Battle for Wesnoth is that rarest of creatures: a free, open-source game that’s totally absorbing. My brother told me about it a couple of weeks ago, and it’s the first game in a long while that’s sucked me in this far.
It’s a turn-based strategy game in a fantasy milieu, with many different campaigns. I’m playing through a very long one now (Heir to the Throne, I think–I believe it was the original campaign), and every level or so I seem to gain access to a new troop type with interesting powers. The game is very rich and detailed, from the choices you make when leveling up basic troops to how to position your troops to take advantage of terrain. It reminds me a lot of the old game Warlords, and a bit of Heroes of Might and Magic.
The graphics are great if you’re in 1998, nothing cutting edge, but for a game like this the graphics aren’t the reason to play anyway.
I’ve played it, and got into it for a while. Some of the missions were absolutely great, and some just seemed poorly designed in that you have to either have trained the right units or get out quickly.
There were also a few things I didn’t really like about it being so turn-based - any of your units could potentially be killed by a massed attack, but if you didn’t risk them it’d be quite tough to win. But if you did risk them it might be impossible to go on in the campaign. The campaign almost required you to have built up some well-trained units - and it becomes almost ridiculous when you’re bringing in weak units just to get the kill.
One thing of note is that the units with more attacks will be better against nearly all opponents. This kind of bothered me when it seems the ‘better’ (i.e. well-trained) units only do more damage with their lower number of attacks. That really only helps if you’re going up against very high-powered units, which you aren’t likely to bring your more powerful troops up against anyway with the risk to them so high.
The game it seems most similar to is Allied/Panzer General (wasn’t there also a Fantasy General, or was that something else?).
One thing I like is that you can submit your stats on the campaign. I think they use this for adjusting balance, but it’s a good way to gauge the difficulty of missions. It also lets you compare against how other folks were doing.
I play this occasionally. It is fun for awhile, but I am incredibly terrible and unimaginative in the makeup of the units I build. Generally I’ll just build all archers if I’m the elves or all berserkers if I am the dwarves. Once this strategy fails I get bored and play something else. Nice concept to the game, just really freaking repetitive.
I’m addicted to this game. I rarely play the campaigns though. I like to set up my own maps and then have huge battles in hotseat against myself (I know weird).
Yesterday I did a 3 on 3 Era of Myths (Elemental, Celestial, and those messenger faction guys) vs. Regular Era (Northerner, Undead and Drake) battle, which was fun. I did it like a tournament of champions with the three factions that won my battles in EOM and Default in previous 3 on 3 matches.
I’ve defeated The Southern Guard campaign, but in Heir to the Throne, I get teed off when my good units die to the overpowered enemy, and quit, so I haven’t been playing campaigns much lately.
Despite avoiding the campaigns, Wesnoth has been taking up a lot of the time I’d normally spend playing MMOs.
One of the mods I’d recommend is SurvivalExtreme. That’s a more RPG style of playing Wesnoth that is quite a bit of fun (but tough).
My favorite units, and the ones that seem to be most powerful when I have big battles are the Assassin, for just poisoning everyone and leaving your enemy with a ton of units drawing income but without enough HPS to do anything. Dark Adepts for cheaper mass annihilation of foes, and in Era of Myths, I love the little Wind elemental things that you get on the Elemental faction. In the battle I did yesterday I had like 8-10 of the wind elementals leveled up, and some even to level 2. For level 0 units, they are amazingly effective.
I’ve been dabbling in Wesnoth for years now, disturbingly. I really quite like it, though it can be frustrating until you wrap your brain around the right way to play. (Which to some extent is what it sounds like panamajack is in the process of doing).
It’s a really well tuned product with more careful balancing than just about anything else out there, and the variety of units is pretty vast. It’s definitely not for everyone though - people who are looking for a simulationist game will be sorely disappointed.
Oh, and re: “Units with more attacks will be better against nearly all opponents.” - that overlooks a critical tactical point - a unit that can kill an enemy in the first hit or two doesn’t take the same number of counterattacks that a unit that needs to attack 4-5 times to deal the same amount of damage does. Units like the Dwarven Thunderer can eliminate wounded enemies without them even getting a chance to counter in a way that an elven archer with more attacks but lower damage per attack will never be able to do.
Well do you have any tips for the campaigns, especially HttT? I’ve kinda got an idea of what the individual units can do, but I still have a hard time putting them together in good ways while avoiding situations where I lose a ton of units.
I’m not sure when to use my level 2 and 3 units and when to save them and train up new recruits instead. Also, a lot of people on the Wesnoth boards recommend retreating when the time of day goes against you, but in Heir to the Throne usually you have a time limit and a lot of terrain to cross, so you really can’t do that and have to try to live through the night, and then suffer losses. The furthest I’ve got on HttT is the Dwarven Doors, which I found to be pretty darn tough, so I’ve started over, which is another thing they recommend over at Wesnoth.org
I haven’t played most of the campaigns, honestly, because my usual play cycle lasts about as long as a playthrough of HttT and maybe a bit of one other campaign before something else catches my attention. That said, here are some tips I’ve gathered from HttT (some of which may apply elsewhere).
#1: When folks say “retreat when the time of day turns against you” they don’t mean “run way the heck away to the extent of your movement” or anything. They mean fall back into good defensive terrain in a good formation. In HttK, “good defensive terrain” translates mostly as “forests” - any elven unit gets at -least- a 60% defense in forest, and some get 70%. A good formation means minimizing the number of enemies that can beat on a given unit, and also dropping your Lawful units further back behind the lines if possible, because they suffer from lost damage during the night. Somewhere between good terrain and good formation falls “making the enemy stand in undesirable terrain” - so if you can get forest that borders on swamp (for most units) or water (likewise), or even plains, you’re in a better place. Units which are isolated -should- however, fall back as far as they can unless you really think they’re not in danger. (Use Control-V it shows you what hexes your enemies can reach and in what numbers.) Also, in -most- missions in HttT, while there -is- a time limit, you shouldn’t have any serious issues finishing the mission in time. The only ones I’ve ever run into problems with were Princess of Wesnoth and Dwarven Doors, the latter of which is -supposed- to be a sort of ‘run for your life’ mission. There are actually a couple of missions where time is on -your- side (Valley of Death being the one that springs to mind).
#2: Learn to love the Elvish Shaman. While at level 1 they’re not super impressive, they still give you healing outside of villages, which is rare overall. (You’ll also get access to white mages and mermaid priestesses in the campaign, though neither of those is a level 1 unit). Slow is incredibly nice for reducing the impact of nasty melee units like Trolls or Orc Grunts. (Or later in the campaign, heavy infantry). And levelling up the Shaman means she turns into a roving village (as a druid, anyway.) and then a flying village (as a Shyde). You want to keep your injured units around healers whenever possible, or at the very least, drop them back to a healer when injured.
#3: Always keep a ready supply of canon fodder. In general, the majority of your troops should be level 1 flunkies most of the time. And you should expect to lose plenty of them - but at the same time, a fair number of them should level up. Try to -avoid- getting killshots with units that have reached the end of their progression - I don’t know what the current state of ‘AMLA’ (Alternative Max Level Advancement or whatever) is, but as a rule, going from level 1 to level 2 is a heck of a lot better than just getting 4hps or whatever as a result of ‘levelling’ a max level unit. Higher level units should be used with care - they’re more offensively potent, but in terms of ability to soak damage, you’re better off with two expendable level 1 units - and be accompanied by some expendables to guard their flanks and soak up damage for them to keep them from getting overwhelmed. This goes double for any unit that you get that is “loyal” (aka “upkeep free”). Those units should be levelled up and guarded closely (You get a fair bunch of them in HttT. Beyond your ‘critical’ units - Konrad, Delfador, and some others that you collect during the campaign, you get a horseman in mission 2, a mage in mission 3, a whole -bunch- of mermen in mission 4, and a couple of elves in mission 7 or so.) because they cost you nothing to field beyond the recall fee.
#4: Don’t forget about Konrad. He kinda sucks early on, but he becomes quite ferocious as he levels up. So make sure you level him up - once you’ve done a few rounds of recruiting, you should probably sally him forth - he only needs 28XP to level up, and when he does, he gets Leadership, which is a valuable ability even if never gets into an actual fight again, because it boosts the attack power of any lower level units around him, making it that much easier to level -them- up.
As for “putting units together in good ways while avoiding situations where you lose a ton of units” - that’s really two different issues. Putting units together in good ways means screening your mages and shamans with fighters (and archers to some extent) and keeping your horsemen out of the woods. Avoiding situations in which you lose a ton of units means not overextending yourself - you should always have a good idea of just what can attack your units each turn. The most common cause of death in Wesnoth is not being able to resist stretching some of your units too far forward because you can -just- manage to get up and kill that one last orc… which then causes the 4-5 enemy units that are within moving range of those now overextended troops to swoop in and deal serious damage. Your decisions should almost always be made from the point of view not of “what can I kill by moving this unit?” but rather “what will attack me if I move this unit?” It’s a very difficult mindset for me to maintain, and I frequently game over when I get lazy and think “Khalenz should be fine against two troll whelps” and don’t notice that my opponent has two orc archers ready to add to the fracas.
Alright, here’s a question. I’m downloading this now, but many fo the units listed on the unit tree not only overlap ( a lot, with the humans particularly), but many are outright obsolete. They just suck compared to the alterative. What gives?
Well, the units page is a little screwy - they’ve redesigned it since the last time I looked at it, and it was hard to find some info. Here are a few things to be aware of about the units page:
#1: The units page covers every unit in the game. Including “NPC only” units, special campaign units, and all kinds of crazy stuff.
#2: You will -never- be able to recruit every unit in the tree. Indeed, you’ll never be able to recruit more than a tiny fraction of them at once.
#3: You can generally only recruit level 1 units in ‘normal’ play, but there are plenty of exceptions.
#4: Campaigns can have all sorts of weird missions. Part of the South Guard campaign only allows you to recruit peasants. Any better units you get you’ll have because you managed to level a peasant.
#5: The multiplayer factions are hard to find on the units page - if you click on “D” under “era” that gives you the “default era” multiplayer factions, which show you the units you’ll get in multiplayer. To sum up:
Drakes: Drake Burner, Drake Clasher, Drake Fighter, Drake Glider, Saurian Augur, Saurian Skirmisher. Drakes are a high damage, high mobilty faction with both lawful and chaotic units. They suffer from somewhat of a bi-polar collection of units - lawful drakes have lots of HPs, bad defenses, are weak against piercing and strong against fire, chaotic saurians are fragile, good defense numbers, are strong against piercing, and weak against fire. A good drake player knows how to use both components of his army to best effect and takes advantage of his flying units. Also, the Saurian Augur is one of the few level 1 healing units.
Knalgan Alliance: Dwarvish Fighter, Dwarvish Guardsman, Dwarvish Thunderer, Dwarvish Ulfserker, Footpad, Griffon, Poacher and Thief. The Knalgans are a defensively powerful - dwarves are really hard to hit in hills and mountains, and many of their “ruffian” type units are hard to hit just about anywhere. Dwarves are tough as nails but slow, ruffians are cheap but offensively weak. Knalgans are a slow faction, overall, with their only fast units being fairly fragile. A good Knalgan player siezes strong defensive positions and slowly rolls over the foe while harassing the flanks with lighter units. Another lawful/chaotic split faction.
Loyalists: Bowman, Cavalry, Fencer, Heavy Infantry, Horseman, Mage, Merman Fighter, and Spearman. Loyalists are a bit middle of the road - they don’t particularly excel in any one particular area. They don’t get any flying units, but they -do- get an aquatic unit, which can be of great value on some maps. The mage is also offensively much nicer than Saurian Augur offensively. Loyalist units are pretty tough, but tend to be a little middling on the defense numbers. Being humans, they fight well in villages and castles, and the horseman is a potent unit on open ground if used carefully. Loyalists are uniformly lawful.
Northerners: Goblin Spearman, Naga Fighter, Orc Archer, Orc Assassin, Orc Grunt, Troll Whelp, Wolf Rider. Northerners tend towards massed units - their units are cheap and sturdy, but not particularly offensively powerful (though orc grunts can be mean). They get a water unit but no flyers. Good defense in hills and mountains. The orcish assassin is a marksman with a poisonous ranged attack, which is pretty mean. Universally chaotic, a good Northerner player will win a war of attrition by taking advantage of the night to boost their offensive.
Rebels: Elvish Archer, Elvish Fighter, Elvish Scout, Elvish Shaman, Mage, Merman Hunter, and Wose. Rebels are quick, with good defense in the forest and a level 1 healing unit. They also have a proliferation of ranged attacks, allowing them to chip away at melee opponents without counterattacks. They’re generally light in the hitpoint department, except for the Wose, which is instead light in the defense department. Mostly neutral in alignment with a couple of lawful units in the mix, the rebels strike when the time of day is bad for their opponents, and take advantage of superior defense in forests.
Undead: Dark Adept, Ghost, Ghoul, Skeleton, Skeleton Archer, Vampire Bat, Walking Corpse. Thoroughly chaotic, with a bunch of unusual units with odd abilities (plague, drain, poison, no melee attack, etc.) the undead are a faction I don’t have enough experience with to even suggest strategies.
Anyway, yeah. Factions are very balanced in MP. Individual units, not necessarily. One faction’s “footman” unit might be better than another’s, but since it’s the only “footman” type unit they have, they’ll be using it anyway. It all balances out.
These posts are really helpful. I’m currently stuck on a mission with 5 different undead masters, where I’m supposed to kill the lich king. I’m gonna restart it with a bunch of mook, instead of trying again by recalling all my powerful units.
You’ll definitely want -some- of your powerful units. Any leaders or healers you have available will be helpful, as will units that have attacks your opponent is weak against - in the case of undead, arcane, fire and crushing damage all have good uses, so if you have mages of just about any sort (Though White Mages and Mages of Light are particularly useful) or Elvish Sorceresses/Enchantresses/Sylphs, those would be good choices.
Which mission is that one anyway? Is that Swamp of Dread?
Thanks for the tips. Yes that helps. I think I’ve been using recalled units to much and then not having enough money to get that many units and losing all my good ones. So I will recruit more cannon fodder.
Recalling units is something of an art. Remember that the amount it costs to recall a unit is fixed regardless of the level or type of the unit. So it’s always in your best interest to recall Horsemen rather than recruiting them, whenever possible, because it actually costs more to recruit a new Horseman than to recall an experienced one. Mages are similar - mages cost the same to recall and recruit, and odds are the one in your recall queue has at least a little bit of XP. On the flipside, Elvish Fighters and Elvish Shamans cost significantly less to recruit than to recall, so you may not wish to recall them unless they have lots of XP (a least a few kills worth) or particularly desirable traits (Strong/Resilient fighters, for example).
Overall though, you’re not likely to bankrupt yourself by recalling too many units - even recalling Elvish fighters, you can only recruit four for the cost of recalling three; What tends to wipe out the finances is running yourself deep into negative upkeep with high level units - three Elvish Fighters are often a better deal for the upkeep than a single Elvish Champion. But not always. And of course, all bets are off for Loyal units - they’re always worth the upkeep (zero) so you just need to think about the recall cost and castle space (Recalling a bunch of loyal Mermen isn’t a good idea in a lot of missions.)
My personal tactic is usually to recruit/recall level 1s and loyal units for the first turn or two of recruiting while I grab the easy villages, and then use the income from those villages to support adding some recalled level 2/3 troops. And I generally always maintain positive or zero income while doing this (I hate losing money to upkeep.). There are exceptions of course - Valley of Death is one of those missions where I tend to say “screw it” and burn all my gold to pull out everything I can and just accept the minimum starting cash for the next mission.
Oh, and another little trick - you can use Konrad to capture a extra village on the first turn as long it’s within a single turn’s move of the keep - move any pre-recruited units out of the castle, do your recruiting, then move Konrad to capture the village you want, then next turn, move your units out, move Konrad back into the keep, and recruit again. Some players take this a step further in multiplayer where they almost avoid capturing any villages within one “Leader move” of their keep because they can get them with their leader don’t have to delay sending their units to the front to capture villages. This is generally less important in the campaign, but it’s still nice in a scenario where you start with several villages close to your keep, to be able to recruit an extra two levels worth of units on turn one without going into negative upkeep. (Remember, you almost always have Delfador, and frequently at least one other pre-recruited unit that can capture some villages early on too.)
And I don’t even consider myself to be particularly good at this game. Armchair general indeed.
I’ve captured villages with Konrad before on the first turn.
Are even level 2 and 3 units only 20 gold to recall? And how the upkeep work with these high level units? Do they take up extra upkeep thus making you go over the max? That upkeep system is a bit confusing to me, I admit. I think villages help with upkeep and also income cause a lot of times a village will move my net income up more than it seems like it should.
The mage and horseman tips as far as recalling are very useful.
Also, I’ve not been upgrading my Elven Fighters to heros at all, I figured the leadership trait for the other upgrade was better. Do you use any Elven Heroes?
I need to get Konrad out there more I guess. I tend to think of him as a King in Chess and keep him well protected.
I find Delfador to be useful for softening up enemies for someone else to kill.
I’m more used to RPGS, so thats probably why I recall so much. I like the idea of all the units having names, so I think of keeping the same guys around for the campaign.
Thanks again for the tips. I’ve started over on HttT a few days ago, and I’m just now at that merfolk level where you get the trident, and I have a leveled up archer, a levelled up fighter (on the leadership path, I forget the name of those). Then I have several level one units including a mage almost to level 2. My best archer is almost to level 3 already because I’ve been taking down a lot of units with that guy.
All my fighters I’ve recruited so far seem to be dextrous instead of strong though, so I keep recruiting more to see if I can get some good traits. Maybe Elves can’t be strong?
I wouldn’t call Wesnoth a “resource management” game, really. It’s a tactics game. While you can argue that all non-twitch-based games are “resource management” games because your troops, or your hitpoints, or your ammo, or whatever, are all resources, I think that’s a little deceptive. Wesnoth is, at its core, all about fielding the right units in the right ways.
Mindwanderer:
Yes, unless they’ve changed it very recently and I spaced out and utterly failed to notice on my current playthrough (possible, but unlikely), all units cost 20GP to recall.
Upkeep is a little bit muddly in my brain, disturbingly, for the amount of time I’ve spent playing, but I -believe- (and this is verified by my readthrough of the manual) that each village can support one “level” of units and gives one GP worth of income on top of that. If you have more levels of units than you have villages, additional levels of units are paid for out of your income. The formula from the manual is:
2 + villages - maximum(0, upkeep - villages)
where upkeep is equal to the sum of the levels of all your non-loyal units.
So without -losing- money, you can support two levels of units from one village.
With regard to levelling Fighters into Captains or Heroes, it depends on a number of factors. One is traits - a strong unit, I’m more likely to level up into a hero because heroes are more offensively powerful, and the extra boost makes them moreso, whereas a quick unit I’m more likely to make into a Captain because it’ll be easier to get him into a good leadership position, and because the reduced durability from quick is less of a detriment in a less ‘mainline combat’ unit. Another factor is how many captains I already have. Once you have maybe 2-3 Captains (Depending on whether you have Konrad out and about and levelled), there’s not really any point in making more - Leadership doesn’t stack, and most if not all of your units will already be in range of a Leader, so you’re better off making heroes instead.
With regard to levelling Konrad, you -do- need to keep him well protected, particularly when he’s still a fighter and therefore pretty sucky, but there should be situations in which you can sneak him in and take a whack at something that’s wounded, and even just -surviving- combat gets XP in most situations.
Delfador is definitely a good way to soften things up to allow other units to get killshots.
Elves can definitely get Strong - I keep getting Strong/Intelligent Shamans in my playthrough, which is probably the least useful shaman trait pair ever. -_-;
My understanding of leadership bonuses is that they are something like 25% * (leader level - affected unit’s level) bonus to damage?
You’ve cleared up a lot of my confusion about Wesnoth gameplay, so hopefully I can start dominating the campaigns, although I get the sense that this game has quite a bit of depth to it.
Been a year or two (and probably a couple version changes) since I played, but everything else seems like I remember it, so here goes:
Undead units include things that are hard to kill (ghosts which have high defenses except vs. fire, Skellies which have high defense except vs. fire and crushing, Ghouls which have decent defenses and can poison people who attack them with melee), disposable (Walking corpses are the cheapest unit in the game, bats are cheap and very mobile but useless in combat; neither unit takes upkeep), and Dark Adepts, who have the best damage-to-cost ratio in the game but are utterly helpless on defense vs. melee units. Strategy is to screen your adepts during the day at all costs, then let your adepts move forward and mutilate the enemy at night, ideally ending each night turn with the adepts screened again by moving skellingtons into the spaces vacated by dead enemy units. Substrategies include trying to match up your units with enemies who have attacks they’re strong against: skellingtons aren’t afraid of spearmen or swordsmen even during the day, but really don’t like macemen. This is true of all factions, but especially true of the undead and the drakes.
Well I got home from work and decided to take a crack at Bay of Pearls. I think it went really well.
I only lost one or two merfolk fighters, so I will have those units ready for levels like Siege of Elensfar.
I leveled up one of my horsemen to a Knight. I got Konrad some experience, he’s almost level 2 now. My Elvish Marksman is almost level 3.
Meanwhile I used cannon fodder for my front lines, and lost several of them, but I was able to protect my important forces from much harm. I finished on turn 21 with 510 gold. So I think I’m in a good position. I’m going to take the land route because the sea route has been hard when I tried it.
My loyal mage is almost to level 2 also. I have to start training a couple more mages so I will have more. I got a couple attacks in with my Shaman to get xp, and I think I did a good job of encircling him with damaged units so they could heal on the move, but I need another couple shamans I suppose.
Erm, at least, I’m pretty sure leadership doesn’t stack. But you’ve got the formula right.
A knight is a good first thing to level a horseman into. Both the Grand Knight and the Paladin are very solid units, though the Grand Knight has greater general application. You can get some Lancers too, but I’d suggest saving them for later.
Hopefully you got the Storm Trident from Bay of Pearls.
It sounds like you made out just fine in terms of gold - did you defeat both enemy leaders?
Taking the land route from Bay of Pearls to Elensefar gives you a nice easy XP farming mission next, so you should be able to level a bunch of units.
