Luck in Wesnoth: Rationale (2008) | Hacker News Reader

Luck in Wesnoth: Rationale (2008)

wesnoth.org

71 pointstosh33 comments

When I tried Wesnoth (some years back) my issue was the campaigns would progressively get farther out of balance as you progressed. If you ever continued after completing a previous scenario with modest to heavy losses, you would find yourself in a dire situation. You might scrape through another level, but there was no recovery.

That was where luck became a tempting distraction. You have to keep your best units alive for the next level or be faced with the unwinnable downward spiral. So at the end of the current battle, it gets tempting to save-scum when one of your heroes falls. Its that, or replay the whole battle, or take your chances that the following battle will be unwinnable.

This is true until you try other things. E.g. I found that if I got attached to units, I tended to be worse off in later scenarios. If you're continuously developing lots of units you always have opportunities to level up & get automatic healing, for example. Of course I say this having never tried anything harder than the medium difficulty setting.

I had this same problem with the X-Com series where it's too lucrative to save-scum.

Thankfully it has a hardcore mode you can toggle on where the game autosaves to a single file so you can't save-scum. Which turns out to be the best way to play X-Com and games like it because you can't just rewind time.

Try Achron https://www.achrongame.com/site/

In my experience, save-scumming is as much of a cheat for developers as it is for gamers.

90% of your players can't get past a level because it's poorly designed? Why, just tell them to keep saving and reloading until they get through! It's realistic! It makes sense! It's blah blah blah.

Unless deliberate like in Kaizo-games, the over-reliance on save-scumming is an indicator that the game's creators are just too insecure or too untalented to fix their own oversights.

I always found when my losses where that high it isn't a matter of going a few turns back, it is starting over with a new strategy.

One important part of wesnoth strategy that mostly comes out in the longer campaigns is that lvl 3 units are often much less economical than lvl 2 or 1's. It is important to train and then save a number of higher level units so that if you do lose one later on you can replace them.

I think that playing Wesnoth without save-scumming requires a tremendous amount of patience. I lack it.

For a less casual RNG game without quick-save-and-reload, I heartily recommend FTL [1]. Without the in-game ability to start over after making a mistake, you're forced to deal with whatever the game throws at you. No excuses, no rationalizations.

It plays amazing, punishes you at every turn, and is tremendously popular.

FTL creators simply loved the problem they were trying to solve, "starship simulator", even more than the various solutions they eventually executed upon. In my view, it is that focus on fun which separates the greats the from second-rates.

[1] https://store.steampowered.com/app/212680/FTL_Faster_Than_Li...

> Without the in-game ability to start over after making a mistake, you're forced to deal with whatever the game throws at you. No excuses, no rationalizations.

I found "Alien: Isolation" to be amazing in this aspect as well. You can only save at very specific points in the map (no quicksave), and in many situations where you might expect the game to be paused, like when saving progress, it's really not.

Makes you think twice before doing anything.

I clearly am missing something, because I almost always die off halfway through stage 2. Which means I've barely interacted with most of the options the game offers. Early stage 3 is the furthest I've ever gotten.

I've tried speeding through, I've tried being thorough on stage one and faster after, I've tried mixes. I cant afford most items for sale, and just keeping up in fuel is sometimes a challenge.

Every playthrough is the same, with the only alteration being how quickly it takes to get into a crippling fight. Yet i keep hearing praise for the large variety and replayability.

I thought it might just be that I'm too casual (advice like "play games on ironman" sounds like a recipe of frustration and boredom to me) but I'm bothered by the lack on concurring voices. Am I the only one to suck at this game?

I started out in a similar spot. I this FTL has an awkward issue with getting stuck in a loop where you die too fast to learn to not die. (Dwarf Fortress, NetHack, and others seem to have the same issue, while other roguelikes like Dredmor don't.) As you hit stage 4+ repeatedly, you start to get a much better feel for the game.

Start on Easy if you haven't, it helps a lot with breaking that loop. It doesn't undermine the gameplay at all like it does in some games, it just helps stretch your money and fuel further. It'll even help you unlock new ships that might suit your playstyle better for harder difficulties.

And yes - the variety and replayability are strongly tied to unlocking multiple ships and progressing far enough to try out a variety of different builds. Stage one just doesn't vary that much if it's all you're seeing.

Are you playing on Easy, Normal, or Hard?

Once you have the basic metagame down (I believe around 30 hours of playtime), then getting to the final zone should be doable with the default ships.

Also, are you using space to pause the game when you need it? I had no clue that I could do that until 20 hours in, just before I almost deleted it all of my computer.

It sounds like you might not be executing the fights properly. You should be expecting to win all the early fights quickly and decisively, so that each of them is profitable by itself. Hard to say what exactly you're doing wrong, but especially early on the key decision should be what you're targeting, and the key bit of manual execution is timing your shots (do not just use autofire).

At least in early fights you'd want to concentrate on the enemy shields or weapons. A typical way to do that with the starting Kestrel might be e.g. to fire a missile on the enemy shield generator (the missile bypasses the shields, takes the shield room to orange damage, and that takes their shields down completely). Then fire the burst laser at the shield room to take them out for a longer time. After that mainly use the burst laser on their weapon room (to keep from taking any damage), but switch back to targeting the shield room if they get it repaired back to orange.

(As for how quickly you go through, you should leave each level exactly one turn before you're caught by the enemy fleet. Taking longer than that is wasting an opportunity to pick up more resources, taking longer means you're ending up in fights that generate no resources.)

FTL has some odd strategy bits to it, especially early game. Here's a grab bag of things:

Abuse the pause button. You can take your time to think and plan.

Engines are a good upgrade: they let you avoid damage, which let's you save money. Every shield you buy is multiplied by how string your engine is.

You should focus on defense over offense the first few levels. I nearly always have two shields as my first purchase, even if I have to turn off my O2 or medbay to run them.

Its OK to avoid shops until you have enough scrap/junk to sell to buy something. Top priorities are usually cloaking and damage here. You can usually win battles with a very small weapons edge if you have strong enough defense, but if you go too far eventually you will be unable to touch enemies.

Difficult to diagnose your play style, but the early battles are pretty easy to win. Sometimes, with a second layer of shields your opponent literally cannot damage you. You can still control the game while paused, so you can give orders and time your shots to all land at the same time and overwhelm opponent shields. I usually target their weapons first, since repairs are costly.

> I thought it might just be that I'm too casual

You can also lower the difficulty level while you master the game's mechanics. Some things to consider:

- Training your crew - Acquiring more crew - What parts to sell - What parts of the ship to upgrade first - How to get by with more equipment points than you have reactor points - When to run - How to choose sectors

Explore as much as you can without the rebel fleet catching up to you.

Generally speaking, you actually want to pick as many fights as possible. The game implies that you're supposed to be a peaceful and heroic Star Trek style Federation and that's not what it actually rewards at all.

The ship upgrades that are always available are more important than stuff you can buy in shops, even though the shop items are more interesting. An extra dot in shields pays for itself in a hurry. You'll eventually need other stuff, and there are multiple load-outs that work, but lots of multi-hit weapons with low power requirements is the simplest winning setup.

Those are the common misconceptions. The game doesn't actually do a great job of communicating how to play it well.

There is a mod out there [0], which prevents the rebels from catching up, thus allowing you to explore every single star in each sector. This gives you huge boost of resources, so you can quickly upgrade the ship and buy any equipment from stores. This may make the game easier to learn and try various strategies.

[0] https://www.nexusmods.com/fasterthanlight/mods/6

The other huge endorsement I have for FTL is that games are relatively short, and many of the punishments are harsh-but-survivable. Losing a crewman to a random event feels devastating, but it doesn't guarantee a loss, and if you do lose you're not set back that far.

That's a nice contrast with other no-saving games like Ironman XCOM. It's a superb game, and I think best played without save scumming, but it's painfully easy to lose a 20 hour buildup to 1-2 bad missions. (Or a 100+ hour game if you're running Long War.)

That, and the in-game mechanics of FTL just feel satisfying in a way that too many roguelites lack. Losing and starting from scratch is much more bearable if playing the game is pleasant, independent of your progression.

In a way, the "luck" factor makes the game more realistic. You plan your actions and send your best troops for the jobs, betting on the high chances of success of the mission... but just as well as in real life, anything can happen! It makes me feel more involved, and this "shit can happen" aspect is precisely what I love the most about Wesnoth.

EDIT : typo

> there is a substantial, but not huge amount of luck

Luck in turn based games make some playstyles impossible. Being aggressive is hard. You may only have to be extremely unlucky in one attack to get completely exposed the next turn. In Wesnoth is even worse because you have to grind your units to death.

I know that the game is that way on purpose but I feel that it makes it a niche game. For me, it has all the bad parts of a card game and a an RPG.

> I know that the game is that way on purpose but I feel that it makes it a niche game.

That's a reasonable conclusion. Personally, I believe that turn-based tactical games will always be a niche regardless of the choices around the systems, and Wesnoth has survived for so long that it's arguably found its niche within that niche.

You have lot of units tho so it evens out. If you play with low gold as a rpg of course doesn’t work well.

Into the breach does the opposite. No randomness and move preview makes the combat work well with few units and makes it’s more of a puzzle game than rpg.

There are some games that feature randomness that is partly controlled by the player.

For example, deck building games (dominion etc) let you choose which cards to add to your deck, then cards cycle through deck -> hand -> discard pile, finally shuffling discard pile to become new deck. There is randomness in the order of cards drawn from your deck, but it can be influenced by your decisions of what cards to add to your deck during the game, and you are guaranteed to draw each card in your deck once as you successively draw hands and cycle through your deck, before shuffling.

I am very much enjoying playing "slay the spire", which takes this deck building mechanic and mashes it up into a roguelike. There is additional variability in random encounters, rewards, and what moves enemies do, but part of the fun is figuring out how to best exploit or mitigate the situation you end up in with the hand you are dealt, and trying to tilt the odds of the kinds of hands you'll get in future. Helps that games are usually short (eg win in an hour if everything goes well, die quickly and restart a new run otherwise)

Another example is a game where each player has two moddable d6 : the values of the faces of each players dice can be individually upgraded/replaced , as one of the core mechanics of the game. ("Dice forge"?)

I read somewhere that Wesnoth was in parts inspired by sega genesis game Warsong, but i see that not in one important part trough, or players would not feel so unlucky and get into situations where they want to abuse save/load mechanics to get a better luck. In Wesnoth each unit accumulates experience and they get more and more valuable and irreplaceable later in the game campaigns. In Warsong commander units each have up to 8 hired units under their command and get experience from hired units fights, while hired units do not accumulate experience at all, being cannon fodder. Before players would lose valuable commander to luck they would lose 8 unvaluable troops in a row at which point it is impossible to blame luck. Players always feel in control of the battle even through fight outcomes are very random.

I always expected a die roll from the day I first installed Wesnoth. Then again, I had some tabletop war game / tactical game experience by that point (as well as the original X-COM), so it really would have been more surprising if Wesnoth had lacked the "die roll".

I wonder if games like Fire Emblem, Langrisser and Shining Force have a shuffle bag approach to attacking, defending, fleeing.

Does anyone know more about this from a game design point of view?

Starting with the GBA games, Fire Emblem's hit and critical chances take the average of two random numbers. So what shows as a 90% hit rate is actually 98% (that is, (2d100)/2 <= 90).

I think this is a pretty neat trick; it's more in line with what people feel like probabilities should be than the reality of those probabilities. It also subtly biases in the player's favor, since in Fire Emblem the heroes usually have high accuracy while enemies more often go for high damage and low accuracy.

That is brilliant, but I have mixed feelings about misinforming the player this way.

I like the way Brogue trains you on odds. You roll the dice A LOT, but it goes by super fast, so you get averages in one battle that conform to player expectations without misleading the player. At the same time, you can still achieve high stakes moments...but generally the player has walked themselves into those high stakes moments by repeatedly playing poor odds, so it feels deserved rather than like a rage quit situation.

I've seen the claim that the Japanese versions of Fire Emblem don't do this, though I'm not sure if it's true.

It wouldn't surprise me if people's past gaming experiences did a lot to vary their expectations for random number generation. I know XCOM was sometimes accused of fudging numbers against the player, though experimentation shows the percentage chances are correct (excluding bugs). I wonder if that's tied to expectations set by games like Fire Emblem.

Heh, if only the hit chance was actually the hit chance. Very often the same attack, e.g. three strikes with 60% chance, yields something like 30% hits when the situation is repeated multiple times (save-attack-load-attack).

In a game I did I had to face this exact kind of cognitive bias with predictable randomness.

Our brain sucks at experiencing chances due to fixation on negative emotions.

Eventually settled for running each chance twice and picking the best outcome and that felt more matching the player expectations, but in the end I just removed the chance aspect.

There was a funny issue with that sort of thing in (IIRC, the American version of) several Fire Emblem games. In an attempt to make the RNG feel less random, they actually generated two 1-100 numbers for each roll and averaged them. This has the effect of making numbers close to 50 likelier than extreme values, which in turn makes extreme probabilities even more extreme: a 5% chance to miss becomes a .3% chance to miss after this averaging.

I couldn't find the article I was thinking of, but it had a number of gamedevs admitting to manipulating hit ratios like this. In a similar vein, it's generally a good idea to make gambler's fallacy true under the hood. Goes a long way towards having less angry, frustrated players.

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