Can anyone consistently beat HttT scenarios on hard?

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santi
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Post by santi »

Well, i fyou want to really experience frustration, play TROW on hard especially the last scenaria until you figure out the right strategy....
I really did not play for the perfect play. In TROW it is imperative to have no losses in the final scenaria; if you do, you lose. In HtTT it is not IMHO.
I have lost a few Rangers and an Avenger which would have been highly desirable. Sad, but no big deal. As far as I can see after DD where I am right now there really are not that many scenaria(Return to Wesnoth maybe) where elvish archers are a must.
On DD I can run, but instead I want to kill all enemy leaders and see if I win this way; the downside is I need to recruit much more than I'd like, but that's fine; HttT thus far is too easy on hard, so I need to give myself a little less gold.
Gus
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Post by Gus »

santi wrote:In TROW it is imperative to have no losses in the final scenaria; if you do, you lose. In HtTT it is not IMHO.
Well, in HttT, it is, if it is how you decide to play in the first place =)
Hard work may pay off in the long run, but laziness always pays off right away.
Kalis
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Post by Kalis »

Will do Santi :)
Should be interesting hehe.
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Wintermute
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shaman only

Post by Wintermute »

baruk wrote:
zookeeper wrote: So, my question could probably be summed up as follows: are there any Wesnoth players good enough to win any HttT scenario on hard somewhat consistently (>~70% or so of attempts), or is the campaign-beating strategy of even the top players to restart the scenario until they beat it, even if it takes multiple tries?
I don't save/load mid-scenario. Some can be beaten on hard with no losses fairly easily, others are a real struggle, and may take dozens of attempts. But rather than just repeating the same approach until you get lucky enough to win, you need to keep trying different strategies. Sometimes you discover a really great one that is repeatable enough that you can win with it perhaps 70% of the time. Understanding and predicting the movements and attacks of the AI becomes as important as your own unit placement.
I agree with this. I definitely remember massive frustration the first few times I tried playing through HttT on hard. The Scepter of Fire was, as I remember it, a very difficult scenario. I had to replay the whole campaign with that scenario in mind, always saving gold and leveling units that would be most useful in that scenario. It has since been nerfed to the point of being a cakewalk, IMO, though that is with the benefit of having played it before. I imagine it would be much more challenging if one didn't know what to expect.

Anyway, I don't have my old saves from last time I went through HttT, so I decided to play through it with version 1.2.2. I really hate restarting scenarios, and I never do any loading from autosaves (other than crashes, ans sometimes not even then). To make it more interesting, I decided to play through it recruiting only shaman. I think that J.W. Talked about doing this, though I don't know if he did it or was just joking. I did use the loyal units (they are recalls, not recruits :wink: ), and I think it would very hard to do this without the mermen in particular.

Some stats:
At the start of the BfW, I had dealt 0.4% more damage than expected, and taken 2.9% more damage than expected.
I had recruited 61 shaman, and had 217 total recalls.
646 kills and 49 losses.

I only failed one scenario – hasty alliance, a replay of which is included – after a seemingly safe move with Delfador, Lis'ar moved all of the surrounding units away and several level three trolls that I couldn't see came and squished him. :oops: I did have several times where the AI had ctk a major unit, but I had luck when it mattered. Luck did not seem to be a deciding factor in the outcome of the campaign, however. If I were to play this over again (with shaman only), I would expect to need a few restarts, maybe 3-5.

In the interests of full disclosure, I had made several previous attempts at doing this on prior versions of Wesnoth, but didn't finish in each case. In other words, I had a pretty good idea about strategy in the opening scenarios, and I also had long term goals in mind for how to deal with Scepter of Fire and Battle for Wesnoth.

I think that doing a no-losses campaign would harder than limited recruiting, like this play-through, but like zookeeper, I abhor saveloading, so I decided to try this rather than agonize over not losing a unit on a few hard scenarios.

Anyway, for what it's worth here are the replays.
Attachments
Sham_HttT_part2.zip
after Dwarven Doors, includes the failed Hasty Alliance attempt, and BfW savegame for stats verification
(451.39 KiB) Downloaded 326 times
Sham_HttT_part1.zip
up through Dwarven Doors
(352.04 KiB) Downloaded 344 times
"I just started playing this game a few days ago, and I already see some balance issues."
Truper
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Post by Truper »

Has anybody tried HttT under 1.3.1 yet? I am a longtime fan of attempting no-reloads campaigns, so I was overly familiar with how the AI plays in the initial scenarios. Seems to me that the 1.3.1 AI is a lot less predictable, making the campaign significantly harder.
Soliton
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Post by Soliton »

Nice watching those Shaman only replays, unfortunately some are corrupted. If someone wants to investigate further here's the list: Crossroads, The Princess of Wesnoth, Plunging into the Darkness, The Lost General, The Sceptre of Fire and Test of the Clan.

Btw, in my last play of HttT I gave the armor to Li'sar. With her elusive foot movetype she's the perfect candidate in my opinion.
"If gameplay requires it, they can be made to live on Venus." -- scott
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Wintermute
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Post by Wintermute »

Soliton wrote:some are corrupted... Crossroads, The Princess of Wesnoth, Plunging into the Darkness, The Lost General, The Sceptre of Fire and Test of the Clan.
Thanks, I'll see if I can upload those again. It's too bad that the *all* the autosaves are deleted in the normal next-level-save process. The last autosave would have another copy of the replay... though perhaps that would be corrupt also. Hmmm.

Soliton wrote:Btw, in my last play of HttT I gave the armor to Li'sar. With her elusive foot movetype she's the perfect candidate in my opinion.
That does seem like a good choice. I had never gotten the armor before (I tend to go for first-try wins more than unlocking secrets, and I am not good enough to do both most of the time!), so I didn't have a good plan for what to do with it. On the other hand, giving it to a unit that can charge is pretty amazing. :shock:


EDIT: The replays mentioned are also corrupt for me. Those are some of the longer scenarios, and I know for a fact that on Princess of Wesnoth and Test of the Clan I was interupted several times, so there were frequent saves and loads (not to be confused with save/loading :wink: ). Perhaps some of the other corrupt scenarios are also because of this? I know in Test of the Clan, for example, that I had started recalling units and then had to leave before I was ready so I undid them and quite. That seems likely to corrupt to me. Oh well.
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Soliton
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Post by Soliton »

Wintermute wrote: EDIT: The replays mentioned are also corrupt for me. Those are some of the longer scenarios, and I know for a fact that on Princess of Wesnoth and Test of the Clan I was interupted several times, so there were frequent saves and loads (not to be confused with save/loading :wink: ). Perhaps some of the other corrupt scenarios are also because of this? I know in Test of the Clan, for example, that I had started recalling units and then had to leave before I was ready so I undid them and quite. That seems likely to corrupt to me. Oh well.
Would be great if you can try to confirm/reproduce this with a simple test case. That would go a long way towards fixing the bug!
"If gameplay requires it, they can be made to live on Venus." -- scott
Kalis
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Post by Kalis »

I noticed that's one of the reason for corruption.
There were several missions where I recalled the wrong unit, undid it, and when I watch the replay, it recalls the original unit and corrupts.
It doesn't seem to occur in the first turn or 2, but if you start recalling and undoing in later turns it shows up.

About the armour, I found Lisar with the armor and the Scepter was the ideal. She becomes an invincible skirmisher with a crazy ranged attack :D
Even better, you can actually use her really aggressively then (unlike normally when she has all those negative resists!)
Velensk
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Post by Velensk »

I'll agree to that let konrad sit back on his keep and recruit, while she leads the men in battle
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