Wanted: foolishly easy wesnoth

[k8to]

I'm interested in a single player wesnoth experience which is vastly more tilted in the player's favor than the current game. I've grovelled throught the code a bit, but C++ makes no sense to me.

I'm willing to pay 25$ to someone for a relatively clean patch which tilts the vs computer play experience significantly but not completely invincibly towards the player's side. I suspect a good experience would incorporate slightly reduced experience requirements, increased unit capabilities (for the human player), and damage ratios that improve the human attacks and weaken the computer ones. Most important of course from a frustration perspective would be a near elimination of the possibility to miss several times during one attack.

I realize my offer is not nearly large enough to pay for anyone's time. So it is meant merely as a minor encouragement for anyone who would enjoy putting together such a patch.

Thanks for not mocking this request.

[scott]

All of the configuration files are plain text. There are many things you can do, like raising Konrad's HP or attack skills or increasing the amount of gold you get in each scenario. You probably don't want to mess with the unit files because you never know which side the unit will be on. For example, you can weaken the orcs but then if you play the orc campaign it is you who are weak. Thus, scenario gold is probably the easiest thing to change to make the game easier for you. If you are willing to look at the C++ source code then you should be willing to parse the plain text config files for the right line to change. You could also download "The South Guard", which is designed to be the easiest campaign in existence to help out guys like you.

[turin]

Well... The South Guard was originally supposed to be the "easiest campaign in existence", but I hear tell that it is not so easy any more. It is, I must say, not exactly fun to make an easy campaign; challenging ones are more interesting.

That said, its probably easier than any of the official ones.

Oh, and, for experience values, there is a way to reduce them in MP (although it is for all sides), and I'm almost certain you can do it for SP scenarios too.

[aelius]

South Guard should still be really easy on "trivial". I'm curious - where have you heard that it's not easy. School's out in two weeks, so I'll have some time to rebalance it and make it easier if it needs it...

- b.

[k8to]

Yeah I'm well aware of the possibility to hand-edit the configfiles. When playing on Easy/Trivial, gold doesn't tend to be the limiter in any event. At least for me. (Maybe this different for others?) It's not that hard to pick a well balanced group of troops to go out onto the field. And winning by simply fielding a million low level troops badly and having them mowed down for so many waves until the opponent runs out of resouces is just not fun.

What's hard (for me) is keeping troops alive -- the AI will tend to bear down on that one unit I'm really counting on and slaughter it. Also I find sometimes I can have overwhelming superiority in an area, but the RNG just makes the game completely infuriating with miss after miss after miss. I don't really enjoy "gaming" the levelling up either, in terms of using the levelling up to regain hitpoints or doing illogical tactical actions just to get more exp for some weak unit.

So yeah, I can win if I make konrad have a million hitpoints and 55 attacks, but that's going to provide a vastly inferior game experience to just tilting the advantage much more significantly towards the player. I've managed to hack in some code in past revisions which caused my units to do more damage and my opponent's to do less. It was mostly good. Certainly much more fun than the stock game. It was _very_ clumsy though since the source base doesn't make much sense to me. My units with four attacks would end up doing stupidly high damage which destroyed a good deal of the fun. It also stopped cleanly applying rather rapidly, because it was a nasty hack.

I'm also making this request because I believe the game would actually be much more fun with this play style as an option. Even if only for those who are willing to go the extra mile to find the patch, and make it work with the current sourcebase.

[allefant]

I like this idea. Instead of having built-in difficultiy levels for campaigns, there could just be a global difficulty setting (so I wouldn't feel like missing out on something if I player on "easy" ). It would work by adjusting all hit probabilities to the favor of the player. An easy way could be to just add a factor f to all hit chance calculation. E.g. where p is the probability right now, use p^f instead, like this:

So e.g:

Code: Select all

f=  1: 10% 20% 30% 40% 50% 60% 70% 80% 90%
f=  2:  1%  4%  9% 16% 25% 36% 49% 64% 81%
f=0.5: 32% 45% 55% 63% 71% 77% 84% 89% 95%

So on "hard", f = 1, everything would be like now. On "easy", f would be 2. This means, the chances of being hit for your own unit would be the second row above, the changes for the AI would be the last row.

A third setting could be in between, with f = 1.5/0.67 for player/AI.

In a sense, the above already works currently if you use excessive reloading - since then in fact all you really do is shifting the probabilities. And myself, I seem to use reload much too often - so I'd probably also like playing with the adjusted probabilities

[Ardonik]

K8to, if you're willing to alter your copy of the game to simplify things, why not consider using Debug Mode?

http://wesnoth.slack.it/?DebugMode

It gives you the ability to change the side any unit plays as and to create arbitrary units with full movement for free. As others have pointed out, you can also run 'wesnoth --decompress' on a saved game file and then edit its parameters directly.

These are still forms of cheating, but they don't require a custom patch. (Not that anyone cares if you cheat on single player.)

[scott]

You could just practice and keep the money. Nothing worth doing is easy.

[MadMax]

You could just practice and keep the money. Nothing worth doing is easy.

Agreed.

IMO, much of the fun of Wesnoth is that it is as hard as it is.

[Dave]

I think a simple way of making the game easier would be to adjust the experience_modifier for all scenarios in the campaign to much lower than normal.

This would make it much easier to level your units up, and much more forgiving when upper-level units die.

And yes, I think we do need a much easier campaign for beginners.

David

[bonehead]

You could just practice and keep the money. Nothing worth doing is easy.

Agreed.

IMO, much of the fun of Wesnoth is that it is as hard as it is.

With all due respect, you're both missing the point. You've also both forgotten how HARD a game Wesnoth is for a beginner. It took me two days real time before I killed a single unit in the second scenario of Heir to the Throne. What can I say---I do live up to my username. After I figured out how terrain effects worked of course it got easier, but Wesnoth does have a very slow learning curve.

Frankly, the game is too hard at the beginning, and I think HttT is a hardly a good introduction to the game. It's an excellent challenge to an experienced player, but it takes a lot of patience on the part of a beginning player, and the willingness to restart many, many times. The southern campaign is a great first step, but I do think the names could be rejigged: novice, easy, and medium perhaps. The hardest level is about as hard as medium in most campaigns.

A novice mode is a great idea though. Lowering unit costs and experience limits would be a good approach. Changing to-hit probabilities or movement rates would alter the game too much. The best approach, I think, is training wheels, not a separate game.

[Dave]

bonehead: I completely agree, and I think that we need some nice easy campaigns and/or easier modes for our current campaigns.

David

[turin]

I would also agree. The problem with the campaign designer doing this is it usually he is rather skilled at the game. This means balancing on a "trivial" or "novice" difficulty level is both boring, and rather hard to do, since what is easy for him might still be hard for an inexperienced player.

I think that, instead of adding a "trivial" to each campaign, we should just try to get some easier campaigns. There have been a few campaigns, like Circon's "Two Brothers" and someone else's "Orcish Incursion", that were meant to be easy...

[scott]

I don't think Orcish Incursion is that easy. You already have to know how to hold your own before you can take advantage of JP30's strategy tips, even though he's pointing out basic stuff.

It took me several months to even become a basic player who could pass the first couple of levels. I deleted the game in frustration and then redownloaded it after several weeks. The gameplay is so simple and transparent (once you know the game rules re: terrain, recalling, etc.) that I wanted to come back and best the game. Usually when I delete games in frustration it's because they're hard to play controlwise. The learning curve is like Othello - a minute to learn, a lifetime to master. It's good to provide a shallower "ramp" for new players to climb, but the game's difficulty is a plateau that is what it is. Eventually a player is going to have to figure out how to play on the "plateau".

[walker]

I joined this forum on June 8, 2004. I had just installed 0.7.10. I'm still playing it, and I just got to Test of the Clans (I will eventually upgrade). Even on easy, this is probably one of, if not the, hardest games I've ever played. This is not how I want to LEARN a game. Little things like one of the AI's level one units killing 2 or 3 of my level one units can be very frustrating. I mean similar units like Horsemen on grassland during the day. For that matter, the AI's level one Horsemen are a match for my level two Knights! That's a little like saying a WW II tank is a match for any current Main Battle Tank.

My point is that I agree that a reasonable way to learn the game with a lower frustration factor is a good idea.

walker