Before You Play (Campaigns) Series

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max_torch
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Before You Play (Campaigns) Series

Post by max_torch »

Before You Play

Allow me to present the start of the "Before You Play" series. This is a series of articles that gives you information about what you should expect mechanically and strategically before beginning a Wesnoth Campaign, without spoiling everything and without getting too specific about what you should do. You are already given some information about a campaign before you play such as the difficulty and the number of scenarios. This adds helpful information in addition to that which is already given. This aspires to be an alternative or supplement to the existing walkthroughs of the Official Campaigns.

In this first post, we will define parameters that will be used for each campaign throughout the series.
  • Difficulty. The official difficulty, of a campaign, as declared in the Campaign Menu.
  • Variability. Variability is a parameter that describes how severely a campaign punishes you for making certain wrong decisions, strategies, or mistakes that mildly or wildly alters difficulty throughout. In each campaign, there are several variables that are not fixed that directly influence the difficulty of trying to finish it. Some of these are the carryover gold you have when you begin scenarios, the composition of your reserve troops (aka recall list) when you begin scenarios, the units that you gave certain items to (such as a trident, ring), and the scenarios you decided to play when given a branching path in a campaign (like the island or the swamp in HtTT), secret or semi-secret rewards (or punishments) you find by exploring scenarios (like deciding to investigate a temple in the corner). Going into reserve troops, you have factors such as how many loyal units you have, how many high-level units you have, and the kind of units you have (are they mostly healers? damage dealers? tanks?).
  • Hardcore Friendliness. Hardcore Friendliness tells whether playing a campaign in hardcore mode would make it significantly harder. A Hardcore approach to playing a campaign is when you self-impose strict rules such as not reloading turns in the middle of a scenario, reloading only from the very first scenario, and using the Predictable RNG option in the game (aka deterministic random mode). One of the motivations for this is that you want to test or guarantee that when you win a scenario it is because you have found a reliable strategy and not one that will only work, say, one out of twenty times. The most obvious factor that affects Hardcore Friendliness is the difficulty of the campaign, but there are other more subtle factors that affect this. There are tomato surprises, revelations that the player could not prepare for or anticipate that could potentially have severe consequences. There is also the focus on macro vs micro level strategy in scenario design - a scenario can force you into an unavoidable intense micro strategy situation that will punish even the slightest mistake, a prime example would be Siege of Barag Gor from Son of the Black Eye. The prevalence of fog, skirmishers, ambushes could also affect this.
  • Grand Battle/Squad Tactics Ratio. GB/ST Ratio tells you if a campaign leans more towards grand battles, infiltration-style squad tactics, or somewhere in between. On one end of scenario design, there are grand battles where armies meet each other on an open field and fight, and on the other end, there are levels with limited space such as dungeons, sewers, castles, caves. There are also hybrid scenarios where you have a combination of open and closed space fighting. There are siege survival defense type scenarios that are not quite grand battles but not quite squad-based scenarios either that would lie in between. There are scenarios that are open fields but give you only a few elite units that behave more like a squad than an army.
  • Vanillaness. Vanillaness tells how far a campaign deviates from the Vanilla Wesnoth Formula. There are the mechanics and rules of the base game that you read about in the game help and documentation and learn about in the tutorial. Then there are additional scenario-specific and campaign-specific rules and mechanics that authors include to make things interesting. "Vanilla Wesnoth" means Wesnoth without any of these special rules and mechanics. Some of these changes are minimal and feel like a slight variation on the Wesnoth Formula while some of these make you feel like you're playing a different game altogether. Some are only introduced in one or two scenarios while some persist throughout the whole campaign. This can introduce an additional learning curve or force you to throw everything you have previously learned about the game out of the window.
I would like to invite people to rate campaigns for each of these parameters. You may also propose a parameter. I will be making my own Before You Play articles where these parameters will be incorporated in the write-up.

Regarding my own ratings and discussion, I have only ever played campaigns on the hardest difficulty, and I cannot speak for the experience of playing it on a lower difficulty. Also, some of the campaigns I have previously played have since been rebalanced and redesigned, which I will have to try to take into account.
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