[UMC] Allow recalling dead L3 units

Brainstorm ideas of possible additions to the game. Read this before posting!

Moderator: Forum Moderators

Forum rules
Before posting a new idea, you must read the following:
Velensk
Multiplayer Contributor
Posts: 4002
Joined: January 24th, 2007, 12:56 am

Re: [UMC] Allow recalling dead L3 units

Post by Velensk »

The ability is that you can pay gold to get units back. You don't pay anything to have that ability you just pay to use it.
"There are two kinds of old men in the world. The kind who didn't go to war and who say that they should have lived fast died young and left a handsome corpse and the old men who did go to war and who say that there is no such thing as a handsome corpse."
Caphriel
Posts: 994
Joined: April 21st, 2008, 4:10 pm

Re: Allow recalling dead L3 units [split from Such a shame]

Post by Caphriel »

Zarel wrote:Your FPS example is a direct application of method 2 (you can wait for the rocket launcher ammo to respawn, then pick it up). It doesn't address pixnaps's or anyone else's concerns at all, which is that Wesnoth implements none of these three solutions.
Pretend the ammo doesn't respawn :P

More seriously, I argue that your premise "In a standard strategy game, any individual unit should be expendable. Leveling plus permadeath screws with that too much - there should really be either one or the other" is a matter of taste, not fact, and that regardless, leveled units are expendable in certain situations. They're just more expensive units, so you need to gain more by sacrificing them. Compare the expendableness of a zergling to the expendableness of a battle cruiser.

I think that this change would make the campaigns a bit easier, because you could be a little careless with your units, knowing that if you get unlucky and they die, but you really need them later, you can always pay to revive them. Depending on the opportunity cost, though, it will either make the game significantly easier for veteran players, or provide another way for new players to go astray in resource management.

However, I don't have an opinion of whether this would make the game better or worse, because I don't play the campaigns. My opinion on this is that it would significantly affect the single player experience, and that whether it would be a good or bad change is a matter of personal taste.

I am reminded of this thread (or at least the original post) and ones like it. To me, this suggestion seems to be making Wesnoth more RPG-like. Reviving level 3 units only addresses the loss of effort in leveling those units, which shifts the focus of Wesnoth from "army of expendable units" to "party of high level heroes."

Were I a campaign player, I would probably appreciate this change, because it would make Wesnoth a little less punishing for slightly lazy players, but I refuse to argue for a change just based on my personal taste :lol2:

Side notes:
Zarel wrote:As an actual game developer, I don't think your appeal to authority is going to do much here. :P
I wasn't appealing to my authority as an aspiring game developer (which doesn't exist :lol2: ), just explaining my frustration with a lot of the recent change requests.

I do agree that a significant loss of effort does not make a game fun. Significant is subjective, though. I think the biggest problem along this line with Wesnoth campaigns is that you can keep playing for hours after you've "lost" (i.e., reached a point from which success is impossible) without knowing it, but that's a campaign design issue, not a game mechanics issue. I also don't want to derail this thread over this, it's been discussed before, and consensus seems to be that a few hours of lost time is not a significant loss. I think it's clear that whether or not a level 3 unit is a significant effort is also subjective.
Zarel wrote:But you do recognize the difference between a user with an entitlement complex, and a user who genuinely wishes to improve the game, and will understand if the developers disagree with his viewpoint. You want to encourage the latter type of user, since you can't improve without good ideas.
Yes, the "other people" that wall-o-text was aimed at were the people arguing for major changes because they don't like Wesnoth the way it is. I probably should extract my thoughts on this and start a separate thread, but it basically boils down to "I don't like the way Wesnoth is, please change it" - bad, and "I think ____ would make Wesnoth a better game, because <well-reasoned explanation here>" - good.

Unless someone asks me for a response, I will bow out of this thread now, because I believe I have said everything useful (and some things not useful) I have to say on the topic.
User avatar
Zarel
Posts: 700
Joined: July 15th, 2009, 8:24 am
Location: Minnesota, USA
Contact:

Re: Allow recalling dead L3 units [split from Such a shame]

Post by Zarel »

Caphriel wrote:Pretend the ammo doesn't respawn :P
Well, then, the game would be unbalanced, since whoever got to the ammo first would gain a presumably significant advantage.

Assuming the ammo was restricted per-player, I would argue that that would be bad design. Nonetheless, FPS games usually end in ~20 minutes, and the amount of effort required to acquire ammo is usually fairly low, too, so you don't lose that much effort, so it'd still be less time and frustration than losing an L3 in Wesnoth.
Caphriel wrote:More seriously, I argue that your premise "In a standard strategy game, any individual unit should be expendable. Leveling plus permadeath screws with that too much - there should really be either one or the other" is a matter of taste, not fact, and that regardless, leveled units are expendable in certain situations. They're just more expensive units, so you need to gain more by sacrificing them. Compare the expendableness of a zergling to the expendableness of a battle cruiser.
Yes, expending a battlecruiser loses you a significant amount of money/resources, but nothing else. You can build a new one in a comparatively small amount of time.

It would be comparable to expending an L3 in my system: You have to pay lots more to get it back, but you don't lose anything else.
Caphriel wrote:I think that this change would make the campaigns a bit easier, because you could be a little careless with your units, knowing that if you get unlucky and they die, but you really need them later, you can always pay to revive them. Depending on the opportunity cost, though, it will either make the game significantly easier for veteran players, or provide another way for new players to go astray in resource management.
As mentioned, because of the game balance, it would provide a negligible benefit for veteran players. For new players, their problem usually isn't resource management but keeping too few units, so while this change won't really make them play better, it won't make them play worse, either.
Proud creator of the :whistle: smiley | I prefer the CC-0 license.
Scatha
Posts: 111
Joined: March 29th, 2008, 2:55 pm

Re: [UMC] Allow recalling dead L3 units

Post by Scatha »

I think I come to this with a position very close to Zarel's. I enjoy campaigns, and can generally do reasonably well on them, but think I would enjoy them more with this change. In particular if I manage to push through a level and win but have several of my high-level units defeated, I have a choice between loading and trying the level again (which I dislike doing) or continuing (which is frustrating). Something which alleviated this to a degree would be likely to increase my enjoyment of campaigns (actually I have largely stopped playing them because of this frustration factor -- if the campaign is difficult enough to challenge me then this problem comes up a lot).

I like the proposed change -- I suspect that this kind of change wouldn't have much effect on optimal play or game balance, but would increase the fun of campaigns for me personally. It sounds like this isn't going to make it into mainline, however, and I'm afraid that I won't be implementing it in any UMC, but if anyone does, I'd love it if they could post a link in this thread -- I'd be worried that I simply wouldn't see it otherwise.

I'd also be interested in hearing other workarounds to the problem (and I admit that the problem is a minor one; I'd guess most things that would fix it would do more damage than good). I don't seem to have any good ideas of my own at the moment.

Edit: Actually, I've realised a problem with the proposed change: campaign economics. Gold carryover between levels is subject to exponential decay. However gold invested in 'resurrecting' units is not subject to this decay. This would mean that at certain points in campaigns the correct decisions would for economic reasons be to bring back all of your defeated units. I think this is problematic.

One might solve this by adding 'injuries' to such units -- something like reverse AMLAs, reducing their total power. This would fit well in terms of flavour and gameplay, but moves further from KISS design.
fabi
Inactive Developer
Posts: 1260
Joined: March 21st, 2004, 2:42 pm
Location: Germany

Re: [UMC] Allow recalling dead L3 units

Post by fabi »

Scatha wrote:I think I come to this with a position very close to Zarel's. I enjoy campaigns, and can generally do reasonably well on them, but think I would enjoy them more with this change. In particular if I manage to push through a level and win but have several of my high-level units defeated, I have a choice between loading and trying the level again (which I dislike doing) or continuing (which is frustrating). Something which alleviated this to a degree would be likely to increase my enjoyment of campaigns (actually I have largely stopped playing them because of this frustration factor -- if the campaign is difficult enough to challenge me then this problem comes up a lot).

I like the proposed change -- I suspect that this kind of change wouldn't have much effect on optimal play or game balance, but would increase the fun of campaigns for me personally. It sounds like this isn't going to make it into mainline, however, and I'm afraid that I won't be implementing it in any UMC, but if anyone does, I'd love it if they could post a link in this thread -- I'd be worried that I simply wouldn't see it otherwise.

I'd also be interested in hearing other workarounds to the problem (and I admit that the problem is a minor one; I'd guess most things that would fix it would do more damage than good). I don't seem to have any good ideas of my own at the moment.

Edit: Actually, I've realised a problem with the proposed change: campaign economics. Gold carryover between levels is subject to exponential decay. However gold invested in 'resurrecting' units is not subject to this decay. This would mean that at certain points in campaigns the correct decisions would for economic reasons be to bring back all of your defeated units. I think this is problematic.

One might solve this by adding 'injuries' to such units -- something like reverse AMLAs, reducing their total power. This would fit well in terms of flavour and gameplay, but moves further from KISS design.
I think that issue should be resolved by the campaign designers.
If you play on hard and you see that you can barely win a scenario if recalling only high level units, there is no room to recall or recruit low level cannon fodder units to protect the lvl3 or higher ones.

So the campaign designer should put some low level units around on the board for free.
Just to make sure that there are some of that guys, that beam with the normal crew to the planet's surface down and everyone knows they will die, are around.
joshudson
Posts: 501
Joined: January 17th, 2006, 8:04 pm
Contact:

Re: [UMC] Allow recalling dead L3 units

Post by joshudson »

Well if you want to recall a Lich or a Draug ...
CHKDSK has repaired bad sectors in CHKDSK.EXE
Post Reply