Battle for Wesnoth

[cerebovssquire]

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.

I think it's one of the most popular open-source strategy games (or even open-source games in general). More information is on wesnoth.org if you are interested.

I played this game from age 12-14. I recently picked it up again and was wondering if any of you guys also play and if yes, do you play multiplayer and if yes, what name do you go by? I'd love to play a game with some crawlers (I'm bad though because I basically savescummed through most campaigns). Since I've seen some wesnoth-related comments I hope that this won't be completely unknown to you

[MIC132]

Well..
I play Wesnoth on and off for a few years now. Though usually skirmishes with cpu/locally with friends. And I love testing new eras, and playing with exp modifier set to 30% to see all unit upgrades. Never managed to beat any campaing either.

It isn't hard to figure from this that I'm a bad player in normal games.

I go by the same nick as here, though you won't see me often online.

I can play you sometime, though it also depends on your timezone (central Europe here). And of course only if you are fine with rather low-skill games.

[cerebovssquire]

Well..
I play Wesnoth on and off for a few years now. Though usually skirmishes with cpu/locally with friends. And I love testing new eras, and playing with exp modifier set to 30% to see all unit upgrades. Never managed to beat any campaing either.

It isn't hard to figure from this that I'm a bad player in normal games.

I go by the same nick as here, though you won't see me often online.

I can play you sometime, though it also depends on your timezone (central Europe here). And of course only if you are fine with rather low-skill games.

I am both living in central Europe and low-skill so that sounds pretty good I go as marquisronove on the server.
BTW there's a command to let you look at all unit upgrades if you want to use that, though I can understand seeing that as "cheating" too of course.

[Grimm]

Great game. Haven't played in a while but I'd be down for a match. I'm flexible as to time at the moment. I'll set up an account asap.

[cerebovssquire]

that was my dream and it hurt
the thing is he had a 40% of hitting me too (they were quenoth elves)


I am currently on the servers and probably will be tomorrow too, so anyone just /msg me!

[MIC132]

BTW there's a command to let you look at all unit upgrades if you want to use that, though I can understand seeing that as "cheating" too of course.

It's not a matter of cheating or not (And I'm using the "show all unit upgrades" anyway, it's an option now, not even a console command), but it's the matter of using the upgraded units in battle.
Well, but that's what you can expect from a guy whose main strategy in RTS is to tech to final tier and then attack (or more often die somewhere along the line).

I'll update my copy and I'll probably be online tomorrow morning and evening. If I'll see you in lobby I'll message you and we can play. Or I'll PM you on the forums.

[Grimm]

All right I'm on, as "Hostilian".

[white_noise]

I find a scale of randomization, when it comes to damage dealing, freakishly wide. You can kill literally everything without losing one HP, or you can be killed with couple of strikes right away. It provoke savescumming and makes the game without it annoying. At least that was the case several years back. Although there was many complaints about it, the devs didn't wanted to change anything. Did they now? Or is it still a lottery and not a tactical game?

[MIC132]

It isn't a lottery, because the combat chances are based entirely on terrain and certain attack modifiers. Hence the strategy part comes from clever positioning and using other conditions to your advantage. Apart from chance to-hit (which, mind you, is based only on how well particular defending unit defends on the terrain it is standing on , bar attacks with "marksmanship" and "magical") there are damage modifiers for time of the day (depending on whether your army is chaotic/neutral/lawful) and modifiers to damage based on defense against certain attack types. So you need good unit choice to counter enemy units, and good positioning to take advantage of your races strong points.
And savescumming helps only in campaign, not against living opponents.
I never found the game too random. Though I must admit it IS hard and after this whole time I'm still working it out.

[rchandra]

I find a scale of randomization, when it comes to damage dealing, freakishly wide. You can kill literally everything without losing one HP, or you can be killed with couple of strikes right away. It provoke savescumming and makes the game without it annoying. At least that was the case several years back. Although there was many complaints about it, the devs didn't wanted to change anything. Did they now? Or is it still a lottery and not a tactical game?

It's not really any different from crawl that way... I've beaten a bunch of easy to moderate campaigns with no need for savescumming (sometimes need to restart a mission entirely due to play errors, not luck). I haven't played recently, but any large change to the combat system seemed pretty unlikely.

[white_noise]

It's not total lottery ofcourse. But you can experiment with placing units in a right position and then play the same (turn by turn) battle sequence several times from save. I did it back then plenty of times and the results was way too different. From crashing defeat to clear victory. With some half-way situations in the middle, but still. So you need to do the best you can to prepare for battle, and then pray to your gods for some luck. Sure it looks realistic, but I'd prefer more straight chess-like approach.

It's very good and fun game nonetheless. I think I'll check out fresh version in nearest future.

[cerebovssquire]

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

This explains the design philosophy on luck.

By the way I'm on as marquisronove right now.

[cerebovssquire]

I'm playing a game of Isar's Cross right now. MIC132 is also online. Perhaps we can play a 3-player game in 5-10 minutes?

[Jeremiah]

I went through a phase of playing this a lot - but ultimately, RNG rage made me stop and I haven't gone back.

I don't know if it's still being worked on, but at one time there was a mod called "Wesband" that was meant to be a roguelike using Wesnoth movement/combat/terrain etc. I remember it being quite good, and it kept me interested in Wesnoth for a while after I had given up on the main game. At that point it was far from complete (there was no way to win) and too easy if you survived level 1, but I thought it had potential.

[TehDruid]

I've tried it before, was kinda like "meh" and then I saw this thread and started playing it again a few days ago! I' haven't tried anything yet on multiplayer because I'm pretty bad at this kind of games... Anyway, I cleared the first 5 vanilla campaigns (on begginer/intermediate modes only so far).

Wesnoth Grimm.png (10.94 KiB) Viewed 5959 times

The above unit is from "Heir to the Throne" which I finally finished today.

Spoiler: show

By ninja killing Ashenviere with 6 gryphon riders since I failed miserably in a contest of pure strength of units/numbers the first time I tried. Damn mounted units are deadly in such open ground.

The main draw in this game for me is the unit advancement. It kinda reminds me of... Pokemon evolutions. I feel overjoyed when my units advance to the next tier. And finding out all the different possible units over time and adding them to the encyclopedia thingy is cool. (My only beef with the game is that the elves only have female druids which later become fairies... FML. )

I like the music of the game a lot.

[danr]

I have been addicted to Wesnoth in the past. It and DCSS are the two games that get my wife threatening to throw the computer out the window.

[Grimm]

The above unit is from "Heir to the Throne" which I finally finished today.

No relation.

[ldierk]

I played it some years ago and would be in for a multiplayer match. Multiplayer looked much more fun to me, because it does not suffer the "save-scumming-issue". I tried to restrict myself to not save-scumm, but became weak over the course of several campaigns. I like the general design and the art a lot though.
I got frustrated on the public server because of the high skill level (at least compared to mine) usually found there.

[DukeVonBathrobe]

I used to play quite a bit of wesnoth actually, though only a dozen online games or so. Eventually I broke the habit of save scumming the campaigns and had more fun with them doing it legit. I could be convinced to play again if I had some people to play with regularly.

[cerebovssquire]

I played it some years ago and would be in for a multiplayer match. Multiplayer looked much more fun to me, because it does not suffer the "save-scumming-issue". I tried to restrict myself to not save-scumm, but became weak over the course of several campaigns. I like the general design and the art a lot though.
I got frustrated on the public server because of the high skill level (at least compared to mine) usually found there.

Yeah, the biggest problem with the online servers is the generally high level of skill and arrogance. I'm not a great player, but I do win more than 50% of 2v2/1v1 online games, and I will still regularily be called noob.
I'm in for some games this weekend/a week on Wednesday and the days following that.
I had a great 1vs1 game with MIC132 a few days ago.

[danr]

What would a game that was a combination of Crawl and Wesnoth be like?

I'm picturing:
From Wesnoth
- Hex-grid
- Terrain modifiers (DCSS already has some of this with water effect on movement / combat)
- The graphical style
- Some elements of ally management?

From DCSS
- Everything else - items, skills, monsters, spells, gods, etc.

[DukeVonBathrobe]

-Adding in slash, pierce, and bludgeoning as resistances inherent to different armor types
-Multiple attack options per weapon doing different damage types (Long Blades could have a pierce attack or a slash attack, etc.)
-Wose as a playable race. Synergy with Fedhas, drinking potions of water heals you and produces fruit. Slow metabolism and movement. Tree punch mutation equivalent to claws 2 except bludgeoning. Huge stealth bonus when moving through plants/trees and can walk (even slower) through deep water. Natural bark armour that improves as you level but weakness to fire, unable to wear all armor. Maybe an ability to root enemies? Ah memorable scenes from Evil Dead.
-Adding in blunderbuss as a ranged weapon (probably using crossbow skill) cone attack, uses and destroys stones/bullets.

Probably terrible ideas, but the concept does amuse. At the very least I think we need a living tree unique enemy that has phrases like "Woes to those whose foes are Wose!"

[cerebovssquire]

There is actually HexCrawl. Sadly it is like version 0.3, which won't be very fun (victory dancing! piety scumming! etc.).