Tactical advice on Liberty

[dfranke]

I've been playing Liberty on normal. I easily blew through the first several campaigns, but now I've reached Glory and I'm just getting obliterated. Any tactical advice? I'm starting with ~450 gold and lots of outlaws, shadow mages, and a couple fugitives available for recall. I think I overrecruited a little bit in the previous scenario so maybe I can start with a little more gold, but without a change in tactics there's no way it's going to make a difference.

[Konrad II]

Is Glory the last scenario?

[dfranke]

Yes.

[Konrad II]

OK. Well I just went overrecruiting everything I had (although I had my ally helping me cause I didn't choose to be able to recruit his units), and I recruited about a dozen outlaws and random units... Then I just rushed through :/ Tbh I found this quite easy, you should retry it.

[troodon]

You have no gold? Then you Must replay previous scenarios and recruit less.

[dfranke]

What? I said I had about 450.

[cathyr19355]

Two scenarios before Glory, you hit a scenario where you're helping a bunch of Rogue Mages clear out a bunch of necromancers and undead from a swamp. At the end of that scenario, they give you a choice about how they might help you. One choice lets you recruit Rogue Mages (at a cost of 52 gold each) and the other effectively means that they will show up, with their leader, as your ally when "Glory" starts.

I tried playing out the campaign making the first choice and got nowhere. If you have the rogue mages as an extra faction in the Glory scenario, that, combined with the orcs and the Paladins, usually will kill enough Royals and cause enough chaos that you can get at least one or two of your units into the fortress to break the pillars--and that should be all you really need. Good luck!

[santi]

cathyr19355 wrote:

At the end of that scenario, they give you a choice about how they might help you. One choice lets you recruit Rogue Mages (at a cost of 52 gold each) and the other effectively means that they will show up, with their leader, as your ally when "Glory" starts.

I got the gold instead..... and had no problem on hard with this scenario
I lost Harper, but that was not necessary.
Basically try to let loyalists and orcs fight each other as much as possible(you cannot completely avoid it) and concentrate your forces in entering the fortress.

[Aethaeryn]

Glory's too easy with allies. I think it needs some balancing. It's true that I tend to play campaigns on the easiest level because I started playing this game a few weeks ago, but I've played many harder easy levels (and there are a few harder levels earlier in the campaign). This is basically: rush with outlaws when they're softened to 4 points and win.

[gorgolok]

Getting the units instead of allies can be interesting. You don't only get Shadow Mages, but also Thieves. Level 2 thieves to Rogues before Glory, and their skirmishing makes taking out the fortress a piece of cake. They're also good for surrounding and backstabbing the mages inside the fortress - without healers in the fortress the troops in there can be taken out pretty easily. For a laugh, try taking the fortress, exploding all but the NW tower, then hold it against the reinforcements (mainly on the E entrance). You can abort any time by exploding the remaining tower.


I personally think Liberty on Easy could be altered slightly to make an extended tutorial campaign. It seems great for new players, teaching them some basic skills - knowing your enemy and using terrain are the main lessons it gets accross. It's not so big on the special skills, there's no healing and leadership, but you have ambush (Fugitives) and depending on what route you take skirmisher for some interesting tactics. Also, the first level is a lesson in ZoC over zerg rushing.

With a maximum of 5 unit types to keep track of (plus enemy units, of course), and limited specials, it seems awesome for players who have come out of the Tutorial and want both a challenge and a way to learn about tactics. I might try and write a small guide to go along with it for a tutorial mode. Because quite frankly, the recommendation in the tutorial to go on to HttT strikes me as ludicrous - to advance well in HttT you need to know a lot more than the tutorial teaches you and shorter campaigns prepare you well for longer ones.

[Turuk]

It's true, Liberty does teach a new player many of the aspects of the game while limiting them from getting confused by some of the more complicated use of tactics for a greater variety of units. It's short and easy to get in to, I know.

However, I think the tutorial recommends HTtT not because it might explain anything that the player should know, but rather because it's an excellent campaign that allows a player to try out a variety of new units, and taking the strategy tips they have learned to try and succeed. It even says in the walkthrough that it's designed with the idea that you might have to restart, since players that go into the campaign are expected to at least know the basics. Plus the epic length of the campaign allows players to max any of the units they are given to recruit.

I understand the point that you are speaking to, but I just think that the two campaigns were designed for two different purposes.

[Eskon]

That's exactly it. People who have just finished the tutorial don't KNOW the basics - they know how to move and how the battle system works. That's like knowing the moves in chess - you don't know jack [censored] about the game itself. The recommendation for HttT is probably because that's where you'll meet Konrad and Delfador again (and to be honest, I think Konrad is kind of dumb).

In the campaign menu you're advised to play the South Guard campaign, and that's actually pretty excellent. It was the first campaign I played, and on easy I completed it without retries. That's also simply how it should be. A beginner campaign has to be such that a beginner is not overwhelmed by it - you're trying to get him or her into the game, and that means making him or her strong enough so that he or she can make rookie mistake after rookie mistake and still win. HttT was very frustrating once I hit Siege of Elensefar on my first playthrough - it's not fit for a beginner. To be honest, I've still not finished it.

I did finish Liberty recently though, medium difficulty. I won without the additional allies, and it was thanks to the services of one of my last units - a quick thief - that I managed to break the fourth pillar, after having my army mercilessly crushed when they couldn't escape, so you could say I was lucky (not exactly luck as the last pillar was free of units because they had been fighting me to the south, so I was the one who made it possible for my thief to succeed). Liberty is not exactly a good campaign for a fresh beginner, but definitely a good test of more advanced elements of "basic" Wesnoth skills.

@ Aethaeryn: Well, if something is "too easy" on "easy", you should probably upgrade to "medium".

EDIT: What's more: Heir to the Throne is LONG. You are expected to do some sort of decent long-term unit management in order to succeed in missions later on and even pretty early, like in Siege of Elensefar. In my first try I just blindly recruited lots of mages after taking Elensefar to kill the skeletons and later found myself failing hard on Crossroads. It's something that doesn't come easy to newbies and should be practiced in shorter campaigns.

[Turuk]

Also with the South Guard campaign, there is A Tale of Two Brothers and An Orcish Incursion. All three campaigns appear before HTtT in the listing and are outlined as novice campaigns, and both offer hints on how to succeed.

And I know what Eskon is speaking to, because HTtT is also listed as novice level. It was the first campaign I ever played way back when, and it took me a while to get through it, I had to replay scenarios a bit to find the right strategy that would work. It's a great way to learn how to field a variety of units, but the learning curve is not like the others.

[Jozrael]

Something that needs to be kept in mind is that player skill is a vast spectrum, ranging from the utterly incompetent (I have tried to teach Wesnoth to several of these...I can explain til I'm blue in the face, but they can't pass the tutorial unless I give them move-specific instructions.

And then, if I do, and they try it on their own, they can't replicate it.

This is known as 'find another game'.

On the other end of the spectrum you have those who are true virtuosos of the game, no need to describe their skill.

Now, you are a campaign designer. You have a discrete number of difficulties possibly available to you, and it is traditional to use three. How are you going to adequately address everyone's skill levels? If you were to incorporate the skill levels of those at the very bottom of the ladder, those who are higher up would find it unchallenging and too easy. Thus, you use a middle of the road approach. Easy should be EASY, but not trivial. Just as hard should be quite challenging. One player's impossible is another player's trivial...and sometimes their skill differences are not that far apart.

That being said, there are certain levels or campaigns which receive more than their fair share of criticism in terms of balancing. Siege of Elensefar is truly a difficult level in HttT compared to those before it. The most difficult level there that you must take before then (a la not IotD) I would say is Bay of Pearls, and that's nothing compared to SoE. So it is indeed logical that you stumbled there: it is the capstone of the first third of the HttT campaign. Once you beat that, the campaign ratchets up.

tl;dr version: It's hard to fit all possible player skill levels into three campaign difficulties. One campaign's 'medium' might be easier than another campaign's 'easy'. You'll only improve if you keep trying again and again and expanding your repertoire of campaigns (and difficulty settings therein) that you have beaten.

@Turuk: In the dev version, HttT is on top and I hope it stays there as the traditional flagship campaign xD.

[Turuk]

Jozrael, that's good to know, Heir to the Throne still remains one of my favorites, and I'm glad to hear that it will still be leading the way.

While I know there are campaigns like Liberty and others to teach people the game, I agree with Joz that HTtT is a good test of a player's skill, and should give a player an indication of where they stand, and whether they should start to up their level from easy(novice, trival) to medium(average, normal) , or medium to hard(challenging, impossible).

People come up with so many names to describe the difficulty, and I feel that a player should take that as an indication as well, as there are a couple campaigns out there which list(as in directly say) that the Medium level for that campaign is much closer to hard on another campaign.