02-28-2008, 07:37 PM
I stumbled on this gem by pure chance.
Wesnoth is a low fantasy open source game that can be used with any platform including windows, mac and linux. The best place to start to explore it is the website - http://www.wesnoth.org/ - from where you can download this freeware game. The website also has its own wesnoth forums with 10,000 (!) registered members. Check out the links, too, its also in wikipedia, as well as other wiki resources.
Wesnoth not a one-off game but a campaign or rather series of campaigns, or even more open ended than that as anyone can create their own campaigns, and new add-ons are coming out fairly often. There are even naval-based campaigns. The game can apparently also be played with opponents and teams, as well as solo.
In the solo version its worth mentioning that you can undo a move that you make as well as save the game at any point so that if you choose a strategy that fails you can go back to load the saved game and try a different approach.
There are two tutorial games based on elves versus orcs, which provide comment by a mentor-character. Its well worth doing these rather than skipping to the campaigns. Each campaign provides three routes of different difficulty from novice to expert. In addition each campaign is made up of a number of scenarios to progress through. Your army is made up of named characters with different abilities (fast, intelligent etc.) and skills (archer, scout, grunt etc). Those soldier characters that survive increase in skill and experience in the next scenario or campaign and even rise in level (captain, hero), so you can build up a veteran army of named characters.
I'm very impressed with this, and astonished that it isn't better known, considering how many players there are. Only recently started, so it would be interesting to read what more seasoned players think.
Wesnoth is a low fantasy open source game that can be used with any platform including windows, mac and linux. The best place to start to explore it is the website - http://www.wesnoth.org/ - from where you can download this freeware game. The website also has its own wesnoth forums with 10,000 (!) registered members. Check out the links, too, its also in wikipedia, as well as other wiki resources.
Wesnoth not a one-off game but a campaign or rather series of campaigns, or even more open ended than that as anyone can create their own campaigns, and new add-ons are coming out fairly often. There are even naval-based campaigns. The game can apparently also be played with opponents and teams, as well as solo.
In the solo version its worth mentioning that you can undo a move that you make as well as save the game at any point so that if you choose a strategy that fails you can go back to load the saved game and try a different approach.
There are two tutorial games based on elves versus orcs, which provide comment by a mentor-character. Its well worth doing these rather than skipping to the campaigns. Each campaign provides three routes of different difficulty from novice to expert. In addition each campaign is made up of a number of scenarios to progress through. Your army is made up of named characters with different abilities (fast, intelligent etc.) and skills (archer, scout, grunt etc). Those soldier characters that survive increase in skill and experience in the next scenario or campaign and even rise in level (captain, hero), so you can build up a veteran army of named characters.
I'm very impressed with this, and astonished that it isn't better known, considering how many players there are. Only recently started, so it would be interesting to read what more seasoned players think.