
Luck in Wesnoth: Rationale (2008) - tosh
https://www.wesnoth.org/forum/viewtopic.php?f=6&t=21317&start=0&st=0&sk=t&sd=a
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dzdt
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.

~~~
wild_preference
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.

~~~
hitekker
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.

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hitekker
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...](https://store.steampowered.com/app/212680/FTL_Faster_Than_Light/)

~~~
ergothus
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?

~~~
jsnell
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.)

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lbill
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

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padthai
> 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.

~~~
mathgeek
> 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.

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shoo
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"?)

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mcprwklzpq
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.

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Endy
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".

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tosh
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?

~~~
jtolmar
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.

~~~
IggleSniggle
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.

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dozzie
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).

~~~
pdpi
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.

~~~
j_4
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.

