Battle for Wesnoth: open-source, turn-based strategy game

Posted by akyuu 2 hours ago

Battle for Wesnoth: open-source, turn-based strategy game(www.wesnoth.org)

190 points | 52 comments

jjmarr 50 minutes ago|

Highly suggest connecting with one of the lead developers, Charles Dang/Vultraz, if you have any C++ jobs in the USA.

He's been a developer on Wesnoth since 2012 but only graduated university in 2024. Unfortunately, it's been an absolutely brutal market for new graduates. Even if you're a maintainer on one of the most popular OSS C++ projects on GitHub.

I can't recommend him enough.

edit: LinkedIn https://www.linkedin.com/in/charles-dang-10994b1b4

wwilson 26 minutes ago||

Thanks,our company is in the DC area so I just reached out with an offer to chat. Wesnoth is an incredible project, I can't believe he doesn't have a programming job.

ecshafer 11 minutes ago|||

I am very surprised if he can't find a job, as an American, in DC, with 12 years of C++ experience. Sure companies aren't great at assessing open source experience, but there is one area its easy to find a job as a dev: work that requires a clearance.

szmarczak 19 minutes ago||

> Unfortunately, it's been an absolutely brutal market for new graduates.

Furthermore, more and more companies are looking for "professional" devs using AI tools such as Claude Code. By "professional" I mean proficient in using those AI tools, not actual knowledge. And they don't even specify this in the job offer and you learn this during the interview.

rhdunn 1 hour ago||

My only gripe with the game is that healing doesn't give XP to the healing units. This means you need to place them in combat to level up instead of placing them behind the fighters like they are intended to be, and with them initially having low health they are very squishy. I know you can kinda cheese it by reducing a monster to 1-2 HP and then getting them to attack, but it feels like going against their role.

jjmarr 36 minutes ago||

I've enjoyed this, honestly. There's a whole short-term pain/long-term gain tradeoff to risking healers that adds more strategy to the campaign.

> I know you can kinda cheese it by reducing a monster to 1-2 HP

In practice, I've found it difficult to get monsters to 1-2 HP since it often means not using your most powerful attacks. On harder difficulties I usually can't afford the opportunity cost.

gwerbin 18 minutes ago||

Yeah I personally found this to be a big part of the tactical and strategic challenge. It reminded me a lot of Pokemon where you have a similar challenge, of slotting "exposure to fighting" into a limited action and HP budget.

Compare to Dota where support heroes have acquired more and more opportunities for assist gold/XP, it does in some sense make the game "easier" for the support players, but then the game is harder in other ways because now the supports are all way more farmed and dangerous than in older versions. It's the difference between controlling an army of many units and having to manage them all, versus controlling one unit and needing to work together within a team.

marknutter 49 minutes ago||

It's OSS, no?

tmtvl 41 minutes ago||

It is, but making a change that doesn't mess up the balance of the game can be tricky.

helle253 51 seconds ago||

Fond memories, playing this throughout my youth :')

everdrive 1 hour ago||

I played the heck out of this about a decade ago. It's an amazing game, and I'd love to return to it and see what has changed.

myky22 17 minutes ago||

Same, i think It was on my first Linux OS. The good old days hehe

thatoneengineer 1 hour ago||

Same!

drob518 35 minutes ago||

Same! Just downloaded the latest version for nostalgia’s sake.

ramses0 1 hour ago||

A+! They even had an iOS version a while back: `https://apps.apple.com/us/app/the-battle-for-wesnoth/id14507...` (this may be the "Mac" version, see: `https://www.reddit.com/r/wesnoth/comments/1pjkwbw/i_had_wesn...`).

If that's your jam then there's also a (non-open-source) "Hero's Hour" which tickles the old Heroes of Might and Magic stylings, works reasonably well on Xbox, where I've been doing most of my gaming lately.

As far as Open Source gaming success stories, I'd put this up there in the Top 5 for "Original IP and Concept" (if that makes sense). Just a stellar labor of love, worth giving it a shot to play!

haunter 1 hour ago|

Also on Steam https://store.steampowered.com/app/599390/Battle_for_Wesnoth...

rpmisms 1 hour ago||

Grew up playing Wesnoth, still adore the game. There is a TON of third party content and a serious extended universe, too!

hyperionultra 1 hour ago|

Could you name a few places to find 3rd party content?

rpmisms 21 seconds ago|||

It's under the "add-ons" menu in game. I would recommend playing the top-ranked campaigns. Some amazing stuff in there. I adore Legend of the Invincibles. Fun story, tons of new gameplay mechanics.

tmtvl 39 minutes ago||||

Last time I checked there was an option on the main menu to download user-made campaigns.

IsTom 38 minutes ago|||

There's a "addons" browser in the game.

wiradikusuma 22 minutes ago||

Sweet! Does anyone have a list of high-quality open source games like this?

(Subjective interpretation, but something like, "I couldn't believe it's free, I would have paid for it anyway.")

jordigh 4 minutes ago||

I know it's a very niche domain, but I feel this way about Lizard.

My lizard is the lizard of website: https://rainwarrior.ca/lizard/

My lizard is the lizard of source: https://github.com/bbbradsmith/lizard_src_demo/

ecshafer 8 minutes ago||

The Free Civ and Free Colonization games are good. Brogue, Nethack, DCSS are good if you like roguelikes. OpenMW is a totally open source reimplementation of Morrowind, so that might fit the bill.

bedroom_jabroni 1 hour ago||

An absolute gem I came across randomly many years ago. Picked up Mewgenics and it left me wishing it had some mechanics from Wesnoth like faster animations (Mewgenics caps at 4x), undo action (at least if the action doesn't trigger any rng/damage behavior), skip enemy turns.

I only wish they added more campaigns into the official lore.

philip-b 21 minutes ago||

I heard about this game many many times due to software developers showcasing it as an example of a good libre videogame. However, I don't know a single person who played it and I have never seen anyone recommending it for its gameplay.

azrazalea 11 minutes ago||

It is a relatively simple formula that is very combat heavy with extremely simple economy. The campaigns are excellent though and as long as the true randomness of attacks/defense doesn't drive you crazy it is a lot of fun. Very challenging and has real strategic and tactical depth as well as pretty well balanced.

I personally never did multiplayer but last I checked the multiplayer community was pretty healthy.

Quarrelsome 18 minutes ago||

i played it, its fine, its a solid game. Easily can lose several hours in a session and probably played over 40 in total. Its enjoyable to play through due to the upgrading mechanics and wanting to see all the potential evolutions. That said, I'm not always a huge fan of the level design as you're often encouraged to play into negative fights (e.g. the timing for meeting the enemy aligns with their daytime bonuses) which forces you to play a bit more defensively than I'd like.

mattlondon 45 minutes ago|

Blocked by Anubis? Just says "invalid response" with no explanation or instructions for how to fix it. Chrome on Android - not exactly niche.

Thanks for that.

tetromino_ 20 minutes ago|

Same happened for me when I clicked on the link, I had to delete the cookies for wesnoth.org and then load the site again. I think their Anubis setup might be broken a bit

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