Advice needed

Share and discuss strategies for playing the game, and get help and tips from other players.

Moderator: Forum Moderators

Post Reply
MRDNRA
Posts: 212
Joined: September 11th, 2009, 5:06 pm

Advice needed

Post by MRDNRA »

I am attempting to complete HttT level Siege of Elensefar on Normal Difficulty (having previously completed it on Easy difficulty on between 2 - 4 occasions).

Starting situation:

Gold: 197
Auto recalls: Konrad (Lvl 2) and an Elvish Captain

Recall List:
Lvl 2s: Elvish Druid, Elvish Sorceress, 3 Elvish Rangers, 4 Knights, Elvish Hero, White Mage, 3 Merman Warriors, Merman Netcaster, Mermaid Priestess
Lvl 1s: 7 Merman Fighters, Elvish Scout, 4 Elvish Fighters, and a Mage

I initially tried sending roughly two thirds of my forces to the western island (after using the option from the thieves for them to help infiltrate the city), the forces on that island being the thieves and rogue, the druid, the mage (approx half way to reaching level 2), Konrad, Elvish Hero, Elvish Fighter and Elvish Scout. The remainder of my forces, that being, the Elvish Captain, 1 Elvish Ranger, One half levelled Elvish Fighter (just 1 lvl 2 kill away from levelling), my white mage, and 2 Knights, fighting a small group (usually no more than 2 or 3) orcs upon initially enterring/arriving at the central island.

It seems that no matter what I try, I lose at least one, if not more, of my units, and the way things stand, with masses of undead (well, roughly equal in number to my forces) along with a couple of other orcs attacking me on the coast of the western island, it seems to me I really cannot afford to lose a single unit, the problem being that to save some nearly dead units I have to expose other units, which promptly get killed anyway.

Therefore, I have decided to restart the level, and am seeking advice on what units I should recall (given my lack of funds), and roughly what tactics I should ideally be using to complete this scenario with minimal (preferably no) losses (I absolutely detest losing units, so I almost always restart turns if I lose just one unit).
User avatar
PaulInBHC
Posts: 32
Joined: November 7th, 2009, 4:41 am

Re: Advice needed

Post by PaulInBHC »

I've lost this one 3 or 4 times on easy. If I can't edit the save to increase gold, I think I'll need to start over and try for more carryover gold.

Reading the wiki walktrough hasn't helped. Hope you get some good advice.
User avatar
Fairy
Posts: 12
Joined: October 27th, 2009, 1:28 pm
Location: Netherlands

Re: Advice needed

Post by Fairy »

Accept your losses and move on, though you might want to replay the last one or two scenarios and try to get a tad more gold (in order to buy cannon fodder).
Your Highness, I have no need of this hypothesis
- Pierre-Simon Laplace
Imp
Posts: 317
Joined: January 8th, 2007, 10:56 am

Re: Advice needed

Post by Imp »

What version are you using? If it's 1.6.5 post your save here and some of us might give it a crack.

Which of the previous missions did you do - the Isle or the Swamp? Is your white mage Moremirmu? Is one of your knights the loyal Haldiel? Who has the trident from Bay of Pearls? I hope it's a resilient merman warrior.

You have plenty of Lvl 2 units, so don't be afraid to lose a few.

Without the save, I can give you some tips:

1) Learn to use sacrificial Lvl 1 units. This is something new players have a lot of trouble learning by themselves. Most of your troops for any particular battle should be fresh recruits. It is possible to finish most of the missions in HttT (and most of the other official campaigns, for that matter) using only fresh recruits. You recall high level units only when they're needed and save them for the big climactic battles at the end of the campaign. You should treat your experienced Lvl 1s like they're Lvl 2s.

Think of it this way: you're going to lose units, so would you rather lose an inexperienced Lvl 1 or a unit you recalled? And what will you do if your Lvl 1 units with 5 XP survive? Are you going to recall them ever again or just dismiss them? If you're never going to recall them again, even if they're Lvl 4, it doesn't matter if they die. So they might as well die helping you (it's just a game - they're not real people). When you're trying to hold a fort where orcs can attack you from 3 directions at night, there's a good chance your spearhead unit is going to die, so you'll want to hold it with a Lvl 1 unit.

This is especially true since you have an elvish captain. The captain is inferior to the hero if there aren't any Lvl 1s to take advantage of his leadership. The point of the captain is to support him with Lvl 1s but if you don't have any Lvl 1s then he's useless, isn't he? I hope he's Quick.

2) It's okay to lose high level units. Like I said, most of the missions in HttT can be finished without recalling and you'll have plenty of opportunities to level up more units later. This is a big battle - you're supposed to take loses.

3) Take and hold the bridge ASAP. You want to finish this before the undead gets to the city, otherwise it will drag on and you'll suffer heavier losses. Run your units to the forts on the city side of the bridge and hold it. This means meatshields (I hope your hero and rangers are resilient) and Lvl 1s backed up by a healer.

4) Tell the thieves to back you up. The fjord they show you is useless. If you tell them to back you up, they disappear until you capture a village in the city. Then they pop up behind the orcs. That's a great place for them to be. It makes it much easier to mop up the orcs quickly - especially if they reinforce you at night. Although they are loyal, don't be afraid to lose them - thieves are quite useless in this campaign for the most part (they're very fragile - even a Lvl 3 thief dies very easily, so any long-term strategy that relies on them is suspect). Try to save the Lvl 2 one, though, but don't be afraid to take risks with them if it means beating the orcs faster.

5) The 200 gold you started with should give you 2 keeps full of units, which should be enough to take the city. You'll want to advance Konrad after he finishes recruiting on the 2nd turn.

6) I'm concerned about your lack of marksmen. In general, marksmen are superior to rangers and make it easier to win, yet you seem to have made all your archers into rangers. Rangers are very gimmicky and can be fun to use on maps that cater to their abilities, but those maps are rare and if you're just trying to win then go for marksmen first. If you want a meatshield, go for heroes instead of rangers. However, since you already have rangers, you might as well treat them like weaker heroes who get a slight defence advantage in forest.

7) However, this should still be possible to win.



Here's probably what I'd do:

1) Recall the merman with the trident on the hex closest to the water. He'll do heavy damage when you need it.

2) Get 2 horse units (perhaps the scout) to capture villages quickly. One will take the east and the other will take the west. The one to the east won't be fighting and will retreat if necessary but after you take the forts you might sacrifice it by charging in from the east to capture a village and trigger the thieves. There are lots of ways you can play this.

3) Plan how you're going to capture the forts by the bridge. You'll want to get there before the orcs but you can also take it by force. A good formation is 3 Lvl 1 units (2 on the forts and 1 in the spearhead in between) with the captain behind them all. Or perhaps take them with a hero or ranger or horse unit first. You'll want a healer too so you can cycle them. I'd probably use 2 healers this map.

4) You'll also want the sorceress and several mages. This is a great map for levelling another white mage for later. You don't have any strong bow units for doing free attack damage on the orcs so you're going to have to rely on your mages. This will make it harder to coordinate with your thieves at night (mages are lawful), but there's not much you can do about that.

5) What this means is one keep's worth of recalls and one keep's worth of recruits with the idea of sacrificing the recruits and most of the thieves.
Yogibear
Retired Developer
Posts: 1086
Joined: September 16th, 2005, 5:44 am
Location: Hamburg, Germany

Re: Advice needed

Post by Yogibear »

I am not sure about normal, but for hard, 200 gold is very tight. If you go for no losses, 250-300 is a lot more comfortable if i remember correct.

The merman (the one with the trident) has already been mentioned and he is indeed very useful here, once you got him into the water. But beware, his hitpoints don't fit with his mighty attack and the AI just loves to attack mermen...

The main trick is to be done with the orcs before the skellies arrive (or at least you only have to clean up what is left for one or two turns). That means you have to kill the orc leader, take the keep (maybe even recruit, but normally it shouldn't be necessary) before or right when the skellies start to cross the bridge to elensefar.
And yes, marksmen are very helpful with that.

It is possible but very difficult to keep the thieves alive. If you intend to do that, you will want to keep them out of fighting most of the time. Even with great defense, it takes only one lucky attack with a level 2 grunt and they are done.

Mages come in very handy, once the fight changes from orcs to skellies (and elves really <censored> here). I'd try to get 3 or if you can afford even 4 mages into the battle, trying to level them up (make sure to keep Elrian from "Isle of Alduin" alive for that, since he is loyal).

Even then, no losses is not easy. The level 2 grunts are your problem. If they get lucky, there isn't much you can do. Limiting attack hexes to 2 at most (or three for a resilient hero in the forest, maybe) should keep you fine for the most part. If i am not mistaken, the leader won't come out of his keep, so it's not a problem to get into reach of his mighty attack, especially at night. When going to attack him, though, slow is important, maybe followed by marksmen or mages. In most cases you will need two rounds to get the leader down and you don't want him to bring in his full power.

The less units you have, the more important it is to place your healers intelligent. That is, back up the most attractive points of attack for the AI (probably your meat shields). With few units, you can't afford to keep heavy hitters out of the fight for too long because they got hurt badly and need to heal.
Smart persons learn out of their mistakes, wise persons learn out of others mistakes!
MRDNRA
Posts: 212
Joined: September 11th, 2009, 5:06 pm

Re: Advice needed

Post by MRDNRA »

Imp wrote:What version are you using? If it's 1.6.5 post your save here and some of us might give it a crack.
I'm still using 1.4.7. I did try the later versions, but they seemed to crash fairly regularly on my computer, although once 1.8 is released I'll download that and see if that works better with mine.

Thanks to everyone for the advice. I'm also restarting the whole campaign (although I'll be going through with the units I've got on this one too), so as to see which units work better when. As suggested, I'll aim for more marksmen etc, and try to recruit more than recall at the beginning of each scenario.

Edit:

Have just reached SoE on total campaign restart, in a far better position (again going the Muff Malals peninsula rather than Isle of the Damned).

Starting situation this time round:

Gold: 323
Auto Recalls: Konrad (Lvl 3), Elvish Hero with 59/72 xp

Recall list:
Haldiel (loyal) has reached Paladin, I have a Resilliant Merman Hoplite with the trident (I chose hoplite due to being steadfast so hopefully is more likely to survive counter attacks).

Other units:
Lvl 2s:
2 Elvish Marksmen, White Mage (Elrian, loyal mage from Aldiun), Red Mage, Elvish Druid, another Elvish Hero, 3 Merman Warriors, and a Knight

The rest are level ones, a few of them mages which I will recall, the rest mainly just fodder units recruited for previous levels, although I will possibly to looking to advance some of those more experienced level 1s at a later time.

Update:

I have now completed the level. I cleared the orcs out by about turn 12, attacked the undead in the city with everything I had (including archers and fighters to do some damage), headed north of the river, for some reason the undead leader left his cave, which made for an easy kill.
AThousandYoung
Posts: 87
Joined: February 3rd, 2007, 2:54 am

Re: Advice needed

Post by AThousandYoung »

User avatar
WarDog
Posts: 4
Joined: December 8th, 2009, 9:50 am

Re: Advice needed

Post by WarDog »

If you really are having a rough time, and don't want to accept your losses or replay previous levels, the open the Wesnoth file in Program files and change the stats of any of you units (Ok, its cheating i admit it...) You can do this by opening Data/core/units. Select the unit that you want, open with Text or Wordpad, the change the stats that appear.(If you've never done this before, be careful and only change the attacks or health, anything else might cause the game to crash.
"Cry havoc and let slip the dogs of war!"-Julias Ceaser
User avatar
Turuk
Sithslayer
Posts: 5283
Joined: February 28th, 2007, 8:58 pm
Contact:

Re: Advice needed

Post by Turuk »

WarDog wrote:If you really are having a rough time, and don't want to accept your losses or replay previous levels, the open the Wesnoth file in Program files and change the stats of any of you units (Ok, its cheating i admit it...) You can do this by opening Data/core/units. Select the unit that you want, open with Text or Wordpad, the change the stats that appear.(If you've never done this before, be careful and only change the attacks or health, anything else might cause the game to crash.
Also, don't try to play multiplayer after doing the above if you decide to cheat like this, as you will get out of sync errors. You are better off just using the debug commands to give yourself extra gold or units if you are set on cheating.
Mainline Maintainer: AOI, DM, NR, TB and THoT.
UMC Maintainer: Forward They Cried, A Few Logs, A Few More Logs, Start of the War, and Battle Against Time
User avatar
thespaceinvader
Retired Art Director
Posts: 8414
Joined: August 25th, 2007, 10:12 am
Location: Oxford, UK
Contact:

Re: Advice needed

Post by thespaceinvader »

Or modifying the scenario files to give yourself extra gold, turns or recalls. Neither of those will interfere with multiplayer.
http://thespaceinvader.co.uk | http://thespaceinvader.deviantart.com
Back to work. Current projects: Catching up on commits. Picking Meridia back up. Sprite animations, many and varied.
User avatar
WarDog
Posts: 4
Joined: December 8th, 2009, 9:50 am

Re: Advice needed

Post by WarDog »

That to...LOL Thanks for pointing that out...
"Cry havoc and let slip the dogs of war!"-Julias Ceaser
User avatar
Zarel
Posts: 700
Joined: July 15th, 2009, 8:24 am
Location: Minnesota, USA
Contact:

Re: Advice needed

Post by Zarel »

thespaceinvader wrote:Or modifying the scenario files to give yourself extra gold, turns or recalls. Neither of those will interfere with multiplayer.
For giving yourself extra gold, debug mode is far easier than modifying scenario files.

Editing saves to make your units more powerful works, too, and is preferable since they don't interfere with if you want to play the campaign normally later on, or if someone else wants to play the campaign.

(Edited to be clearer.)
Last edited by Zarel on December 20th, 2009, 11:27 pm, edited 1 time in total.
Proud creator of the :whistle: smiley | I prefer the CC-0 license.
User avatar
Turuk
Sithslayer
Posts: 5283
Joined: February 28th, 2007, 8:58 pm
Contact:

Re: Advice needed

Post by Turuk »

Turuk wrote:You are better off just using the debug commands to give yourself extra gold or units if you are set on cheating.
Zarel wrote:Or just using debug mode to give you more gold.
Mainline Maintainer: AOI, DM, NR, TB and THoT.
UMC Maintainer: Forward They Cried, A Few Logs, A Few More Logs, Start of the War, and Battle Against Time
Greep
Posts: 17
Joined: April 20th, 2008, 7:00 am

Re: Advice needed

Post by Greep »

On challenging, I actually played defensively through this one. Probably not the best approach but it worked. I first took the villages, but let the orcs chase me all the way back to my keep on the first difficult night time. This spread the orcs out rather thin. Then I bumrushed them as hard as I could at dawn and invaded from the center and east side. I had I think a little less than 220 gold.

I recalled only loyal units the first turn, which let me recall/recruit an extra unit. I would definately recall both the white mage and the druid (especially the white mage). Also, if you decide it's just too much and you can't win and start the campaign over, you should try and level up some elvish warriors rather than knights so you can block your mages better. You should at least have 2 knights, but 4's a bit excessive for the beginning.

Edit: bleagh, I see you beat it. Nice job :)
Post Reply