler:

If you didn't know you're going to lose most of your recall list, a perfectly good strategy could fail abruptly through no fault of the player.

I think this is the root of the original poster's complaint: You don't know if you're doing well enough until you hit a surprise wall, at which point you have to replay one or more scenarios. Certainly you'll do better this time, because now you have foreknowledge of the scripted surprises in each mission as well as what you'll need for future missions, but it's frustrating to some players that the only way to succeed is to fail and gain foreknowledge.

I think what Caphriel said (quoted above) succinctly captures my point.

Not knowing what lies ahead, the only tactic you can really adopt is to try to end each scenario with as much gold as possible and with your men leveled-up as much as possible. And as one poster noted, in the latter case, it actually pays to have a number of men “ready” to advance to the next level as they are concomitantly healed when they eventually are able to level-up (hopefully during a rough patch in the next scenario). Still, in the grand scheme of a campaign, chronic use of this “rule-of-thumb” to achieve success seems unsatisfying, at least in a strategic sense (more on this below).

At any rate, although I’m a newbie (I’ve been playing for a couple of months now), I’d like to make it clear that my comments don’t stem from frustration over not being able to complete any particular scenario or campaign (i.e., I’m not just here to rant because I can’t finish a given scenario or campaign). Instead, my comments reflect my overall impression from having worked my way though several campaigns: An Orcish Incursion, The South Guard, Liberty, Heir to the Throne (wasn’t able to finish because of a bug with the iphone version), and Hammer of Thursagan (just one more scenario to go!). In particular, in the latter two, I had to go back several times (sometimes to the beginning) so as to make sure I had sufficient resources to complete a later scenario that I was having trouble with.

Now, reading various comments on this forum and from various websites, it seems the practice of having to return to earlier scenarios to complete campaigns is ubiquitous. And I would submit that if players aren’t doing this, then they are likely “save-loading”. So, to reiterate, if so many people find it necessary to engage in these practices just to complete a campaign, then doesn’t that mean there is something fundamentally wrong here? And, by the way, why allow “save-loading” at all? I wonder for those players that unscrupulously use it (and I’m guessing these are RPG fans that like seeing their characters – in this case, their army – rise to God-like status) how much their enjoyment of the game would drop if that function was suddenly disabled?

And this isn’t a “too easy/too difficult” issue. Rather, it’s about how the challenge placed in front of the player is overcome. Ideally, I want to feel like I beat a scenario because of some brilliant strategy I came up with; I don’t want to feel my success was because of superior numbers (a lot of gold), high level units, or even luck (I’m staying away from this one – ha-ha). Unfortunately, often when I win I feel it had more to do with the aforementioned factors than with the strategy I implemented. Similarly, when I lose, I feel it had less to do with my strategy and more to do with the fact I simply didn’t have the resources.

Let me try to make this concrete. I first played through Hammer of Thursagan on hard. Many scenarios I had to do several times (which is how I like it!) before I eventually beat them, but even when I beat them I didn’t feel it was so much because I hit upon a great strategy as it was because of some stroke of luck (for example, my dwarvish thunderers all achieved their hits on a particular turn, or my AI allies did a better job this time around killing orcs). Now, after becoming frustrated on subsequent scenarios of Hammer of Thursagan, and getting tired of mining earlier scenarios for resources (“save-loading” would have been the easy though, in my mind, dishonorable thing to do), I tried repeating the campaign on normal difficulty. Well, without too much trouble I’ve made my way to the last scenario, and I have managed to horde plenty of resources (gold and leveled units). I must say the latter has been much more enjoyable. Still, I feel the joy of coming up with a brilliant strategy for defeating my enemies has been robbed from me: being honest with myself, I can’t help feel that my success for each scenario has been more a function of the number of men and high level units I’ve been able to obtain as opposed to any strategic brilliance on my part.

In the final analysis, I guess it is what it is. There is inevitably a trade-off between the RPG elements and the strategic elements: though there is some joy in accumulating gold and seeing units level-up over a campaign, such a practice means that players more often than not will complete scenarios via superior numbers and firepower rather than through the application of a well thought-out strategy. And, I guess, therefore, any discontent on my part stems from the fact that I prefer the latter to former, that’s all.

Finally, to reiterate my original suggestion for dealing with the leveling issue, in the event that certain leveled-up units do perish, and in the event that they are necessary to complete the next scenario, why not just offer replacement units (i.e., the option to recruit a new veteran unit)? I guess I feel that if each scenario was self-contained strategically (i.e., that completion of each scenario didn’t depend upon resources garnered from previous scenarios), that it would make for a much more enjoyable gaming experience. But, then again, this may simply be a matter of taste, my taste.

[Caphriel]

There was a suggestion a while back for campaign developers to include some sort of fallback starting resources in terms of recalls and gold for players that had insufficient resources to complete a mission they'd arrived at. It was pretty roundly argued against for several reasons (one of which was more work for campaign developers), but looking up the thread may be edifying. I can't find it off-hand, though.

You're right, though, that it's a matter of taste. Compare to, say, the old Mario games. Wesnoth is a lot less forgiving than most modern games, and while I generally enjoy that, the time investment required exceeds my available time for playing it. I don't mind replaying a half hour or so, but replaying the last few weeks worth is never going to happen, for me at least. So I stick to multiplayer, which limits the time investment per discrete game.

[chaoticwanderer]

It can see where you're coming from, but from my experience with Wesnoth, most every scenario can be beaten without too many resources from prior scenarios and without save-scumming. And of course, this depends on your actual skill as a player and the difficulty of the scenario. The campaigns I've fully beaten include, AtoTB, Liberty, HoT, DiD, and OI, all of which I played on normal or hard difficulty without save-scumming. I'm not here to brag, I'm just saying it can be done.

Just something to consider though, is that campaigns are balanced with your 'carryover' from previous scenarios in mind. Some scenario levels are designed to be smooth and easy, where you can get some more gold and experienced units, while others are designed where you'll have to throw away a lot of gold and money to win. If you're playing a scenario where you have to throw away so much resources to the point where you feel you cannot win the campaign, you're likely playing at too high of a difficulty level and/or the campaign itself is too difficult for you at this point. Easier campaigns/difficulty levels are made so that it is easier for you to get by without sacrificing too many units/gold, so that subsequent scenarios will be more easy as well. Harder difficulty levels require extremely careful spending and use of resources so that you can beat individual scenarios as well as be prepared for later levels. Beating campaigns on higher difficulties is very rewarding, but requires more time and better strategy.

But anyway, as others have suggested, I'd recommend just adjusting the difficulty. You'll find that as you improve, you'll be able to play through campaigns with more ease and not feel screwed over by previous scenarios, because wesnoth campaigns are balanced with that in mind.

[Caphriel]

Never mind save loading, did you beat all those campaigns without having to go back and redo a previous scenario, on your first playthrough? Because it sounds like you're entirely ignoring the point of the discussion, in favor of assuming the participants aren't good at Wesnoth

[Velensk]

The only time I've had to restart a campaign or even go back a few levels was when I played HttT for the first time and on TRoW on hard (back when it had the old gold carryover system).

On other campaigns I've always had the tools I've needed and the amount of gold needed to continue. This may be that those were two of the first few campaigns I've played and I've gotten better since then or it may just be because other campaigns have easier requirements.