This issue -- whether units should fully heal on level-up -- is almost as old as Wesnoth itself.
Personally, probably not surprisingly, I am in favor of the current way of doing things. It's not very "realistic", certainly, but there are important gameplay reasons for it. Firstly, I would suggest that in most games, leveled up units do not typically have a great deal of hitpoints when they level up -- especially in multiplayer. In cases where they do have a lot of hitpoints, it is likely that the player whose unit leveled up is already in a strong position, either in the multiplayer game, or in the campaign being played. Also, I would suggest that currently in multiplayer games, leveling up is not near as strong or often used as it is in campaigns, and many games are played ignoring leveling up almost entirely. Thus, in multiplayer, with this change, leveling up would go from being something that occurs sometimes; that adds nuances to the game, to being something that is almost useless. The most likely case where one usefully levels up, in fact, would be by a situation where an almost-dead enemy levels-up, allowing you to swoop in for an easy 16 xp, hopefully leveling up one of your full-hp units. This would make a part of planning to make sure that one of your almost dead units *doesn't* level-up, lest you give away some easy xp to an enemy and let them level-up. This would be just....weird. In single player, leveling up would still be important, but mostly only from a long term point of view. Players would level units up so they would be useful in the *next* scenario. They would be of little use in the current scenario -- unless they had almost leveled at the beginning of the scenario. This would in fact make a leveled unit a liability in a scenario, since you'd have to expend resources to protect them. It would greatly increase player frustration, and I think we have more than enough of that already. You'd have to play even more carefully, more conservatively, making sure that when you level up units you protect them adequately. I think it's already more than important enough to play carefully and conservatively. I think I understand the motivation behind suggesting units shouldn't heal fully, but I don't think it'd improve the gameplay; it'd make it more frustrating and less fun. David On Mon, 2007-12-03 at 11:26 -0500, John McNabb wrote: > I would just like to comment that it really is not that difficult to > get rid of the full heal from normal leveling. The amount of code to > do it is trivial. The question that should be discussed is whether > such a fundamental change in the game is desirable. > > Personally, I find the full heal to be annoying. It makes units that > are very close to levelling much more valuable then a unit that has > just leveled. Of course, this has become part of the standard > tactics, especially for units with charge, but it is one that ruins my > suspension of disbelief. If I were king, I would make it so that when > units leveled up that they would gain the difference in HP between the > two levels when they leveled. Thus, a unit that levels from a 35hp > unit to a 45hp units if it is wounded and at 1/35 and levels up to > 11/45. This makes killing a near-leveled unit much easier to do by > swarming, since you know that attacking the unit won't result in it > gaining 44 HP. It has always seemed odd to me to have a unit limping > along at near death suddenly become good as new after killing 1 other > unit. > > That said, it would be a large enough change in gameplay that there > would need to be general agreement on it. Serious rebalancing would > be required both to the individual units, but also to campaigns. > > -Darth Fool > _______________________________________________ Wesnoth-dev mailing list [email protected] https://mail.gna.org/listinfo/wesnoth-dev
