We just want our throne back Wesnoth SG 2

[Amelia]

.... I remember this scenario.

[Bobchillingworth]

Yeah, good luck. This scenario is probably the toughest one of the campaign. I had to save scum a lot before I finally figured out a winning strategy.



One of the most telling signs that Wesnoth isn't a "professional" game is that the difficulty for some of the campaigns is utterly schizophrenic. Once you get Dwarfs and especially if you get the Scepter and Void Armor on the princess the rest of the the missions are incredibly easy.

[Ranamar]

Yeah, good luck. This scenario is probably the toughest one of the campaign. I had to save scum a lot before I finally figured out a winning strategy.



One of the most telling signs that Wesnoth isn't a "professional" game is that the difficulty for some of the campaigns is utterly schizophrenic. Once you get Dwarfs and especially if you get the Scepter and Void Armor on the princess the rest of the the missions are incredibly easy.

I somehow managed to miss the Void Armor whenever I played it last, so I looked it up. Wow! Who came up with that idea? I like the scepter, and the flaming sword is a cool counterpart, but... that one just covers the only weakness the princess has.

Edit: On further consideration, are there any other campaigns which are really bad about giving out overpowering items?
(Also, the real problem with dwarves is that dwarves + healing can get quickly ridiculous... although even without healing, if you've got the +2 from healthy around.)

[Bobchillingworth]

I haven't played all of the campaigns, but I remember Delfandor's Memoirs being all over the place in terms of difficulty too, although part of that was due to the game randomly letting you build level 2 units at a certain point (which made it much, much easier). Another campaign had amulets that would allow whatever units picked them up to permanently do holy damage- giving a couple to Great Knights made fighting most of the enemies a joke. That particular campaign had an awful mission that was apparently specifically designed to kill off almost all of your experienced units, which was one of the most blatant attempts at creating fake difficulty that I've ever experienced in a game.



Anyway, I digress. If you want more of a challenge, skip the void armor mission. it makes the Princess all but invincible, and with the Rod she'll obliterate anything that gets in range. I hear the mission with the drakes that you can take instead is pretty hard I couldn't do it because I lost all of my mermen in the level you're on right now, but I think you guys have enough loyal sea-worthy units to make a go of it.

[antisocialmunky]

You have enough Mages of Light and Paladins that you should seriously just rush the center skeletons and kill him. Then you can knock over the bottom and lastly the top. Otherwise its basically a nazi-zombish last stand that is highly attritional.

[haphazard1]

I'd say the elves' units can be characterized thusly:
Our baseline has a strong melee attack and a weaker ranged attack.
One variant trades some health for better dodge in forests and trades melee damage potential for ranged damage potential.
The other variant trades damage potential from both attacks (and a little HP after leveling up) for significantly more movement points.

The first is obviously the fighter, the second is obviously the archer, and the third is obviously the scout.

Actually, looking back, I think the real problem with the scout is that you can't lead an assault with scouts.

Depends what you are fighting. Throwing them at a line of level 2 or level 3 enemies, sure they will die. But they are not meant to be line of battle troops. They supplement line of battle, raid to kill isolated units, grab villages, and help out where needed.

Each of the variants can do things the others can't.

Sure, they're almost as durable as fighters, and they get the same dodge values (which is unique), but they have barely more melee damage potential than the archer and barely more ranged damage potential than the fighter. So, you have to coddle them to level up

That defensive advantage is quite important, and helps survivability a lot. As does having both melee and ranged attacks, so they can not be cheap-shotted like horsemen. And health is quite decent, better than the archer lines although obviously not as robust as the fighter lines.

at which point they're a ranger that trades almost half its best attack and the ambush ability for 4 points of speed. At level 3, they have worse damage potential than an avenger in melee or a champion at range. (The only saving grace for the L3 is that the other units require 20% more exp to level up... but then you have to pay L3 upkeep.)

Tradeoffs, as noted. And 4 points of speed over the avenger but 5 points over the champion, who is only move 5 -- double the movement compared to champions. Some scenarios you really do need speed. And even in general scenarios the speed allows scouts/riders to help out where needed, while a slower unit may end up out of the fight while travelling.

I thought they were really cool until I did that sobering analysis the first time. On the other hand, as otherwise expendable units which you use for a land grab, they're quite good. For one thing, they actually get decent dodge in a village and don't get bogged down in forests, unlike human cavalry. If a few of them do get a measurable amount of experience without dying, well, more power to them!

A lot depends on how you use them. They have their place in the overall army, and I think we could use a couple more.

More mages are always better, I say, since the fire ones can match resilient line fighters of a level lower and then turn around and unleash FIREBALLS.

Promoted mages are very good units to have, and I wish we had more. But keeping them alive until they can promote can be a major problem, as they are very fragile at level 1 and take a lot of XP to advance. Intelligent is certainly a useful trait for mages if you can get it.

Also, mages (of whatever level) are not fast moving. And they especially have trouble in rough terrain (mountains, swamp, water, ice) -- unless they are quick it is 1 tile per turn.

Paladins have excellent resistances, but they get flat-ground defenses when they're in a castle. They'll also have an obnoxious tendency to kill attacking undead when defending, which will give the attacker more total potential attacks. (Obnoxious chance to kill attackers when defending! What has the world come to? )

Paladins are great units, but their defense stinks. And they get chewed up by anything with a ranged attack. Despite being level 3 and with all that health, I always feel like my paladins are about 1 turn away from being heavily wounded and needing to retreat to heal.

And yes, we will have to be careful against the undead hordes. Paladins, Kalenz, Konrad are all candidates for being too effective for their own good.

You didn't say anything about how Konrad and Delfador let Li'Sar go! (Since she's in recurring-villain mode...)

Yeah, I guess it was necessary for the plot. But that decision really did not make much sense. Hostage and ransom demands, anyone?

... and now, after laboriously dismantling the value of Elvish Scouts as fighters, I'm going to suggest recruiting a bunch. Okay, maybe just 3 or 4. Why? To steal villages, of course!

It'll be a suicide mission. I don't expect any of them to survive. What I expect is that they'll cost the enemy more than they cost us, or, at least, reduce their income to closer to just their base income. If we can get units running after them, that's also units that aren't running after our heroes in the center.

This is one possibility. Having some decoys/lures to keep the enemy's attention split away from our main force will be useful. Some newbie shaman can be very useful for this too, place a few of them in forests and let the enemy come after them. Send them out in pairs so they can keep healing each other.

Another thing to look at is how do we use the two bottles of holy water? I recommend horsemen, either new recruits or (if we have some) level 1s with some XP. A new knight with minimal XP could work also. Send them out immediately (meaning turn 2) to grab the bottles and gain the arcane melee attack, then bring them back to the main force. As long as we do not get horribly unlucky in the first fight or two (or leave them stranded), they will pile up XP and rapidly promote. The promotion full heals are very important with this approach to keep these units in the fight.

As general strategy for this level...we need to spend our money recalling (and maybe recruiting as noted above) and then get the heck out of Dodge. The starting keep is a death trap despite the tile defense and moat:

- It is too small to defend all sides and have room for wounded units to retreat for healing
- It is located precisely so the north and south undead armies will hit it at the same time (east tends to show up much sooner due to highly mobile wraiths)

The only question (to me) is where to go? Wiping out one of the undead kings and taking their keep has worked well for me, with south being a better target than east. (North is too powerful to overwhelm, with more gold and a larger keep.) Going after south means it takes longer for north's troops to arrive and hit you from behind...maybe long enough to have finished off south. Or we could just flee into forests or hills, like the west side or the southeast corner.

I am not completely certain how to handle unit mix. We want all our healers, all our powerful anti-undead units (mages, paladins, sorceress line types). We need a couple horsemen to take the holy water. But beyond that...spam newbies as distractions and meat shields? Recall the toughest we have and hope to keep them alive? Some of both?

If we go for distractions, I would not worry about villages (other than as distractions to the AI which also have good defense). We will end this scenario with zero money no matter what.

We do lose out a bit here for not playing the Isle of the Damned scenario. Depending on how that might have gone, we would get some white mages showing up to help. But they show up late enough to be only somewhat helpful, and we would not get to keep them anyway.

This will be a tough battle, but we have a good core army and should be able to make it. Remember that all we have to do is survive -- killing the enemy is nice if we can manage it, but survival is what we are aiming for.

[Ranamar]

I was thinking on my way home... you know, we have a bunch of Paladins, like, four or something, and they're fast, and they can heal each other, so if we keep them buddied up they have a bit more endurance. I had silly ideas based on defending the center keep, but they actually work better if we don't.

Paladins are fast. They also do a ton of damage, and even more during the day. Let's use them to punch a hole through the enemy forces for wherever we're going. (For example, since you were thinking of taking out the southern leader, go after him.) The rest of the army can follow at whatever pace it manages, and the paladins can come back to just barely keep up when they do manage to get too beaten up.

As for the holy water, you were just saying we should try to get some Elvish Riders. Is there a reason we should try to give them to Horsemen when we could give them to Elvish Scouts? I guess Horsemen do better damage, especially on a charge, but you were just complaining about their lack of ranged attack. Also, I feel like we have enough heavy horse, actually, if we actually decide to recall all of it. You may disagree, however.

[haphazard1]

I was thinking on my way home... you know, we have a bunch of Paladins, like, four or something, and they're fast, and they can heal each other, so if we keep them buddied up they have a bit more endurance. I had silly ideas based on defending the center keep, but they actually work better if we don't.

Paladins are fast. They also do a ton of damage, and even more during the day. Let's use them to punch a hole through the enemy forces for wherever we're going. (For example, since you were thinking of taking out the southern leader, go after him.) The rest of the army can follow at whatever pace it manages, and the paladins can come back to just barely keep up when they do manage to get too beaten up.

There will be plenty for our paladins to fight, but sending them ahead is an option that could work. My main worry is they will get surrounded -- especially if the enemies recruit a lot of wraiths which are very fast. But if we are heading that direction with our main force we should be able to break them free if necessary.

As for the holy water, you were just saying we should try to get some Elvish Riders. Is there a reason we should try to give them to Horsemen when we could give them to Elvish Scouts? I guess Horsemen do better damage, especially on a charge, but you were just complaining about their lack of ranged attack. Also, I feel like we have enough heavy horse, actually, if we actually decide to recall all of it. You may disagree, however.

The reason I suggest horsemen rather than scouts is that the holy water only gives arcane to melee damage. So we want the biggest melee damage dealers we have, which is horsemen with their charge bonus. For many undead one arcane hit with charge bonus can be enough to kill them even at night. In the daytime even level 2 undead can be killed. On defense the impact is not as powerful (no charge bonus) but should still be enough to kill weaker undead.

Inevitably these guys will get beaten up from counter-attacks and some ranged hits. (Also, be very careful of units with drain attacks! Wraiths at night with doubled draining counter-attacks can be very, very bad news.) But they will gain XP fast enough that they should get a couple promotion heals, which is why I recommend level 1 horsemen and not units which are already promoted. I suppose we could go with more promoted units, or even someone like a champion. But the bottles are a couple turns away even for horsemen, and I don't think any non-mounted unit could get to them without being cut off.

Anyway, I had considerable success with this on my solo play through of this map. And I saw some similar postings on the wiki forum discussion of the map. The arcane is like getting an instant semi-paladin. And by the time the level was finished, both my new recruit horsemen had promoted to paladins.

[Jkaen]

The way I did this in SP was to head south with experienced troops to kill him, and spammed fighters to go sit on all the nearby villages in the middle to slow down the chasers to give enough time to finish south before the others come

[haphazard1]

The way I did this in SP was to head south with experienced troops to kill him, and spammed fighters to go sit on all the nearby villages in the middle to slow down the chasers to give enough time to finish south before the others come

This is another good idea. So for distractions we have at least three possibilities:

- Fighters on villages
- Scouts to villages and to run around and let the enemy chase them
- Shaman in forests (preferably in pairs for healing and survivability)

The only problem is figuring out how much recruit/recall time to allocate to these distractions, and how much to tougher troops for killing our target. We don't want to stay in the starting keep too long or Konrad will get trapped there. Also, how much gold do we have? That will b a big limiting factor given that we need to recruit all our core arcane attackers, healers, paladins, etc.