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[Mesa]

Allegedly there have been at least two threads on this game here but both of them date back to at least half a decade ago so I think it's not unfair for me to create a new one instead.

Starting off with the link to the game's website, from which I'm immediately gonna quote their synopsis:

The Battle for Wesnoth is a Free, turn-based tactical strategy game with a high fantasy theme, featuring both single-player, and online/hotseat multiplayer combat. Fight a desperate battle to reclaim the throne of Wesnoth, or take hand in any number of other adventures...

As well as the more verbose description+features list.

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

The Battle for Wesnoth is a turn-based tactical strategy game with a high fantasy theme.

Build up a great army, gradually turning raw recruits into hardened veterans. In later games, recall your toughest warriors and form a deadly host that none can stand against! Choose units from a large pool of specialists, and hand-pick a force with the right strengths to fight well on different terrains against all manner of opposition.

Wesnoth has many different sagas waiting to be played. Fight to regain the throne of Wesnoth, of which you are the legitimate heir... step into the boots of a young officer sent to guard a not-so-sleepy frontier outpost... lead a brutal quest to unite the orcish tribes... vanquish a horde of undead warriors unleashed by a foul necromancer, who also happens to have taken your brother hostage... guide a band of elvish survivors in an epic quest to find a new home... get revenge on the orcs by using the foul art of necromancy...

There are at least two hundred unit types, sixteen races, six major factions, and hundreds of years of history. The world of Wesnoth is absolutely huge and only limited by your creativity — make your own custom units, create your own maps, and write your own scenarios or even full-blown campaigns. You can also challenge up to eight friends—or strangers—and fight in epic multiplayer fantasy battles.

• Build up a formidable fighting force, starting from a single leader and a small amount of gold.
• Over two hundred unit types in six major factions, all with distinctive abilities, weapons and spells.
• Experienced units gain powerful new abilities as they advance.
• Several multiplayer options available, including Internet play.
• Scores of different custom-designed map and unlimited random maps.
• Hundreds of campaign scenarios available for download through a simple in-game dialog.
• Fog of War feature available for a true test of generalship.
• Sophisticated markup language lets advanced users make their own maps, factions, or campaigns.
• Excellent language support — 54 different languages currently available.
• Compatible with Windows, OS X, and GNU/Linux, as well as BSD distributions such as FreeBSD, OpenBSD, NetBSD, and DragonFly BSD.

Sounds good for a game developed almost entirely by fans, for free, for almost as long as Dwarf Fortress, no?
It's also on Steam Greenlight if you're into that.

So it took me a while to actually fully understand the game's ideas+mechanics+'thing' (outside of Heroes of Might and Magic, I was never a huge fan of hex-based turn-based strategy games), but now that I did, I think it's an absolutely amazing game, especially for that price (of nothing at all). Sure, it's still slightly rough in some places (I do think that the graphics are ever so so slightly disjointed and the interface is a tad too menu-driven), but it's definitely very mature and all-around great. Plus it has a tough-as-inals campaign about elves trying to survive in a post-apocalyptic desert, Mad Max-style. ^{(nevermind that it was a fan campaign that then made it into the canon because of its quality, but how cool is that)}

[Cthulhu]

Even once you learn how to manage the RNG it's still very random.  The campaign reminds me of the easy GBA fire emblems where success is basically just farming up enough tier 2 or 3 guys that you can just roll through the enemy.  Once you've got five or six elven champions and a few priestesses to heal them up there's almost nothing the AI can do.

Multiplayer also seemed pretty unbalanced.  I won a 2v2 game by killing both enemy leaders with the same bat.  And I don't mean KSing with a cheeky bat, I mean the bat was the primary cause of death.

Multiplayer games can be extremely swingy and random slugging matches with mountains of bodies on both sides where the tide can shift even on the last turn (drakes vs undead) or horrible monotonous slogs where it's obvious who's going to win 20 turns before it's over but you can't make it go any faster (undead vs undead)

[Werdna]

If you enjoy these type of games, look for Elven Legacy Collection on Steam.  It's a semi-sequel to an old favorite of mine, Fantasy Wars.  It's a lot more professionally done than Wesnoth, which I last recall only had a few 'campaigns' with little overall story.  Something to check out once you've had your fill of Wesnoth!  I don't know why but this genre of game tends to be brutally tough, all of these titles have a lot of RNG to them and a campaign can grind to a screeching halt merely because the AI decides to throw everything it has to annihilate 1-2 of your best units.  You can learn to avoid that in most cases, but these games often have mission timers that force you to leave armies in risky positions.  Ironman's too sadistic for me, I usually allow myself mission restarts but not turn restarts.

I grew up on SSI and other "hex-based" wargames so these turn-based strategy titles have always been a favorite of mine.

[zaimoni]

Most, if not all, mainline campaigns are balanced for savescumming on "normal".  The best user-mod campaigns don't have this problem.  Also, backward compatibility is not a priority so there are many good add-ons that are not available for current versions.  (I have verified that the one I like, Wesband, cannot be migrated from 1.10.x to 1.12.x because of a critical bugfix to Lua scripting applied for 1.11.6 .)

[Hanzoku]

My one wish for this game would be the ability to have partial XP sharing. The lion's share goes to the killing blow, and maybe a point or two for each hit for the setup units.

[ChairmanPoo]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yfAE3GqhFz4

[sambojin]

There's also an Android, and I think iOS, port of Battle for Wesnoth. It works ok'ish.

If you want to look at the other end of the spectrum of these things, there's Age of Fantasy on Android. It has squares and no RNG and is quite a bit faster to play. It's in beta right now, so isn't as polished as Wesnoth (not having years of development behind it), but it features user-made content, scripted battles, and is also free.

It's like Wesnoth Lite, with the RNG taken out. Which is sort of what I want from a game.


Battle of Wesnoth always sits on my phone, staring at me, hoping I'll bother to finish a campaign (or even map) one day. At least I can do that in AoF.

[Cthulhu]

There's a lot of campaigns and many of them are very long (maybe a little too long) but there's not as much to them as the equivalent length in a similar game.  Most of the missions have the same strategy.

Turtle up with your heavy melee guys in front spaced two apart to maximize space while maintaining the ZOC wall with support units and trainees behind to jump out and steal kills.  Grind your way across the map to whatever you need to do.  Very rarely will the turn limit matter.

Once again like the GBA fire emblem, if you allow them to the enemy will kill itself on your high ranks every time its turn comes around, allowing you to mop up and move the cage on yours.

[baruk]

 The Wesnoth RNG always gets brought up in these threads - here's the salient part of an article by David White about luck in wesnoth, and how it differs from a game like fire emblem.

In Wesnoth, there is a substantial, but not huge amount of luck. The main luck limiting factor is the way in which units have multiple strikes in a battle. A unit with four attacks has four chances to hit, not just one, and so it is generally reasonably unlikely that they will either miss all four times, or hit all four times.

Of course, units have different numbers of strikes. This means different units are susceptible to luck to different degrees. This is one of the key gameplay facets of Wesnoth: managing luck. There are many opportunities to manage how much risk one exposes oneself to, and make backup plans if things go wrong.

This can be contrasted against a game like Fire Emblem. In Fire Emblem, a unit typically has one attack, though may have two in some situations, and four or more in very rare situations. Units also have a chance to hit, but it is dependent heavily on the attacker's skill, and in particular, it is common for an attacker to achieve a very high chance to hit, and a 100% chance to hit is common. (If a player wants, they can optimize to almost always have 100% chance to hit).

This approach is more satisfying for many gamers, because they feel in control of the game. They can normally achieve a 100% chance to hit, they can use units that have poor dodge abilities but high resistance to damage, and expect to usually be hit, but take relatively little damage. They can play Fire Emblem close to being a deterministic game.

This has a certain appeal to it, and is fun in its way. In particular, one can often in a turn in Fire Emblem carefully plan out one's moves, work out how many enemies one can definitively knock out, and can plan to avoid any chance of one's own characters dying.

However, in my opinion this kind of gameplay has only a limited amount of appeal. It is certainly not the kind of gameplay we want in Wesnoth. In Wesnoth we want a player to plan out a complex situation, to estimate carefully the possibilities. To have to work out a good strategy. If a player can simply rely on all sorts of assurances that their units will hit, they don't have to do any of this. Sure, there will be a certain amount of fun to planning out a situation where you can set up a cool 'domino effect' of enemy units going down as you attack them. But this is nothing to do with the skill of planning out a real strategy in a dynamic situation where you have to consider all kinds of contingencies.

https://forums.wesnoth.org/viewtopic.php?t=21317

[sambojin]

The exact opposite of this is why I like Age of Fantasy. I want my dominos. I want to plan out, with unerring accuracy, exactly what I intend to accomplish each turn. Research bonuses vs units, hit and fades, even deleting (disbanding) units so another can strike from that square, all become actual parts of your strategy.

Hit and hope is fine, and it has its place in some games, but it makes for an "uber unit or bust" thing quite a bit of the time. Very heroic, but not particularly good for things like multiplayer. A deterministic ruleset is great for this, because it's actually your fault if you cock it up, not the RNG's.

Then again, AoF still has percentage chances for some spells and catapult hits (vs faster units is worse), so it really is just a wargaming thing.

Recovering from bad rolls has a part to play in determining your strategy too, I guess. I just don't like it when it's used for every damn attack. Too much RNG is a bad thing in strategy games, IMO.


Chess is a "better" TBS boardgame than Warhammer, for instance. And half of Wahammer involves working out how to even/average out your dice rolls in a given situation. Then they introduced random charge distances, destroying strategic integrity, and horde mechanics for infantry to sell figurines. You can't learn how to get good at Warhammer, because strategic movement got dice rolls added to them, so you can't plan squat. Then the game died. Chess is still going fine. Figures do their thing and you can plan a strategy around them.

Strangely enough, I'm fine with the original Xcom's RNG, but not so much the remake's. It probably depends on how much you can "smooth" out the bumps, how much death/single-map-defeat/RNG-sucking is an obstacle in a campaign, and how many rocket launchers they give you from day 1 .


So yeah. GOOD strategy shouldn't rely on a dice roll. Or it should give enough bonuses that it's never a complete epic fail, and nothing happened. Because it's not really strategy if that's a feature of your game, especially if a few epic fails can determine the outcome of a game. Annoying SP, but it makes it pointless playing MP.

[Cthulhu]

The Wesnoth RNG always gets brought up in these threads - here's the salient part of an article by David White about luck in wesnoth, and how it differs from a game like fire emblem.

In Wesnoth, there is a substantial, but not huge amount of luck. The main luck limiting factor is the way in which units have multiple strikes in a battle. A unit with four attacks has four chances to hit, not just one, and so it is generally reasonably unlikely that they will either miss all four times, or hit all four times.

Of course, units have different numbers of strikes. This means different units are susceptible to luck to different degrees. This is one of the key gameplay facets of Wesnoth: managing luck. There are many opportunities to manage how much risk one exposes oneself to, and make backup plans if things go wrong.

This can be contrasted against a game like Fire Emblem. In Fire Emblem, a unit typically has one attack, though may have two in some situations, and four or more in very rare situations. Units also have a chance to hit, but it is dependent heavily on the attacker's skill, and in particular, it is common for an attacker to achieve a very high chance to hit, and a 100% chance to hit is common. (If a player wants, they can optimize to almost always have 100% chance to hit).

This approach is more satisfying for many gamers, because they feel in control of the game. They can normally achieve a 100% chance to hit, they can use units that have poor dodge abilities but high resistance to damage, and expect to usually be hit, but take relatively little damage. They can play Fire Emblem close to being a deterministic game.

This has a certain appeal to it, and is fun in its way. In particular, one can often in a turn in Fire Emblem carefully plan out one's moves, work out how many enemies one can definitively knock out, and can plan to avoid any chance of one's own characters dying.

However, in my opinion this kind of gameplay has only a limited amount of appeal. It is certainly not the kind of gameplay we want in Wesnoth. In Wesnoth we want a player to plan out a complex situation, to estimate carefully the possibilities. To have to work out a good strategy. If a player can simply rely on all sorts of assurances that their units will hit, they don't have to do any of this. Sure, there will be a certain amount of fun to planning out a situation where you can set up a cool 'domino effect' of enemy units going down as you attack them. But this is nothing to do with the skill of planning out a real strategy in a dynamic situation where you have to consider all kinds of contingencies.

https://forums.wesnoth.org/viewtopic.php?t=21317

That's why I hate chess ( ͡° ͜ʖ ͡°)

Yes, risk management is a thing, but I feel like it's a less durable challenge, I guess would be one way to put it.  Once you've figured out how to successfully manage the risk there's not a whole lot else.  Fire Emblem, the most obvious example of the "dominoes" challenge, manages to be challenging all the way through with new missions that necessitate new strategies.  Wesnoth really has one challenge, at least in the default campaigns.  Once you know how to beat any given mission you know how to beat all of them and even the curveballs it does throw can mostly be steamrolled through.

RNG management is the primary challenge of wesnoth and it doesn't continue to provide new challenges once you've mastered the basic formula, is what I'm getting at.

[LoSboccacc]

I far more hate the money carry over system that punish you progressively harder for a bad random roll earlier in campaigns.

the Wesnoth combat as it is is exquisite, precisely because it's not a chess game and requires turn by turn adaptation as opposed to simpler planning, so longer term strategies are possible, encouraged and challenged every step.

[baruk]

That's why I hate chess ( ͡° ͜ʖ ͡°)

You jest, but it's worth saying: the article isn't straight-up bashing on deterministic game systems like chess, it's identifying the tendency for the classic levelling system of RPGs to mitigate against the random nature of the game. Once you hit the higher levels, any wesnoth-style risk management aspect of the game gets lost in favour of a more deterministic playstyle. Which is fine if you like that sort of thing (and millions do).
 A fantasy wargame, whilst sharing the setting of many RPGs should not necessarily follow their design philosophy - perhaps there is value in committing to a consistent set of mechanics throughout, rather than sweetening the risk management medicine with deterministic syrup. If chess is a purely deterministic game, then Wesnoth attempts to be purely concerned with risk management.
 That said, there is one deterministic combat outcome I can think of in wesnoth - berserk melee units attacking units without any melee attack (eg. dark adepts) will eliminate them 100% of the time. Only the dwarf faction get berserkers, the justification is that they don't get mages (guaranteed 70% hit chance), so have special dispensation. EDIT: I just looked this up, there is actually a limit of 30 combat rounds of fighting, so your dark adept will have around a 0.2% chance of survival.

RNG management is the primary challenge of wesnoth and it doesn't continue to provide new challenges once you've mastered the basic formula, is what I'm getting at.

  This is a bit like saying that chess is limited in that it provides solely a set of deterministic challenges. Every move I think about in chess involves the same mental processes, the same kinds of calculations - it doesn't diminish the challenge, at no point do I suddenly "solve" chess and every move becomes trivial. In the same way, you never solve risk management, each new turn in a wesnoth game involves new calculations - the same mental processes may be involved, but it never becomes a routine, by rote execution of the same moves in the way that you might approach an already-solved puzzle.

_{edit: changed a metaphor}

[Vendayn]

I played this years ago, pretty fun, but I was a lot younger so it was too confusing for me at the time.

Any addons/scenarios/mods or whatever people suggest for this these days?

(edit: Ah, they have a launcher now and I can browse add-ons directly from there. Don't remember a launcher way back when.)

[Vendayn]

Doing the tutorial, and its kinda annoying

I guess I chose Elves, or maybe that is just what the tutorial uses as a race.

The issue, it had me send a unit to a forest patch on a small island with a village. It did NOT send me to block the bridge. But elves have defense in forest, so okay.

But, units can still just as easily pass my units. I kinda had impression a unit wouldn't be able to pass one tile next to my unit, so it have "zone of control" of that area. But the orcs just went past like it was nothing

Maybe I'm too used to modern mechanics where the unit in fact controls the immediate territory around it. But as it is, what is the point in the tutorial sending my melee into a forest when it can't even protect the bridge and the orcs can get by anyway? The tutorial should have me protect the bridge then lol. As it is, the orcs come up anyway and go right past my unit. Most modern games actually have a zone of control (which is even what the game says). In this, there is none as far as I can see, just choke points. I don't see any zone of control at all.