-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- Hash: SHA1 Am 26.01.2012 08:10, schrieb Gabriel Morin: > Ultimately if you have campaigns you need to have a slippery slope, the > alternative being that your skill at getting lots of gold and powerful > units doesn't have much of an influence. I don't think that having to > restart a few scenarios is to be viewed as The Ultimate Evil(tm): happened > to me, I was happy to find the way to play them better, and I'm still alive > today! If you worry so much about poor newbs getting scared, why not > provide automatic loyal reinforcements or gold on easy difficulty, whenever > you detect that the player is starting a scenario with insufficient > resources/army to win? The rest of us with minimal experience and/or a > brain will manage.
Hmm, this sounds to me like a better solution to the problem. Lets face it, the problem is simple: You might reach a point where it is not possible anymore to win a scenario with the "resources" you have. Those resources include the starting gold as well as the recallable units. Currently to fix this you have to jump back several scenarios and level more units and/or play faster with better resource management. So the question should be: what can be done to prevent this from happening? For this I see several solutions (in no particular order) making balancing of later scenarios more easily possible (yes, they are partly drastic and not reasonable to implement!): 1) Get rid of gold carry over and just rely on starting gold. Besides also remove the recall list. This way every scenario would be self-contained. This would suck for many players since they love the leveling up of their troops and it would also remove challenges like "manage your finances" in a larger scope than just a single scenario. 2) Currently the AI is of a fixed strength per scenario. It tends to have the same units available as well as the same amount of gold, no matter how strong or weak the enemies army is. An option would be to change this so that the enemy AIs amount of gold is based on the players amount of gold (eg "player gold + 20%"). Of course the recruit/recall list of the AI could also be modified. Currently the AI often hast lvl2 and 3 units on its recruit list to make up for a missing recall list with those stronger units. 3) Add some way to check for the current "army strength" of a player. This strength does not just depend on the gold (since the starting gold can be adjusted by the scenario designer!) but also on the available recall list. Though using all units from the recall list is not valid here either. Maybe using the difference from 20 gold to the units recruit price (as long as it is positive!) as additional component to the "army strength". So a player with just lvl1 recalls that each cost <=20 gold would have his starting gold as army strength, player with many higher level units would have a significantly higher value there. The campaign designer would then try to balance their campaign for specific army strength ranges. Eg give the player more gold or some free higher level units (possibly especially ones that are harder to level like healers). Of course this approach also still has to differ between the monetary army strength as well as the recallable strength. So if you just have a freaking huge and strong recall list but almost no gold there would be a problem as well as with no recall list bug huge amounts of gold. Possible solutions in such a case would be a wandering band of mercenaries that offer the player their service for a "special fee" (as a way to provide players with huge amounts amounts of money with an easier way to get some higher level units that might be required to beat a scenario). The basic change on our side would be giving the campaign designer better ways to weight the strength of the player and base the scenario balancing on the current army strength by providing "especially useful" reinforcements, different enemy troop strength or possibly just a higher starting gold. 4) Remove the current system of recalling based on a fixed value and make the recalling depend on the units recruit price possibly coupled by a factor. This way the starting gold of the scenario can be set to a "more sane" minimum for what you most likely need to beat the specific scenario. There are possibly millions of combinations of what I proposed above possible and all can probably be done already with some crude WML hacks. Personally I prefer to follow some general rules though: * Try to keep the rules as consistent throughout the game as possible. Consistent here eg means "same rule for recalling everywhere" so that a player knows what to expect. At least it should be the same ruleset for one content. * Make sure that the player at least "feels" rewarded for something done really well. Currently this is done by giving "good" players a (significant!) advantage in later scenarios and often have "bad" players not fail in the scenario they are bad in but later on in the campaign. All the other things mentioned before in this thread are very player dependent. Many want to keep their "special" army (and because of these save-load when losing a single unit), want to see units level, love the RPG like aspects of the game. So yes, for those it would be a shame if the units would just be faceless troops and leveling units possibly has a rather bad effect on you. Personally I think it would be good to provide content developers with better means to judge the players strength in a current scenario and adjust the balancing of the scenario based on the players strength. Since I personally really dislike RPGs where the enemy troops level with you in some really strange ways making the game significantly more difficult if you just continue playing and discovering stuff (anyone ever played "TES: Oblivion"?) I'd vote for not taking just the route number "2" as outlined above. I'd prefer providing good means to follow route "3" since then the content designer can more easily balance stuff based on what is there and what is not. Of course this can also mean *slight* adjustments to the enemy troops (better/worse troops, free creeps, ...) to better match what the player is likely able to beat, but still somehow based on what players actually got available, not on what some overachievers managed to get preventing them from a too easy stroll through the park. Cheers, Nils Kneuper aka Ivanovic -----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE----- Version: GnuPG v2.0.18 (GNU/Linux) iEYEARECAAYFAk8hPc0ACgkQfFda9thizwU9PACfbFL2tDJM5f2RvWzw647zMCKI 0kYAnj7QnxP2OeinBBsuqUy0ORKQPlBp =9fyW -----END PGP SIGNATURE----- _______________________________________________ Wesnoth-dev mailing list [email protected] https://mail.gna.org/listinfo/wesnoth-dev
