My only gripe with the game is that healing doesn't give XP to the healing units. This means you need to place them in combat to level up instead of placing them behind the fighters like they are intended to be, and with them initially having low health they are very squishy. I know you can kinda cheese it by reducing a monster to 1-2 HP and then getting them to attack, but it feels like going against their role.
> Frequently Proposed Ideas (FPIs)
> 7. Healing/leadership should give experience
> It is felt that allowing units to gain experience without risk would make leveling-up of such units inevitable. Further, one of the motivating examples of this is so that units such as shaman can have a hope to level up in multiplayer. It is pointed out that if the experience gains were high enough to allow shaman to level up in a single multiplayer game, then it would be trivial to gain the best type of healing unit in a campaign very quickly.
https://forums.wesnoth.org/viewtopic.php?f=12&t=34904#w0fpi7 (2011)
There's various ways around this (like capping amount of experience per level by source), but ain't game design fun?
It depends. Personally I think they should make alternatives more easy. For instance, under Options, for people to pick other ways to level up. Does not have to be 1000000 ways, just, say 3-5 ways in total, first one being the main default and only the main default is kept balanced, the rest can be unbalanced, just allowed per option as-is.
Other aspects of the game or mod-able, but such things as this I guess is against the grain enough to probably be difficult.
I've enjoyed this, honestly. There's a whole short-term pain/long-term gain tradeoff to risking healers that adds more strategy to the campaign.
> I know you can kinda cheese it by reducing a monster to 1-2 HP
In practice, I've found it difficult to get monsters to 1-2 HP since it often means not using your most powerful attacks. On harder difficulties I usually can't afford the opportunity cost.
Yeah I personally found this to be a big part of the tactical and strategic challenge. It reminded me a lot of Pokemon where you have a similar challenge, of slotting "exposure to fighting" into a limited action and HP budget.
Edit: Now that I think about it, most turn-based games have this mechanic. It's almost an idiomatic balance/design decision in gaming.
Compare to Dota where support heroes have acquired more and more opportunities for assist gold/XP, it does in some sense make the game "easier" for the support players, but then the game is harder in other ways because now the supports are all way more farmed and dangerous than in older versions. It's the difference between controlling an army of many units and having to manage them all, versus controlling one unit and needing to work together within a team.
Dota/League does this because each hero is controlled by a human, and humans don't like playing low-impact, low-wealth, low-exp supports.
Isn't the strategy then to keep them behind the fighter units, wait until an enemy is 1 HP away from death, make the healer advance and make a kill, then put a fighter in front of them again?
Yes, but people don't like that because everyonce in a while a unit misses completely and then it will be targeted and die the next turn.
No risk, no gain
An indirect compensation is that these units require less XP to advance, but I understand your concern too.
> I know you can kinda cheese it by reducing a monster to 1-2 HP and then getting them to attack, but it feels like going against their role.
This is a problem with the XP-per-kill system. Wesnoth could use a variant instead. I use the above strategy all the time to level the healers up.
Note that elven units have slow (their healers), which is very powerful in its own right for getting a kill on a unit. First slow, then deal damage with other units.
It's OSS, no?
It is, but making a change that doesn't mess up the balance of the game can be tricky.