Such a shame

[batoonike]

That would complitely remove any motivation to do well in the previous scenario money-wise.

Though it sure is strange if its nearly impossible to win because you didnt know what to expect.

[AI]

Not entirely: the more money you have, the more units you can field and fight, gaining you more experience, so you boost your recall list faster.

[A-Red]

I third the negative sentiments toward Oblivion, but that's not really what was being suggested for Wesnoth. Oblivion scales the monsters up so they get harder as you get tougher; I think the suggestion Yogibear made was to do the reverse, to some extent, and give the player a break if they had low gold. The rewards for doing a good job would still be there, but there'd be less punishment for mistakes made ten levels ago.

Erm, that's the exact same thing. A double negative is still a positive, y'know. (Usually.)

I mean, making a game easier when someone's having a hard time is the exact same thing as making a game harder when someone's having an easy time. There's no difference. At all. It's the difference between "A game is harder in hard mode than in easy mode" and "A game is easier in easy mode than in hard mode".

Not at all. It matters where you put the baseline and in which direction or directions you modify. You could start with a difficulty of 10, to put a random number to it, and modify only downward to 1 or only upward to 20, or you could do both. Oblivion, being an RPG, started with the lowest possible difficulty, and then the monsters had nowhere to go but up. With Wesnoth, on the other hand, we could take the current difficulty for mainline scenarios as the standard, and only go easier from there, which doesn't raise Oblivion's problem at all.

The bonus doesn't have to be absolute either. For instance, you might only adjust the difficulty from 10 down to a minimum of 5, even if the player's starting gold calls for a difficulty of 1. That way you don't completely negate the bonus of playing well, but you also don't cripple the weak player too much.

[Rya]

Honestly the difficult settings in Wesnoth are currently really bad, because just giving the AI less money doesn't make the campaign automatically easier. I'd rasy see that the easy difficulty would mean "less exp needed for allied units" and "allied units have slightly more HP than usual" instead of "AI gets less gold".

[Luther]

The problem isn't really that Wesnoth is hard, it's that the best strategy for playing campaigns is to spam expendable L1's, but it's hard for a beginning player to realize that, nor is it very fun for someone who prefers to use high level units.

I totally agree with this. (Yes, I'm an RPG fan.) I recently changed the way I play campaigns. I now recruit new units on the first turn of every scenario instead of recalling. Yes, the campaigns got easier, but it greatly diminishes the fun of leveling up units when I don't get to use them right off the bat.

When thinking about this today, I realized this problem might easily be solved by lowering the recall cost to about 10 or so. This leads me to wonder why the recall cost is so high in the first place. Presumably, it's so that you can have the same number of units regardless of the size of your recall list. Personally, I think the player should be rewarded more for not letting their units die. Sure, you'd have access to more high level units, but that's exactly the kind of reward you should expect after grinding them so much. What are people's thoughts on this?

For those who don't know, this idea CABD with a Lua command or, if you don't play MP campaigns on a server, in the data/game_config.cfg file. If this were an official change, it would require rebalancing of the start gold settings in campaigns.

EDIT: I thought about changing the recall cost to 0, but that would make gold largely irrelevant in most scenarios, so I think 10 would be fine.

[Caphriel]

You're missing the point of Wesnoth Wesnoth campaigns are not about using an army consisting of super-powerful units to slaughter your way through missions. If your source of fun in Wesnoth is "leveling up units" you're probably playing the wrong game. Alternatively, investigate some of the user-made RPG addons. Recalls are expensive because higher level units are powerful.

The reward you get for "grinding them so much" and not letting them die is having them when you need them, not "getting to power through scenarios with an elite force of level 3 units" (in most campaigns.)

Wesnoth is not an RPG.

[Luther]

You sound like you're assuming this change would make the game too easy. If someone were to make a new campaign that had a recall cost of 10 and was balanced accordingly, do you believe it would fundamentally change gameplay in a bad way? If so, why?

To put it another way, is there a reason why Wesnoth encourages the use of new recruits?

Sure, recalled units are more powerful, but you already paid to recruit them, and you earned them XP. To charge the player again for a recall seems somewhat arbitrary. I know the game has to charge something to force the player to hold on to houses, but that doesn't explain why the recall cost is what it is.

You seem to think it's more fun the way it is. I'd appreciate if you could tell me why. I'd test my theory myself, but it's easier to ask why things are the way they are then to write a whole new campaign.

[JackBarber]

To the base post of this thread, about the whole FE, AW thing.

The feature where characters actually DIE in Fire Emblem and that you have limited amounts of units, is what makes it MORE of a strategy game than Advance War.

[AI]

No, that makes it more of a tactical game.

[JackBarber]

No, that makes it more of a tactical game.

Aren't strategy games tactical things...?

[Thrawn]

There is a difference between strategy and tactics. Because FE has very predetermined ways it wants the player to go about something (figure out the tactic for the scenario), it's different from Wesnoth, were the right option is based more on how you initially approached things like recruiting, or your general game plan.

[Caphriel]

To put it another way, is there a reason why Wesnoth encourages the use of new recruits?

...

You seem to think it's more fun the way it is. I'd appreciate if you could tell me why. I'd test my theory myself, but it's easier to ask why things are the way they are then to write a whole new campaign.

Nope, I actually have come to dislike the Wesnoth campaigns and don't play them anymore, for reasons mostly unrelated to this, and mostly related to the fact that I don't find the AI to be an interesting opponent. I would actually think the game would be more fun without recalls at all. But to answer your first question, I believe Wesnoth encourages the use of new recruits because that's the way it was designed.

To quote Dave from the Wesnoth Philosophy wiki page, "The focus would be around building your own army, and watching it grow as its members became more experienced." Especially consider Heir to the Throne, the first campaign. Over the course of the campaign, you (should, anyway), accumulate a large army of level 3 units by the last mission, at which point you pull them all out for an epic battle. You can't grow your army if you keep reusing the same L3 units over and over.

Furthermore, a lot of players treat their leveled units as characters in Fire Emblem: restart if they die, pretty much. While there are situations where you might wish to do this in Wesnoth, level 3 units are not so rare and valuable that they cannot be sacrificed to complete an objective.

I don't disagree that games involving leveling up a small party of adventurers and fighting your way through battle after battle with them, watching them grow in strength, can be fun, but Wesnoth is not those games.

[Brunopolis]

Sorry I didn't come back in a while but saying I'm a troll because I have criticisms about the game is absolutely ridiculous. I actually pointed out why I dislike the campaigns and I actually pointed reasons as to why to do this.

This game is essentially a combination of Fire Emblem(leveling up your units with vital key heroes that you have to protect))and advance wars(building more units with gold). This is not a bad thing because both Fire Emblem and Advance Wars are great games. However, Fire Emblem was much less of a strategy game than Advance Wars. Instead Fire Emblem went more into the RPG route. I'm not sure what Battle for Wesnoth is trying to be but if it's some sort of strategy/rpg hybrid rather than a RPG with strategy elements then I think the campaigns need a little tweaking.

Is what I say a personal opinion? Definitely! However, I just wanted to point that I had a very poor campaign experience and it almost completely turned me off from Battle for Wesnoth altogether. It led to me to a situation of guaranteed failure in future missions and I'm sure I'm hardly the first person to experience this.

P.S. Thank you to all the kind people that replied. I'm really surprised how many people provided helpful useful comments(positive or negative) as opposed to insults. As to those that claim I'm a troll or whatever. Elitism runs rampant on the internet. What can ya do? 8P

Edit:

I think the scale of the time investment is probably what creates these reactions. There's no way to learn the principles of Wesnoth campaigns (expendable units, good army composition, using cannon fodder, etc.) without putting a good many hours into the game, during which time the player will feel that he is learning, because his tactics and single-scenario strategies are improving. Discovering that you've been winning a series of Pyrrhic victories can be an unpleasant shock. And then after discovering the mistake, it takes an almost equal amount of time to attempt a better method, which the player, feeling that the game doesn't make sense, may be unwilling to invest.

I had to add this. I didn't realize until I read Caphriel's post but I think he nailed it perfectly. It's the idea that you don't realize that you've screwed up until it's too late and you're too far in the hole and have to redo the whole campaign. It's as he put it...an "unpleasant" shock. To many it's irritating enough to make you quit playing. (Un)fortunately, I'm a masochist and keep coming back abuse for more even if it pisses me off.

[Noy]

Sorry I didn't come back in a while but saying I'm a troll because I have criticisms about the game is absolutely ridiculous. I actually pointed out why I dislike the campaigns and I actually pointed reasons as to why to do this.

This game is essentially a combination of Fire Emblem(leveling up your units with vital key heroes that you have to protect))and advance wars(building more units with gold). This is not a bad thing because both Fire Emblem and Advance Wars are great games. However, Fire Emblem was much less of a strategy game than Advance Wars. Instead Fire Emblem went more into the RPG route. I'm not sure what Battle for Wesnoth is trying to be but if it's some sort of strategy/rpg hybrid rather than a RPG with strategy elements.

I think you fail to get the point: it NOT like AW or Fire Emblem... not even close. AW is not even that strategically deep or complex. You need to balance for things like time of day, terrain and damage types (in ways that are far more pronounced than AW). Applying tactics from that game would almost certainly lose you the game in Wesnoth. Leveling up is not even close to being exclusive to Fire Emblem or RPGs, True strategy games have included such options for years. Moreover you don't need to level up to "win," its possible to do it with only level ones. Investing lots of time into Lvl3s is actually not that fruitful of a strategy, its all about balancing a few of those, with a ton of cheap lvl1 spearmen/elvish fighters/Skeletons/Dwarvish fighters/ect. The only time I've ever felt that the game is an RPG is in some Cave levels with few units, or in specialized scenarios where its supposed to be an RPG (Brotherhood of light).

Thus comparisons with either game aren't fair nor useful. You need to learn how to play wesnoth, not ask to make the game like another (which isn't a very good strategy game in the first place.)

[Brunopolis]

Well I'm talking about campaigns here. And in campaigns since how you start depends upon how much you leveled many missions ago then strategy becomes less of an issue and how much you leveled your "heroes" starts to matter.

Secondly, Advance Wars is just as strategic as this game. It has damage types, terrain, and instead of times of day it has weather(snow, rain, etc) just like Battle for Wesnoth. The only thing it doesn't have is leveling, carrying money from one mission to the next, and "king" units. Otherwise, it is VERY similar to Advance Wars. The idea of king units and leveling carrying from one mission to the next is something straight from Fire Emblem. Sounds like a perfectly valid comparison to me. Tell me what concept in Battle for Wesnoth is not in either Advance Wars and Fire Emblem?

And in skirmish matches and the competitive nature of Wesnoth I never said the game had problems. It's just easy to tell every Wesnoth newbie to LTP but when a mistake leads to like 6-7 hours lost of game-play and forces the player to completely restart then I'm sorry but that is excessively punishing. It's a "screw this I'm never playing game again" kind of punishing. I'm sure you might enjoy that because you're l33t but I doubt the developers of this game want most new players to have such a sour experience.

At the end of the day the campaigns are supposed to introduce new players into the Wesnoth world before they decide to play against others. Unfortunately, the campaign experience is so different from regular skirmish matches it forces you to play a completely different style of game chalk full of reloading and leveling up. Something that I find to be completely devoid of strategy altogether.