4 ms·

Wesnoth is great and nicely balanced. Complaining about Wesnoth RNG is for losers. Wesnoth gives you an estimate of how much damage did you do against the expe

Wesnoth is great and nicely balanced. Complaining about Wesnoth RNG is for losers. Wesnoth gives you an estimate of how much damage did you do against the expected. In long games, luck always evens out. In short games, it evens out across other games. Just accept it as a stroke of fate, and to your best with what you get.

chongli 5y ago
That hasn't been my experience. From what I've dealt with, a run of bad luck early will leave your army perpetually behind the curve. Since units need to survive battles to level up you can be totally destroyed by some bad luck. Sure, your dice rolls will even out over the long run but the effects of early bad luck will compound throughout the game.
- Cyphase 5y ago
  How would you improve Wesnoth?
  - chongli 5y ago
    It’s hard to say. The combat variance is pretty fundamental to the game design. If you took it away the battles would be pretty routine. Other games manage to incorporate a lot of randomness while keeping the basic interactions (combat etc) deterministic and predictable. For an example of this, see Slay the Spire. In that game the cards all have completely predictable effects. The randomness comes from the cards you’re dealt. Furthermore, you can control the randomness of card draw in numerous ways, potentially making your deck very reliable, possibly at the expense of full potential.
- Andrew_nenakhov 5y ago
  One game you are unlucky, another one you are lucky. I've played hundereds of BW 2p matches, and lost/won only due to extreme run of good or bad luck maybe in 3% of games. Just move on and play the next game. Or play chess.
  - chongli 5y ago
    That’s called metagaming. In NetHack you would see people drinking from fountains all the time in the early game. Occasionally you’d get a wish which you could spend on some powerful artifact or silver dragon scale mail (SDSM) and win the game. Most of the time you’d unleash a bunch of water moccasins or a water demon and die immediately. Needless to say you could win games of NetHack by doing the metagaming strategy. The problem is that it wasn’t going to help you win the current game in front of you, the one you’re playing right now. And that’s where some players (like myself) part ways with metagaming. We are interested in winning the current game. That is, taking every game as a unique puzzle to solve and attempting to win. So a game that randomly decides “haha you lose” is unsatisfying.
    - Andrew_nenakhov 5y ago
      Well, it's battle for you. Your knight clad in iron is almost invincible on the field, unless some lucky arrow strikes him in the visor, killing him instantly. Real life is full of accidents, and BoW more or less honestly imitates that. (I mostly used save-scumming in the campaign, due to overwhelming odds anyway, so I'm speaking about luck in multiplayer games)
      - chongli 5y ago
        I think we’re speaking at cross purposes then because I was mostly speaking about the campaign. If Wesnoth was designed only for one-off battles and units were meant to be sacrificed like chess pieces in singular pursuit of a victory then a campaign is wholly inappropriate. The original point of comparison here is Heroes of Might and Magic which does not have this problem since the game is designed as a campaign with many battles and the leveling up aspect only applies to heroes which are essentially generals that do not directly participate in battle.
        Andrew_nenakhov 5y ago
        Yes, I was speaking about p2p. Campaigns in Wesnoth can be tough, but I always used save scumming to beat them. I think they are an afterthought and clearly main developers' focus is multiplayer, and all factions are balanced with it in mind. That said, that Double Suns campaign with desert elves is quite great and I enjoyed it, even if it uses rather different settings from the base game.
- omniscient_oce 5y ago
  Yeah, it makes it so you have to play extremely conservatively or just keep save files to roll back to. At least, that's my memory of playing the campaigns as a kid
- FiatLuxDave 5y ago
  Long-time Wesnoth player here. I noticed you and Andrew seem to be talking past each other here. Andrew is talking about Wesnoth in player vs player mode. You seem to be talking about the scenarios. From a balance perspective these are two completely different games. For anyone reading here who hasn't tried both modes, the PvP mode is a fairly good and balanced standard wargame. You can play against the AI, which is decent but not great, or against other players online. The scenarios on the other hand... what everyone is complaining about is true. But this is a problem with the scenarios, not with the game. In order to make them "interesting", pretty much every scenario has a bunch of gotchas in it, like if the objective is to get your general to the other side of the board in 25 turns, on turn 10 some event will happen like a dam breaking and blocking off the main path or a new enemy appearing on your flank. On a first time play through, it is very hard to anticipate what gotcha will appear and how to mitigate it. To make it worse, most scenarios are ten or more battles long, and you need enough survivors and gold from the early battles to win the later ones. So, if you barely win an early battle you've basically lost the scenario, but you won't find that out until later. To sum up, when people are loving on Wesnoth, they are talking about the game, and mostly play it in PvP. When people are hating on Wesnoth, they are talking about the scenarios, which are truly unbalanced. Tell people to try the PvP first.
  - Andrew_nenakhov 5y ago
    Thank you for your comment. Of course I was talking about p2p! You can always savescum in campaign, so why complain at all? :-D Damn. Now I need to install Wesnoth and play some games... .

chongli 5y ago

That hasn't been my experience. From what I've dealt with, a run of bad luck early will leave your army perpetually behind the curve. Since units need to survive battles to level up you can be totally destroyed by some bad luck. Sure, your dice rolls will even out over the long run but the effects of early bad luck will compound throughout the game.

Cyphase 5y ago
How would you improve Wesnoth?
- chongli 5y ago
  It’s hard to say. The combat variance is pretty fundamental to the game design. If you took it away the battles would be pretty routine. Other games manage to incorporate a lot of randomness while keeping the basic interactions (combat etc) deterministic and predictable. For an example of this, see Slay the Spire. In that game the cards all have completely predictable effects. The randomness comes from the cards you’re dealt. Furthermore, you can control the randomness of card draw in numerous ways, potentially making your deck very reliable, possibly at the expense of full potential.
Andrew_nenakhov 5y ago
One game you are unlucky, another one you are lucky. I've played hundereds of BW 2p matches, and lost/won only due to extreme run of good or bad luck maybe in 3% of games. Just move on and play the next game. Or play chess.
- chongli 5y ago
  That’s called metagaming. In NetHack you would see people drinking from fountains all the time in the early game. Occasionally you’d get a wish which you could spend on some powerful artifact or silver dragon scale mail (SDSM) and win the game. Most of the time you’d unleash a bunch of water moccasins or a water demon and die immediately. Needless to say you could win games of NetHack by doing the metagaming strategy. The problem is that it wasn’t going to help you win the current game in front of you, the one you’re playing right now. And that’s where some players (like myself) part ways with metagaming. We are interested in winning the current game. That is, taking every game as a unique puzzle to solve and attempting to win. So a game that randomly decides “haha you lose” is unsatisfying.
  - Andrew_nenakhov 5y ago
    Well, it's battle for you. Your knight clad in iron is almost invincible on the field, unless some lucky arrow strikes him in the visor, killing him instantly. Real life is full of accidents, and BoW more or less honestly imitates that. (I mostly used save-scumming in the campaign, due to overwhelming odds anyway, so I'm speaking about luck in multiplayer games)
    - chongli 5y ago
      I think we’re speaking at cross purposes then because I was mostly speaking about the campaign. If Wesnoth was designed only for one-off battles and units were meant to be sacrificed like chess pieces in singular pursuit of a victory then a campaign is wholly inappropriate. The original point of comparison here is Heroes of Might and Magic which does not have this problem since the game is designed as a campaign with many battles and the leveling up aspect only applies to heroes which are essentially generals that do not directly participate in battle.
      - Andrew_nenakhov 5y ago
        Yes, I was speaking about p2p. Campaigns in Wesnoth can be tough, but I always used save scumming to beat them. I think they are an afterthought and clearly main developers' focus is multiplayer, and all factions are balanced with it in mind. That said, that Double Suns campaign with desert elves is quite great and I enjoyed it, even if it uses rather different settings from the base game.
omniscient_oce 5y ago
Yeah, it makes it so you have to play extremely conservatively or just keep save files to roll back to. At least, that's my memory of playing the campaigns as a kid
FiatLuxDave 5y ago
Long-time Wesnoth player here. I noticed you and Andrew seem to be talking past each other here. Andrew is talking about Wesnoth in player vs player mode. You seem to be talking about the scenarios. From a balance perspective these are two completely different games. For anyone reading here who hasn't tried both modes, the PvP mode is a fairly good and balanced standard wargame. You can play against the AI, which is decent but not great, or against other players online. The scenarios on the other hand... what everyone is complaining about is true. But this is a problem with the scenarios, not with the game. In order to make them "interesting", pretty much every scenario has a bunch of gotchas in it, like if the objective is to get your general to the other side of the board in 25 turns, on turn 10 some event will happen like a dam breaking and blocking off the main path or a new enemy appearing on your flank. On a first time play through, it is very hard to anticipate what gotcha will appear and how to mitigate it. To make it worse, most scenarios are ten or more battles long, and you need enough survivors and gold from the early battles to win the later ones. So, if you barely win an early battle you've basically lost the scenario, but you won't find that out until later. To sum up, when people are loving on Wesnoth, they are talking about the game, and mostly play it in PvP. When people are hating on Wesnoth, they are talking about the scenarios, which are truly unbalanced. Tell people to try the PvP first.
- Andrew_nenakhov 5y ago
  Thank you for your comment. Of course I was talking about p2p! You can always savescum in campaign, so why complain at all? :-D Damn. Now I need to install Wesnoth and play some games... .