-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- Hash: SHA1 Am 27.01.2012 11:57, schrieb Noy: > If there is a problem with the game dynamics for beginners, then I suggest > there needs to be better scenario design, and maybe implementing some of > the suggestions made by other developers for beginner players (ie end of > scenario reinforcements.) However if you'er on an advanced difficulty level > and you can't beat it at that level, tough luck. My suggestion is try again > or decrease the difficulty level.
Okay, so we come down to basically two problems listed by you one the third one omitted: 1) The game might be too difficult in some selected setting for a specific player. A solution here can be "restart this mission in 'insert_easier_mode'" as was proposed before (though it has problems if the campaign forks to completely different scenarios only available in higher difficulties; this is technically possible but IIRC noone has done so (yet)). 2) For a really new player the game might be too difficult on the easiest level proposed. Here some "better" tools for scenario developers might help making it easier for them to see if the player is "too weak" and possibly *allow* (not enforce!) some help. 3) Due to gold carry over and the recall list balancing of (longer) campaigns is *really* difficult. Now lets look at what we can/should possibly look at for each of the problems: For '1' we got a proposed solution though there are problematic corner cases. We might have to enforce that every scenario of a campaign has the same number of difficulty levels so even if you branch into some "hard only" scenario it still has to be possible to switch to some "easier" version of it. For '2' we can already provide reinforcements and stuff like this, but currently there would be no reward in not accepting help. And there is also no good mechanism to determine if help should be offered. For '3' we really have a tough spot. A real problem here is that you basically have to play the complete campaign in a selected difficulty level to see if it is feasible or not. The main problem here is also that a campaign designer might not be the best player of the world but still wants to offer a "really challenging" setting. There is no decent way for the content designer alone to determine if the later scenarios are not "too easy". I think the idea fendrin mainly has is to ease life of scenario designers by making the maps more self contained. For this problem I personally think we somehow have to switch how difficulty levels are handled and done and which influence they have on the game. Currently difficulty levels mainly define how much gold the player gets, how strong the AI is (recruit and gold wise) and how much time is available to complete the scenario. Here it might make sense to switch to some kind of "ranges" for available units and gold for a player in a selected difficulty level. And the range plus the difficulty level determine what the player and the AI get (plus possibly offered reinforcements). With something in this direction it might be possible to have a single scenario more self contained and reduce (not remove) the effect previous scenarios can have. This way it might be more easily possible to balance a "freaking long" campaign in a way which leaves the later scenarios still challenging for extremely good players while not making it basically unbeatable for everyone else. I fear that the extremely good players might experience a drop close to the end of a campaign at the moment since their troops and amounts of gold just make them too powerful. Yes, this is a *really* hard to judge area of the game. I think there is no "perfect" solution at all. Every solution we find will have some flaws in some area. So the question is what are the important parts and how to achieve at least decent solutions for all the areas, even if some of them are not as great as we'd love to have them? Cheers, Nils Kneuper aka Ivanovic -----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE----- Version: GnuPG v2.0.18 (GNU/Linux) iEYEARECAAYFAk8iixEACgkQfFda9thizwX38QCfeW8TLsMNNTQCbY2I+UZD7sku 4+sAn2ZuIyqPWHhxwBnotnZrEXXOowuP =0Rrp -----END PGP SIGNATURE----- _______________________________________________ Wesnoth-dev mailing list [email protected] https://mail.gna.org/listinfo/wesnoth-dev
