Idea: Reuse wesnoth engine to simulate dynamic campaigns

[zookeeper]

I think randomly generating a single-player campaign is just plain boring though. There's no real plot, no real characters, etc. Fun to play for a few scenarios so you can see how it works, but probably not much beyond that.

That depends on the kind of generation. For instance, the ai parameters in strategic view could be set based on faction attitude, which in turn depends on the player's success in a sub-quest. What about pacifying the elves by rescuing one of their sages who was abducted by the humans? If I say random generation, I don't rule out randomly putting together prescripted elements.

Well, I'm not saying it can't be done, just that it's probably harder to do well than you might think. If you make a system for faction attitudes, prescript a lot of subquests and manage a decent storyline (probably affected in major ways by the player's actions), then sure. The rest is just technical stuff (even if complex), but how the storyline is embedded in a mostly randomly generated campaign is probably the biggest problem. Although admittedly I can imagine it working in a bit of the same manner as games like the UFO series: have predetermined chain of "plot events" that occur in order, but at somewhat random times. Or, in the case of what you're proposing, have them occur when entering key regions or battles, so that you cannot avoid the vital events and pieces of the plot.

I'd also be concerned about how you balance it. What kind of ways would you use to force the player to actually try to achieve something besides just charging on to the next battle and winning (which would be rather boring)? If considering for example the Civilization of UFO games, you can't beat your enemies and advance if you don't do research, build things and so on. In Wesnoth however, you can beat pretty much anything (controlled by the AI anyway) even if you just have a few lvl1 unit types to recruit. Giving the player new unit types to recruit when he conquers cities or enemy regions would be a logical thing to do, but in Wesnoth it'd not be that much of an incentive for the player, since he only needs a few unit types to be able to beat almost anything. I'm not saying the player cannot be forced to have to actually think and use strategy on the world map using other means, just that it's something which doesn't seem entirely trivial in this case.

In a conquest style strategy game the player usually doesn't have much of a challenge winning when he has conquered about half of the map. At that point it tends to turn into a simple boring grind to eliminate the remaining opposition which isn't any threat to your existence anymore. This is also something which would be nice to have addressed. It's fine in the context of a single battle, as battles are short, but whenever it happens in the whole campaign in any game, I usually get annoyed, as the latter half of the game becomes so dull. Yet in most other games you have stuff left to research and build to alleviate that a bit.