Siege of Elsensefar/Difficulty question

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Noxos
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Siege of Elsensefar/Difficulty question

Post by Noxos »

I spent about 10 hours trying to beat this scenario (on hard), before resorting to cheese tactics... building loads of cav and attacking the orc stronghold immediately and then sending the survivors around the north west side to kill the necromancer while I had my hero running away with a couple escorts to keep the skeleton horde occupied. And even then, I only won because I re-rolled the last lance hit twice. (yes I felt bad about it too but after all that effort..., I'd had enough)

I'm just wondering though, how on earth do you beat this "conventionally"? I did well falling back to the trees and then defeating each wave of enemies in detail, but I then ran out of time a few turns before I could reach the necromancer. It seems that I either always run out of time, or rush ahead too much and get spanked during nighttime.

Maybe I should just restart the campaign on "normal". How much of a difficulty difference is it? I like a stiff challenge which hard definitely is but I don't want to have to resort to cheating (re-rolling) to get through it.

I do have to say "well done" though to whoever made it. A very interesting map and I look forward to "cracking" it better.

edit: Just noticed the megathread on this scen, feel free to close, sorry
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beetlenaut
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Re: Siege of Elsensefar/Difficulty question

Post by beetlenaut »

I will answer this part here: "normal" is much easier than "hard". In many games, there is not much difference in the difficulty levels, but in BfW the difference is huge. Also, it takes a while to get good despite the simplicity of the game. Believe it or not, you will find Elensenfar pretty easy eventually.
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vanatteveldt
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Re: Siege of Elsensefar/Difficulty question

Post by vanatteveldt »

Newish player here, but just beat Elfensar on medium on the first try. Used one cheesy reload because I bungled the attack on the necromancer - his free units caught me by suprise and I had underrecruited and only attacked one pass and my units were just dying in there. Reloaded back 5 turns or so to do a double attack S and W and was more cautious before going in, and beat it without much trouble.

So, I think Elfensar on medium is pretty doable. The AI lets his units be killed in the field pretty easily, and the first castle was easy to take without any cheese required. The rogues are either completely useless or I used them wrong, but I'm a big fan of horsemen and archers.
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beetlenaut
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Re: Siege of Elsensefar/Difficulty question

Post by beetlenaut »

I agree that the thieves aren't much help. They are only really effective if you have some luck, and dead otherwise. However, three or four loyal assassins are nice to have around later on in the game. So, In Elensefar, I just have the thieves run away and stay out of danger.
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vanatteveldt
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Re: Siege of Elsensefar/Difficulty question

Post by vanatteveldt »

Yeah I think I underestimate the value of loyal, or of gold in general. I just finished the campaign line and never had a gold shortage. I did try to finish most campaigns pretty quickly, so that might have helped with the gold.

I took me until halfway the campaign to realize that it is not always a good idea to recall a lot of lvl3 veterans, but rather that a continuous leveling pipeline supported by mainly the heroes is much better for the final result. It seems that for a new Wesnoth but veteral turn-based strategy/tactics games HttT on medium is not terribly difficult if one is allowed to restart scenarios.

I will try HttT at hard at some point, but I am first experimenting a bit with the other factions/campaigns.
oaq
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Re: Siege of Elsensefar/Difficulty question

Post by oaq »

At the hard level, I failed the Siege of Elensefar several times, until failure taught me effective Elensefar tactics as follows.
Spoiler:
This is what has worked for me, at any rate. For illustration, a recent replay is attached.
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HttT-The_Siege_of_Elensefar_replay.gz
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beetlenaut
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Re: Siege of Elsensefar/Difficulty question

Post by beetlenaut »

I would have evaluated that as far too slow to finish on time, but I hadn't thought of triggering the sorcerer's trap with a scout. That buys you three or four turns, so good idea.
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RaustBD
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Re: Siege of Elsensefar/Difficulty question

Post by RaustBD »

beetlenaut wrote:I agree that the thieves aren't much help. They are only really effective if you have some luck, and dead otherwise. However, three or four loyal assassins are nice to have around later on in the game. So, In Elensefar, I just have the thieves run away and stay out of danger.
Yeah, the thing with this campaign is that, at least in my experience on normal, you'll quickly reach a point in the game where you never have to recruit, because the number of loyal troops you can nab is just absurd. If you make sure to never let a single loyal unit die, you'll find this campaign rapidly becoming a cakewalk, and I find that I only need to recruit when I need meatshields that I can stand to let die.
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max_torch
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Re: Siege of Elsensefar/Difficulty question

Post by max_torch »

One way to win is by rushing the orcs with horsemen that are one or two points away from levelling up... (You can set up the xp points in muff malal's peninsula). You can then take on the undead from a good position. this allows you to win on hard with a few or no units lost and few gold spent. here's a replay for ya.
HttT-The_Siege_of_Elensefar_replay.gz
(34.36 KiB) Downloaded 655 times
Oh and the fact that the necro comes out is really just luck.. its not something to really depend on all the time but it happens often
Velensk
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Re: Siege of Elsensefar/Difficulty question

Post by Velensk »

I find the replays posted here to be interesting because they all so strongly clash with my approach to this scenario.

I find that in general you can get through almost any scenario using mostly level 1 units and that if you do so you'll effectively have an endless recall list and plenty of gold. I'll edit this post with a replay in a bit.
"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."
Beleth
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Re: Siege of Elsensefar/Difficulty question

Post by Beleth »

Velensk wrote:I find the replays posted here to be interesting because they all so strongly clash with my approach to this scenario.[/q]

Ditto, though I've never finished HttT on hard mode, so that likely impacts the tactics required.
Velensk wrote:I find that in general you can get through almost any scenario using mostly level 1 units and that if you do so you'll effectively have an endless recall list and plenty of gold. I'll edit this post with a replay in a bit.
What difficulty level?

Can't wait for the replay. :)
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max_torch
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Re: Siege of Elsensefar/Difficulty question

Post by max_torch »

Velensk wrote:I find the replays posted here to be interesting because they all so strongly clash with my approach to this scenario.

I find that in general you can get through almost any scenario using mostly level 1 units and that if you do so you'll effectively have an endless recall list and plenty of gold. I'll edit this post with a replay in a bit.
I would love to see how to do HtTT-valley of death with barely any recalling on hard
Velensk
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Re: Siege of Elsensefar/Difficulty question

Post by Velensk »

Any difficulty level.

Here is the replay. I came into the level a little worse off than I'd normally hope for but it worked out alright in the end. I'm going to note a couple things here:

First: I had more leveled units than I put out. I didn't put them out because I felt that I would get more utility out of other units and I didn't want to drag down my income with the upkeep for them.
Second: When I captured the castle I could have recruited more than I did but I felt that I could finish just about as quick with what I had and again I didn't want to pay for more.
Third: I didn't play perfectly and suffered some bad luck at a couple points. I could critique my play at several points but as the point of this is to show a much less risky way to play that allows more room for error I figured it wasn't worth restarting.
Fourth: I did lose some valuable units but on a more difficult level you can definitely afford to do that. You have all the easy levels in the campaign to build up your reserves for when you do need them. As long as you constantly draw in new recruits and a few of them survive it's generally pretty easy to have extra level 2s or (what is sometimes better) a large supply of level 1s close to leveling.
Fifth: Note the ending gold. Even without the bonus I had quite a bit saved up. That's enough that on the next scenario I shouldn't even have to spend most of it on the inital recruit and as long as I am sure to capture villages and not recall to many levels of units it'll build a strong carry over.

EDIT: I can continue onto the valley of death but that replay might not come for awhile.
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SoEdemo.gz
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"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."
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max_torch
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Re: Siege of Elsensefar/Difficulty question

Post by max_torch »

@velensk
I saw the replay.
point of this is to show a much less risky way to play that allows more room for error I figured it wasn't worth restarting.
Yeah the important thing is you can do it without load/saving and that despite the worst case(bad luck, careless mistakes) the kind of strategy used still allows for an acceptable outcome.
You made up for the units lost with the early finish and by not spending so much at the elensefar castle.. so this still doesnt ruin the campaign effort for hard.. This is also a nice way to do SoE.

@oaq
I think your strat was risky (managing to beat necro at only the last turn, so I dont know if this will work everytime) and although you lost zero units, you dont get any early finish bonus gold and you ended with 246 gold, You will feel the effects of this in the following levels.. Sometimes its better to lose units for the sake of achieving an overall better result with the scenarios... (On hard you can even lose lvl2s... just dont lose too much of the loyal ones)... Although a lot of people claim this campaign can be won on hard without ever recalling but wow that is probably for SUPER experts...

just my 2cents
Velensk
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Re: Siege of Elsensefar/Difficulty question

Post by Velensk »

This is my rule of thumb: The harder the campaign, the more important gold is as opposed to keeping leveled units.

The reason for this is pretty simple, the harder the campaign, generally the more enemies are being thrown at you and thus the easier it is to advance units and replace leveled units. Therefore as long as you're constantly recruiting your reserves will grow from the survivors. On the other hand, you can be seriously limited by lack of gold. You cannot let yourself get into the situation where you come into a scenario with 100 gold (or whatever minimum is) and look at the opposition and say 'well, there's no way I can beat that without 5 level 3s. And then proceed by a combination of skill and not getting unlucky to scrape your way through the scenario but as you didn't have extra units to raid villages, and for those 5 units you were paying 15 upkeep a turn you don't go into the next one with much more than minimum gold either. This leads to situations where hundreds of experience points are lost on units that really can't use them and the player has to sit around trying to keep every unit alive in a game that really isn't designed for that (play Fire Emblem if you want a game designed for sentimental attachment).

EDIT: Because I didn't end up having to leave when I thought I would I made it to the valley of death. Now normally I wouldn't play this scenario this way but the request was to see this scenario with very few recalls (I hope 5 is low enough for you) so I did it that way. In this scenario, knowing that the next one is easy with minimum gold and that the only way to get extra gold is to not only survive but to kill all enemies quickly I would normally go all out.
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HttT-The_Valley_of_Death_..._replay.gz
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"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."
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