NWP: Terrain you Pain

WSNPP: NWP #1– Terrain you Pain

Hello to new players of Wesnoth, this is the first ever NWP guide. In this guide we’re going to take a look at terrain and how it can affect your game play.

Background:

In every hex there is terrain. The whole map has landforms and masses and I will not elaborate on the Geography part of it. Now the terrain determines a unit’s defence or their dodge chance against attacks. This can vary on the type of unit, race and any bonuses for example: an Elf archer would have high defence in forests and low defence in deep water (70% in forests and 20% in shallow water) where as a merman is the total opposite (60% in shallow water, 20% on forests).

The pain:

Now I am not sure if this happens often to anyone but it does to me. Basically what happens is that you’re playing on a map you never played before, your opponent is playing elves and you’re playing a random race.

You start the battle and you end up with Knagllans and guess what? Almost 90% of the map is dominated with forests. So your opponent already has that advantage, field advantage. This annoys me a lot and I’m sure it annoys you to. This can occur with randomised maps too although not often.

What to do:

Now there is no simple and easy counter to this disadvantage but you can change your build to adapt to the situation. So instead of recruiting dwarves, you just recruit footpads and gryphon riders or some other combination. Since footpads, poachers, gryphon riders and etc are excellent on that terrain type, the game becomes a little bit more balanced however you cannot effectively use the other half of your army, in this case it’s the dwarves.

Some Tactics:

1) You can rush the enemy with a group of gryphon riders and quickly take out the enemy hero. (My rating – 6/10)

2) Build footpads, poachers etc to push the opponent’s forces back whilst recruiting a few dwarves as support and to deal damage. (My rating – 8/10)

3) Take the villages and slowly deprive your opponent of his/her income and then finish him/her off through sheer numbers. (My rating – 9/10)

These would be the most common and easiest tactics to pull off. There are plenty of other ones, even crazy ones in my opinion but I do not recommend them.

4) Sending your hero along with your army and taking over the enemy keep and recruiting there then sending the new recruits against the opponent’s leader. You can normally scare the leader off his keep by forcing him to heal on a village then overtaking the village. (My rating – 6/10 Why? since your hero may die whilst travelling towards the keep and because the tactic can be easily countered.)

Campaigns?:

Now you may notice in campaigns that the same thing happens. You might have a scenario that is underground and you’re loyalists. Well, fortunately the objective is not totally against you so there shouldn’t be too much of a problem. Just recruit units that are ok or good on the type of terrain and quickly finish the objective.

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