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Axslav's Battle for Wesnoth (PC)
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| [January 15, 2008 12:56:26 AM]
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Gameplay:
After playing the game some more I found a few things that at first irritated me but then after a bit I saw how they were actually good things that the game had. One of these things was how the combat was done probabilistically so there was a fair amount of luck involved. This was frustrating as I would make a certain plan and it would go all wrong when something unlucky happened (note I never complained when I got lucky). However then I started to play taking the possibility of luck into account (there's some famous quote about how luck doens't matter to a good general but it does to a great general). I started to see how it added another element of strategy to consider as you had to play in such a way as to be flexible and easily adapt to minimize the damage a turn of bad luck would have as well as maximize the benefit a turn of good luck would have.
Another thing that at first I found bad was how easy it was to save and reload the game to try to get good luck. When I finished a level it wasn't very satisfying if I only did it by artificially giving myself good luck by reloading when I got bad luck. However the ability to reload saves is definately essential to the game and with some discipline players who want to avoid reloading the game can do so (you get practice on fighting the moments of weakness when one of your units dies and you want to reload to avoid this result).
Design:
The game provides a huge range of challenges with very well set difficulty levels (you can set it so it's very beatable even with many mistakes done or you can set it so it's very difficult and even a player who normally has no problem beating strategy games on the highest setting is very challenged and is forced to come up with creative ways to win).
Also the game has a great reward system as not only does the player want to win a level to get on to the next level and advance the storyline, but the player also carries on some of the gold they gained in a level to the previous level (as well as a bonus for finishing it early). Also not only do units get stronger through battle (rewarding the player for keeping units alive in order for them to develope into stronger units), but the player can "recall" units that they had at the end of previous levels to help them in future ones, so the player can keep evolving their units throughout the whole campaign as opposed to just a single level.
While Battle for Wesnoth's graphics could be made more state of the art, it would detract from the game's ability to be played on older computers as well as detract from some of the simplicity of the enviroment and mechanics (a game with as much emergent strategy as Wesnoth deserves to have the strategy be the main feature).
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| [January 14, 2008 12:43:26 PM]
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Summary:
Battle for Wesnoth is an open source (www.wesnoth.org) turn based strategy game played on a map divided into hexes. There is one resource (gold) which you use to recruit troops from your castle in order to control villages (which control your gold income) and accomplish the objective your given (generally to defeat your opponent). You can either play through various single player campaigns, play single player skirmish maps against the computer or play online.
Gameplay:
I decided to play through the tutorial campaign first which I found helpful towards learning the mechanics of the game (which are fairly simple). As an experienced strategy game player I found the popup comments during the tutorial a little tedious after awhile, but for somebody without much experience playing the type of game they would probably be helpful.
While playing the game, I quickly found myself wrapped up in the story telling aspect with which the tutorial campaign (and I assume the other campaigns as well) progressed. While the characters/troops I was controlling were sprites that would not be considered as state of the art graphically, the dialogue of the characters before the campaign starts and between each level of the campaign pulled me in.
I was also impressed with the strategic depth of the game. The game utilized basic strategic ideas such as having concave battle lines in order to maximize the ratio of your troops fighting to their troops, using convex battle lines in order to quickly move troops from one part of the battle line to the other, as well as having vast room for creative strategic and tactical manuevers.
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Axslav's Battle for Wesnoth (PC)
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Current Status: Playing
GameLog started on: Sunday 13 January, 2008
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