Yeah, I pulled it up on my iPad to buy it, then saw that the first post was incorrect (it is $4.99 not $0.99), so I ended up not buying it. -Verxion
These are one of the rare App Store games I'd gladly pay more than $10. Content-wise, Battle for Wesnoth is almost endless. In fact, it's one of the few games I'd be happy to be stuck in an island with.
Well I have the Itouch version. But didn't like it... seemed to complex and everything tiny. Since I have an Ipad now... I'm spoiled... and want to try it again.
it's worth the 4.99 if you're into turn-based SRPGs. It's the closest to a fire emblem-type game I've run across for the iOS with a ridiculous number of campaigns to boot. My only gripe with it is the %-hit rates are off (ex 70% hit rate shouldn't translate to consistently hitting 1 in 5 times...)
No, no they're not. We've gone over this (literally) thousands of times over on the official forum for the game at http://www.wesnoth.org/forum/ The thing with wesnoth is - you can see the code. It's open-source. What it's doing isn't some secret, hidden in the vaults of a game studio. Anyone with a basic understanding of programming (such as, most college math students who'd know statistics) can look at it. And they have - everyone (out of thousands of programmers who've looked) agrees that our random number generator works correctly, and you're getting exactly what it describes. If you don't believe me, you can look at it yourself. We've had it to the point of linux kernel hackers looking over our RNG code. That single bit of code, due its controversy, is probably the most comprehensively reviewed bit of code in the game. What you're running into here is a documented effect - people just remember bad streaks of luck far more strongly than they remember good streaks of luck. In fact they tend to view the good streaks of luck as "normal"; they don't see them as exceptional circumstances, they view them as "normal operation". (This is why all compulsive gamblers are such - instinctively, it feels to humans like winning should be sustainable.) Pertinent reading on the subject: http://www.wesnoth.org/forum/viewtopic.php?f=6&t=21317 http://www.wesnoth.org/forum/viewtopic.php?f=6&t=29308
The code may be correct, but if hundreds of your players are complaining about it, maybe it's time for a design change
Or maybe some games aren't for everyone. I can see the point in lying to your players and telling them an attack is 60% when it's actually 70%, just so they won't be disappointed by their subjective perception of the success rate. But it's hard to make that work in an open-source game.
Yeah, it's basically the same (roughly speaking) design Civ has; two fighters duke it out, and although it's heavily weighted by their strengths, the outcome is random. In fact, wesnoth is a lot nicer than civ, in that, in civ, there's always a chance, however small, that your unit might lose a fight, because the outcome is entirely random. Those of us with fond memories of losing a stealth bomber to a phalanx can attest to this. By comparison, in wesnoth, you can take advantage of certain unit arrangements where you can be certain a unit can't possibly die in the fight; in fact, most of the fun and strategy in wesnoth comes out of doing this. If you set it up so that there's only one tile from which your elven fighter can be attacked, and so that none of the enemies who could move there to attack have a damage potential higher than that fighter's current HP, he's absolutely safe, and absolutely guaranteed to survive. As you work through all the potential contingencies of which soldiers could fall, and which other soldiers would be exposed by that happening, you work up an elaborate tree of pros and cons in your head about unit positioning; there's a lot of complexity in that, much like in other games like Chess or Go, and that's what people find fun about wesnoth. As much as it annoys one demographic of players, the randomness is exactly what has turned another demographic into raving fanatics; wesnoth has a huge replay value, and remains interesting, because you can't "solve" the gameplay like you can in a purely deterministic game. If you look at games like Fire Emblem, and Advance Wars, those games aren't very replayable, because they're so deterministic that players have worked out nearly perfect solutions - down to fully mapped out series of moves, for every level in the game. Once you've beaten the game, there's no reason to come back, because it's always going to be the exact same thing. Seriously, like, here are some walkthroughs that do exactly that. Such a walkthrough is impossible to write for wesnoth, because such events aren't predictable. You have to constantly adapt, and rethink your plans, which is what people find fun. Some people aren't into that, and that's why there are games like Advance Wars - some people want to work out one bulletproof master strategy, and then sit back and watch it beat the game for them. But other people get bored to death with that, because once they've figured it out, they're no longer challenged by the game, and are just going through the motions. Every time you play Wesnoth is fresh and surprising. Occasionally it's an unpleasant surprise, but there's not much cost to those unpleasant surprises. In a worst case scenario, you just restart the level. It's a small price to pay to have a game that actually has replay value.
I'm not sure if you mean this literally, but while I generally agree with your comments about randomness, I don't agree with this at all. Maybe you're overgeneralizing too much from what you like. I'd like the game even better if combat were more uncertain, so I'd definitely not agree that most of all of the enjoyment in the game is in trying to set up guaranteed wins.
Yes, because you have to make the difficult choice about which units you do that for. You don't have enough troops to do it for everyone (if you did, you're winning the game). You can only guarantee survival of a few soldiers in a given turn, and that's the fun - having to choose which ones are important. The strategy and fun comes out of trying to "mitigate risk". You're never able to do it completely, so you have to make hard, strategically-interesting choices about which risks you'll leave yourself exposed to. And yes, I am generalizing from what I like, because what I said doesn't need to be true for the whole world of videogames. No generalization like that can be true for the whole world of gaming, but what I said is true for a large segment of people. It's kind of like calling a movie "good" or "bad". It's an accepted convention, and we all know it doesn't hold true for everyone. Trying to take the time to qualify which groups it does/doesn't hold true for would be an absurd waste of time. Try it some time.
Hmm. I guess I don't accept it. I think you could communicate a lot more information, more accurately, by saying, "This is most of what I find fun in the game." If that's what you mean. But obviously it's up to you. Like I said, I do agree with much of what you wrote.
I picked it up for full price and it was still a great deal. You get tons of campaigns. And to be honest its one of the most strategic strategy games I've played in a while. Area of Control, bonuses for land type, bow versus sword, night and day...you really have to plan. If you spread out too much and night falls, forget it you'll get pounded (as long as you play a good guy). Anyone once the fence, just buy the damn game and stop guessing...
I agree 100%. Sometimes you will lose some troops during a counter attack. You need to make sure its ones that aren't as valuable as others. Keeping a formation is a good idea too. Strong units on the outside in a wedge with your healers and archers in the inside. Archers advance and hit first, followed by your big guns and then place the healers to heal any wounded, retreat the badly wounded. Then hold the line during the counter attack. Area of Control is a huge deal in the game. Hey, kinda like war...just a few more elves
so I just got this and was kind of disappointed initially - having no time I just fired up a skirmish game to see what the gameplay looked like. I was scrolling around the map and wow the framerate/responsiveness was bad. Dragging my finger across the map it was really slow and choppy. Is this normal?
