Wesnoth

By: Albert Lai

On: April 18th, 2007

Today: Wesnoth – that grand ol’ turn-based
fantasy strategy game that has been taking up the most of my time, relative to
my other pursuits (though, I suppose TwinSeedDX deserves a mention or two). It
should be noted that Tim actually mentioned this a while ago on his blog, which
I discovered after I sank many an hour into this game and was three-fourths of
the way done typing this.

Wesnoth is, basically, Fire Emblem.

IN BIZARRO WORLD.

A fool may mistake it for being Fire Emblem, which is at the core an RPG, while Wesnoth is but an RPG at the rind surrounding the strategy pulp. I mean, you have unit advancement and the fantasy theme. But those are merely superficial similarities.

Strategy elements are much stronger within Wesnoth – recruiting units is as much a part of the campaign as retaining old ones from earlier missions – not to mention that in multiplayer (Which is more than functional) you build up an army from scratch. In addition, your units also incur upkeep, which means that you can’t just spooge units from your keep – capture and maintenance of towns is crucial as well.

Overall, with the graphical finesse and the wide variety of built-in and optional content Wesnoth is one of those games that, to quote Tim “could be commercial. Thank God it isn’t.”

Posted in Freeware, Highly Recommended, Macintosh, Strategy, Windows

BIZARRO MAN

GAME ARE GOOD ME HEAR
Tim

Actually, I don’t play strategy games. (yeah, I’m missing out a lot)

You’re probably referring to Maenny’s post. It’s an absolutely fab game from what I’ve heard. ;)
Alan Gordon

I found this game to be a bit frustratingly random in the combat department. I stopped playing the second or third time I send one of my heroes against a nearly dead unit, only to have him miss every time and then get killed by a series of lucky blows.

Not so say that it isn’t for everyone, but I’m pretty sure it isn’t for me.
poot

Sounds and looks a lot like Ogre Battle.
Albert Lai

> Alan Gordon

Yeah, I actually had a rather lengthy rant about the complete binary (on / off) aspect of battle before I nixed it as being completely incomprehensible to people who hadn’t played the game.

So I’ll post it here off the top of my head!

Really, the most irritating part is that the game balances high damage values (usually enough to take a character down by 10% of their HP) with ludicrously high avoid chances (usually hovering around 40%). The skill “marksman”, which implies the ability to hit accurately, just means that the character has a minimum hit chance of 60%!

It’s sort of balances powerful units that hit only 2 or 3 times versus, er, 4 or 5 times, but I would prefer lower damage for a more stable battle arena.

The fact you can rewind back a turn or so slightly off-sets this, but it also feels a bit like cheating. Not to mention the load times.
Smithy!

This game is really quite entertaining, but if you’re looking for another Ogre Battle you’ll probably be disappointed…
Smithy!

I played wesnoth a lot, waay back in the day.

Then I stopped playing.

And now

I redownloaded and am playing it again.

And it’s much more fun this time around.

Yep.

Could be commercial is right.
Carlosfocker

Good solid Strategy game. Runs on linux which is always a plus