Show HN: Wesnoth – Free, turn-based strategy game (opens in new tab)

I have never liked purely deterministic, non-random games. I think part of it is that they encourage analysis paralysis--if I know that a single mathematically perfect move exists, I'm not happy unless I can find it; I'm more willing to settle for "good enough" and move on with the game if I know that even a perfect move can be derailed by the dice, and even a bad one might luck out.

And part of it might be that non-randomness seems sort of cold and sterile and inhuman to me. Sometimes, you do everything right and you still fail. That's the human condition.

And then, meaning no offense, the kind of players who are put off by luck sometimes rub me the wrong way. They often seem to put way too much of their personal self-worth on the outcome of a game. I'm all for rigorous fairness in things that matter, things that affect people's lives, but this is supposed to be a relaxing diversion.

I used to feel like this too.

Then I understood I just had bad tactics.

If you fight the right way (cover every units' back, use beefier units to guard weaker ones) you don't suffer from bad luck nearly so much because you don't hang on the edge and can stand few bad blows.

While you shouldn't need to at lower difficulties or on easier campaigns, you can always quick save before a move or at the end of your turn and reload if you didn't like the result of your move or the enemy moves. Do it a lot in the early scenarios to build up hero unit reserves and see if you can make it through later scenarios without reloading. Mark the turn start save and try a strategy, if it fails go back to that turn instead of starting over. And note that if your strategy is poor, continually reloading alone won't let you win. (Unless maybe you spend a crap ton of time waiting for positive outcomes of minuscule-probability events...)

Edit: I remembered a quote I liked from early on in Iain Banks' The Player of Games. While I still like chess (and take issue with the notion that reality is built on chance, rather than our predictive measurements of reality restricted to chance due to us being part of reality not outside it) I thought this was a pretty great put-down of games without chance at all:

"All reality is a game. Physics at its most fundamental, the very fabric of our universe, results directly from the interaction of certain fairly simple rules, and chance; the same description may be applied to the best, most elegant and both intellectually and aesthetically satisfying games. By being unknowable, by resulting from events which, at the sub-atomic level, cannot be fully predicted, the future remains make-able, and retains the possibility of change, the hope of coming to prevail; victory, to use an unfashionable word. In this, the future is a game; time is one of the rules. Generally, all the best mechanistic games - those which can be played in any sense "perfectly", such as a grid, Prallian scope, 'nkraytle, chess, Farnic dimensions - can be traced to civilisations lacking a realistic view of the universe (let alone the reality). They are also, I might add, invariably pre-machine-sentience societies.

"The very first-rank games acknowledge the element of chance, even if they rightly restrict raw luck. To attempt to construct a game on any other lines, no matter how complicated and subtle the rules are, and regardless of the scale and differentiation of the playing volume and the variety of the powers and attibutes of the pieces, is inevitably to schackle oneself to a conspectus which is not merely socially but techno-philosophically lagging several ages behind our own. As a historical exercise it might have some value. As a work of the intellect, it's just a waste of time. If you want to make something old-fashioned, why not build a wooden sailing boat, or a steam engine? They're just as complicated and demanding as a mechanistic game, and you'll keep fit at the same time."

Giving it another go would be worthwhile.

I can't speak to multiplayer, but one of the most interesting parts of the game is thinking about how to approach each scenario so that even when things take a turn for the worse, the units you lose are expendable.

This means things like purchasing low tier units to pad your ranks, not positioning key units where better-than average odds will take them down, and occasionally sending out a sacrifical lamb to prevent your lines getting broken.

I think a save at the start of each scenario provides a good balance of tension. If you reach for the save/reload buttons every turn, you'll tend not to learn the skills you need to play successfully and enjoyably.

Occasionally you'll hit a wall where it seems like you have to rely on unusually good luck to succeed. This is usually a signal that you've either lost too many key units, or that your composition isn't right for the campaign. That just means it's time to replay at an earlier point with your new knowledge.

Luck favors the prepared mind.

Definitely. The question of luck is always something which pops up in the forums now and again. The answer is always the same, it was a deliberate choice to have an element of luck, it keeps things interesting and forces your strategies to be more error-prone. Yes, among top-level players, luck may sometimes decide the fate of a game, but that is a price they decided to pay for the results =)

I met those guys at fosdem as well some years ago. It was a small game-dev room, they stayed through all the presentations having their miniature hack-session throughout the whole time :-)

It was great. Remember that one of them had a great presentation about importance of designing their game in data and not in code, to allow non-developers to participate.

Isn't life strange. I had to wait over 15 years for my computer to be connected to the internet and somehow I managed.

There's a very nice port on Open Pandora as well for playing on the go: http://repo.openpandora.org/?page=detail&app=wesnoth-1.11

Is that legal? That version seems closed-source!

And I couldn't even access the developer's website (www.androthsoft.com). If the money went to the authors/official website I'd buy it in a heartbeat, but in the current situation I'd rather circumvent the official download channels...

I started playing Wesnoth in 2005. Practised 'programming' in WML to make custom maps. There was one I designed called 'DOTW' which was a rip off from DOTA. For a good few weeks it was the most played map in Wesnoth multiplayer. Good times.

I didn't know about Wtactics. Is it from the same devs?

While I see the value of Wesnoth, it's not my kind of game. Now a constructed card game, that I enjoy!

Browsing that website, I think the game rules should be easier to find.

This is really strange because I read that chapter before checking HN and to my surprise its here. The chapter is a great read and gives some ideas on how to architect a game, especially one that you want the players themselves to contribute too.

A similar game hooked me on programming at an early age. It's called Graal and you had to pay to contribute. I wish I had found this game instead.

I'm wondering the same thing. Also, this is not even close to new. My understanding is that it has been open source and freely available for quite some time.

FWIW, this is mostly scenario design and writing contributions. Which are of course also important.