I did enjoy the campaign but ... playing on the Normal difficulty for the campaign, as an experienced Wesnoth player (though mainly 1.12 to 1.14, only just upgraded to 1.18) the final couple of missions - especially last one - are I well above the stated "Novice" difficulty for campaign as a whole I think.
Scenario 3 - without being too spoilery, I took the option for fighting extra enemies for a reward. It was challenging to complete within the turn limit as a result ... fair enough I suppose. Admittedly I made a mistake of letting my one healer get poisoned near the end, with the nearest village several turns backtrack -> slowed my final push. So, my retained gold * carryover was less than the minimum in the final mission.
So scenario 4 with minimum gold (250) I thought is *way* difficult - even with all the optional characters collected and loyals still alive.
I checked the WML to see enemy gold - 700 total - and they can recruit level 2s. And between the multiple enemies, the map is small and they have tons of recruitment tiles (10+?) so can get all their troops out at once and hit you en masse.
Fighting a massive force (close to 3x mine) of mostly level 2s all at once is just plain hard - even with some reasonably good defensive terrain, with only 250 gold and only 1 healer, over several tries I couldn't maintain a viable front line. The AI seems smart enough now to not just charge in it's fastest units to die during the day - but build up to a big group attack at their best time-of-day, night.
Consider that a significant proportion of player forces are loyalist cavalry - good on the attack but poor on defense, especially since enemy has many L2 archers. On my first couple of goes I had tried recalling all my loyal cavalry units -> tried attacking during the day then falling back, they get poisoned/arrowed badly and are pretty useless in that case after the first turn you use them.
But even not recalling extra cavalry and going for bandits/outlaws, you just don't have enough good defenders.
You only have one healer, and even at mage-of-light level he/she can help keep one part of the line strong, but with the enemy having so many L2 poison units, it's another tough element to maintain a defensive line.
It's quite a small map, so I can't really see a "defeat in detail" strategy to destroy one enemy before the other. And even the smaller enemy is a strong L3 - so you'd need to somehow get a very strong force of cavalry through to finish him early.
In the end I resorted to a turtle defense using the mountains in the S-W corner - and even then I had to "debug" myself in a couple of javileneers to win, then add extra turns to give necessary time to advance and clean up their leaders at the end (20 turn limit is quite low for a big battle BTW).
All of this is okay if you want to make a hard/challenging campaign. I think I'll download Konrad2's replay and see how he won, maybe I can learn some better strategy for dealing with the smarter AI in 1.18 release. And maybe if I go back and min-max strategy for scenarios 2 and 3, I could build up a bigger gold carry-over than the default. Starting with 350 gold in scenario 4 probably makes it more viable - but the 250 minimum seems not for me.
Sire did say in the 1.1.0 release notes for this campaign:
Maybe something more like the following would be appropriate re difficulty in the description: "A rework of the Tale of Two Brothers campaign .... including upping the difficulty to provide a stern challenge even for veteran Wesnoth players!"
Anyway - thanks for the great little campaign, and I hope this feedback on difficulty is constructive.
Scenario 3 - without being too spoilery, I took the option for fighting extra enemies for a reward. It was challenging to complete within the turn limit as a result ... fair enough I suppose. Admittedly I made a mistake of letting my one healer get poisoned near the end, with the nearest village several turns backtrack -> slowed my final push. So, my retained gold * carryover was less than the minimum in the final mission.
So scenario 4 with minimum gold (250) I thought is *way* difficult - even with all the optional characters collected and loyals still alive.
I checked the WML to see enemy gold - 700 total - and they can recruit level 2s. And between the multiple enemies, the map is small and they have tons of recruitment tiles (10+?) so can get all their troops out at once and hit you en masse.
Fighting a massive force (close to 3x mine) of mostly level 2s all at once is just plain hard - even with some reasonably good defensive terrain, with only 250 gold and only 1 healer, over several tries I couldn't maintain a viable front line. The AI seems smart enough now to not just charge in it's fastest units to die during the day - but build up to a big group attack at their best time-of-day, night.
Consider that a significant proportion of player forces are loyalist cavalry - good on the attack but poor on defense, especially since enemy has many L2 archers. On my first couple of goes I had tried recalling all my loyal cavalry units -> tried attacking during the day then falling back, they get poisoned/arrowed badly and are pretty useless in that case after the first turn you use them.
But even not recalling extra cavalry and going for bandits/outlaws, you just don't have enough good defenders.
You only have one healer, and even at mage-of-light level he/she can help keep one part of the line strong, but with the enemy having so many L2 poison units, it's another tough element to maintain a defensive line.
It's quite a small map, so I can't really see a "defeat in detail" strategy to destroy one enemy before the other. And even the smaller enemy is a strong L3 - so you'd need to somehow get a very strong force of cavalry through to finish him early.
In the end I resorted to a turtle defense using the mountains in the S-W corner - and even then I had to "debug" myself in a couple of javileneers to win, then add extra turns to give necessary time to advance and clean up their leaders at the end (20 turn limit is quite low for a big battle BTW).
All of this is okay if you want to make a hard/challenging campaign. I think I'll download Konrad2's replay and see how he won, maybe I can learn some better strategy for dealing with the smarter AI in 1.18 release. And maybe if I go back and min-max strategy for scenarios 2 and 3, I could build up a bigger gold carry-over than the default. Starting with 350 gold in scenario 4 probably makes it more viable - but the 250 minimum seems not for me.
Sire did say in the 1.1.0 release notes for this campaign:
But in this case - I don't think you should describe this as a "Novice" campaign in its intro.Of note, the final scenario has been made more difficult by an increase in enemy gold as well an an addition of a new enemy faction.
-- This was done as the final scenario was deemed to be "too easy/basic," and it didn't really land the hype for being a final battle. Hopefully this change will make the finale more climatic and enjoyable of a scenario!
Maybe something more like the following would be appropriate re difficulty in the description: "A rework of the Tale of Two Brothers campaign .... including upping the difficulty to provide a stern challenge even for veteran Wesnoth players!"
Anyway - thanks for the great little campaign, and I hope this feedback on difficulty is constructive.
Statistics: Posted by Snarkus — Yesterday, 8:08 pm