Show HN: Wesnoth – Free, turn-based strategy game

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.

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.

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...

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.

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."

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.

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.

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.