Heir to the Throne difficulty levels

[Faello]

Heir to the Throne has 3 difficulty levels:

-Beginner
-Easy
-Normal

I consider myself as an veteran player, played dozens of wargames and hardcore strategy games ( like CWG2 ) in the past years ( not to mention playing this campaign on averange diff level & other campaigns before ) so I've decided to play it on the Normal difficulty level ( I don't load/save during the scenario so game balance is important to me - I thought maybe something wastweaked/balanced and campaign is not so luck-based anymore).

Wrong.

I've finished "The Elves Besieged" in the last turn without spectacular successes - when I've started "Blackwater Port" I was ----->

Limit of turns were decreased to 9 ( wtf ? ) making task of killing Orcish Leader an absurd ( should I give my every unit packet of Lucky Strikes and pray for 100% effectiveness so I could reach enemy leader before time ends ) ?

I think this campaign still needs some balancing because it relies too much on pure luck than strategic/tactical thinking and player is literally forced to
load/save if he wants to win scenario on this diff level.

Cheers.

[Velensk]

If you had read the senario discription you would know that you don't have to kill the orc leader to win just survive. I agree the 9 turn limit is kind of lame however you ought to have noticed that.

[Wintermute]

remember that you don't have to kill all the minions to get to the leader. getting the bonus is tricky, and can be fun, but it's just that - a bonus.

While some bad luck at the end can ruin your day, I think that if you play more Wesnoth, and then go back and try again in a few months you may not find it as tricky as you thought.

[nightcrawler]

Heir to the Throne has 3 difficulty levels:

-Beginner
-Easy
-Normal

I consider myself as an veteran player, played dozens of wargames and hardcore strategy games ( like CWG2 ) in the past years ( not to mention playing this campaign on averange diff level & other campaigns before ) so I've decided to play it on the Normal difficulty level ( I don't load/save during the scenario so game balance is important to me - I thought maybe something wastweaked/balanced and campaign is not so luck-based anymore).

Wrong.

I've finished "The Elves Besieged" in the last turn without spectacular successes - when I've started "Blackwater Port" I was ----->

Limit of turns were decreased to 9 ( wtf ? ) making task of killing Orcish Leader an absurd ( should I give my every unit packet of Lucky Strikes and pray for 100% effectiveness so I could reach enemy leader before time ends ) ?

I think this campaign still needs some balancing because it relies too much on pure luck than strategic/tactical thinking and player is literally forced to
load/save if he wants to win scenario on this diff level.

Cheers.

You must be oh about the millionth to complain that the game is too hard because you consider yourself a normal or veteran gamer.

On the other hand, whoever decided to call the three difficulty levels "beginner," "easy," and "normal" was smoking crack. It looks like someone named esr was responsible. There wasn't much IRC discussion from what I can tell on which difficulty labels to use for HTTT. However, it is definitely NOT a beginner campaign, and those labels need to be changed (and it's a simple search and replace now, right esr? ).

The HARD difficulty (as it's still called in the WML) is really cranked up to give people one heck of a challenge - hence the 9 turns on HARD. I feel for you. You were taken in by false advertising.

[santi]

The point of playing levels that are , let's say challenging, is that you are often forced to go back, replay and learn from your mistakes, that is how you get better. That said, when I last played httt on 1.2.4 hard, I was astonished at how easy it was compared to TROW. Even the supposedly hardest level, Valley of Death was too easy. Now to your question, the point is that if you desperately want the bonus, try to mass your troops in the forest withing striking distance. troops from behind(outside striking range from the leader) should clear the enemy front line and then your front line can take out their leader. Make sure Delf is able to get a few hits, if not to kill, at least to weaken, so another unit can get the kill and get XP.

[Faello]

If you had read the senario discription you would know that you don't have to kill the orc leader to win just survive. I agree the 9 turn limit is kind of lame however you ought to have noticed that.

Yeah, but you know, bonus is just too cool to leave it behind

remember that you don't have to kill all the minions to get to the leader. getting the bonus is tricky, and can be fun, but it's just that - a bonus.

While some bad luck at the end can ruin your day, I think that if you play more Wesnoth, and then go back and try again in a few months you may not find it as tricky as you thought.

I play Wesnoth since 0.8.something with some breaks ( last time I was playing 1.0.2 iirc ) and played a lot of mp games - although I'm still pissed when cpu gets 7 hits on my unit in row with 50% hit chance EXACLY when he needs to. But I was always an impatient person - this game helps me to change it

You must be oh about the millionth to complain that the game is too hard because you consider yourself a normal or veteran gamer.

Well I've complained because description "normal" wasn't accurate here - I know what does HARD diff level in this game mean - it means that cpu player will have stronger/more numerous army and he will have more chances to wipe out my veterans with "lucky strikes" - he's not smarter or something - and without save/loading it would be more difficult to beat him up without losing troops you need in the next scenarios ( great examples of scenarios where computer can inflict casualties to your army despite good strategic thinking are for ex. Bay of Pearls, The Siege of Elensefar. Princess of Wesnoth, Scepter of Fire )

I know that playing on HARD diff level gives a lot of satisfaction, but when you're repeating some scenario 3 - 4th time because cpu owned one of your vet's with his 100% chance hit attack, you start to think about throwing your cpu through the window eh eh

In CWG2 luck factor was minimalized so everything depended on your moves and strategic thinking - here some suicidal cpu attack can always mess you up - and it really pisses me off sometimes

On the other hand, whoever decided to call the three difficulty levels "beginner," "easy," and "normal" was smoking crack. It looks like someone named esr was responsible. There wasn't much IRC discussion from what I can tell on which difficulty labels to use for HTTT. However, it is definitely NOT a beginner campaign, and those labels need to be changed (and it's a simple search and replace now, right esr? ).

The HARD difficulty (as it's still called in the WML) is really cranked up to give people one heck of a challenge - hence the 9 turns on HARD. I feel for you. You were taken in by false advertising.

Exacly what I was thinking

[nightcrawler]

Exacly what I was thinking

Just so you know, that change is less than a month old. Other players didn't have the same disadvantage as you. I wrote the start of my last post not actually realizing this until I looked up the turn limit on Blackwater Port (wondering if it had changed on the medium difficulty!)

You might actually try on the lowest difficulty level. There are a lot of nuances in keeping units alive that you wouldn't know just from playing other games. Keeping units alive after attacking = success in Wesnoth.

[Faello]

When I was talking about great cpu luck, I wasn't talking about leaving knight in the open field few hexes from my main line in the night and then being surprised why he got chopped by these 5 skeletons

I'm talking about situation when you're checking your line, possible enemy damage, and you're sure that first few units will definitely survive, and your knight has 90% chances of surviving attack - high enough - there's plenty of similar situations when playing this game - and yet cpu is chopping your knight cuz' he is hitting him every time - that's what's suspicious for me

If it's going about my curent game - beginner is too easy - I'm actually playing on "Easy" (medium ) difficulty level and it's going well - I've just finished Siege of Elsenefar without a single load/save and I didn't loose any of my precious units ( Elvish Captain, Elvish Avenger, loyal Fire Mage advanced to Archmage, loyal Paladin owned Undead Leader and overleveled, Reglok survived etc. ) so it's going quite well

Thx for all replies btw.

[PrinceRepulsive]

Hello, Faello. I think you're probably a bit better than me, so this may or may not help: I've found that in almost all circumstances, ending a turn when a unit can be hit by three units is a bad idea. Only if it's day vs Northerners and if the unit in question is an archer in the woods. There are, of course, plenty of exceptions, but following this rule has always helped me.

[Troy]

I know that playing on HARD diff level gives a lot of satisfaction, but when you're repeating some scenario 3 - 4th time because cpu owned one of your vet's with his 100% chance hit attack, you start to think about throwing your cpu through the window eh eh

I have felt like that before

EDIT: now how did that happen^-^

[TL]

In CWG2 luck factor was minimalized so everything depended on your moves and strategic thinking - here some suicidal cpu attack can always mess you up - and it really pisses me off sometimes

IMHO having something that can always mess you up makes the game MORE strategic, not less. Part of thinking strategically is being able to plan for things being worse than could be expected based on the information you have. If everything always goes according to plan it's more of a puzzle game than a strategy game.

Anyhow the luck factor does NOT depend on difficulty level, except that harder difficulty levels means more enemy units (so more chances for CPU to get lucky, or for that matter for you to get lucky vs. CPU) and higher level enemy units, so it makes a bigger difference when the enemy gets lucky. No one gets really outraged when a goblin spearmen nails your 70% defense elf archer 3 times in a row and does 9 damage, but when an orc warrior does the same thing people take a lot more notice even though it's just as (un)likely to happen. Those 1-in-10 (or rarer) occurences happen all the time for both you and the CPU, you just usually don't notice them except when it ends up killing one of your prize units.

"Normal" is probably not a very good description for HttT's highest difficulty level though. They renamed the middle difficulty from "Normal" to "Easy" which is fair enough since it is easy, but the highest difficulty on HttT is definitely harder than the other campaigns they call "Normal".

[Clonkinator]

So what about renaming that "normal" (which was hard before) to "challenging" then?

[Ar-Senator]

Hmm, what about the Son of The Black-Eye campaign? It stated the difficulty levels as "challenging", "hard" and "nightmare". I started with challenging, but then I discovered after playing a few scenarios that it's not challenging for me at all. At first I thought that I'd pick the middle one, but then I remembered that playing the Eastern Invasion on "Hard" (on a previous version, don't know what that difficulty's called now) was too difficult for me.

But really the point being, that are the same difficulty levels (beginner, easy, normal, challenging etc.) between different campaigns aligned at all?

[zookeeper]

Hmm, what about the Son of The Black-Eye campaign? It stated the difficulty levels as "challenging", "hard" and "nightmare". I started with challenging, but then I discovered after playing a few scenarios that it's not challenging for me at all. At first I thought that I'd pick the middle one, but then I remembered that playing the Eastern Invasion on "Hard" (on a previous version, don't know what that difficulty's called now) was too difficult for me.

Remember that while the early scenarios of SotBE might be easy on the harder difficulty levels, some later scenarios might prove to be much tougher. The differences between difficulty levels can be smaller or greater depending on what scenario you're playing and campaigns usually get a bit harder towards the end.

But really the point being, that are the same difficulty levels (beginner, easy, normal, challenging etc.) between different campaigns aligned at all?

They should be or become aligned. They might not be perfectly so yet since the uniform labeling was just recently introduced.

[nightcrawler]

So, is HTTT getting its labels adjusted or what?