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Monday 14 January, 2008
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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