Battle for Wesnoth

It's a cool game, especially great considering that it's free. Keep in mind the terrain and time of day and you'll do fine, most of the time. RNG will really fuck you at times, so be ready for that.

Please continue.

Expect certain cool campaigns to be unfinished (like the becoming a necromancer one)

Getting flashbacks here

If you liked Heroes 3, make sure you check out Disciples 2 Gold and the Age of Wonders series.

It's fun and there's plenty of custom campaigns to play, also a skirmish mode and MP if that's your thing. The RNG can be a little annoying but it honestly isn't as bad as many anons would have you believe and it doesn't matter in MP since both sides are equally prone to it (in SP it hurts the player a bit more than the AI for various reasons).

If you get the chance always level up a caster up the healer patch first (you can make the second one a damage-focussed caster).

And Mage Knight. I'm becoming tempted to start offering to teach the damn game in these threads just because of how worthy of a successor it is. There's also a Star Trek version now if that's your thing. Either of which are practically a direct sequel to HoMM in terms of gameplay.

path* not patch

Have you played Master of Magic, Eador: Genesis, or the Age of Wonders series already?

-Typical level cycle is you capturing a bunch of villages at the start, recruit or recall as many units as you can, and carefully march towards the goal. Don't expect to be able to get reinforcements, as almost every level has a time limit against you. Your enemies won't send reinforcements either until you start killing off his units, and even then usually only one at a time.
-There's a button somewhere in the options that lets you see how much gold your enemy has. This can give you an idea of how many units you can expect to face.
-Try to stick on good terrain and force your enemy on bad terrain. The AI tends to be more suicidal than you (by the way they also like to pick on low HP units so keep those away from the AI).
-Try to keep your loyal and free units alive, as they don't cost upkeep.
-Put your level 1 units in front of your higher level units so your higher level units don't die. Protect your units that are about to level up. Try to feed kills to your lower level units.
-Try to stick your units on good terrain.
-Try to hit melee units with ranged attacks, and ranged units with melee attacks.
-Abuse leadership to get as much damage out of your units as you can. Your hero unit usually gets leadership when he levels.
-If possible, avoid going full-out attack during the cycle of the day that's disadvantageous for you or advantageous for the enemy. In general, you should attack at dawn (your enemies are usually chaotic).
-Orc assassins are a fucking shit to deal with.
-If you can, try to get a white mage so you can hold the line better.
-When upgrading horseman, always go knight.
-When upgrading elf archers, always go marksman.
-Archers and spearmen and horsemen suck against skellies.
-Don't bother using too many scouts except for taking villages.
-Don't play on hard mode unless you like being forced to save scum a lot.
-You get a full heal when you level up. I forget whether or not you still get a full heal when you reach max level (I don't think you should but they might have changed that).
-Try not to drag out levels too long. I think the gold bonus is calculated depending on the total number of villages and number of turns you have left, so it's always more optimal to end the level earlier. If you fuck up and don't have enough gold for the next level be prepared to rely on a really small army.

You can keep levelling past the max level for more total HP + a full heal but its better to give the lower-level units the XP.

Disciples 2 is really cool but I really wish battles had some sort of grid movement in them instead of being traditional RPG combat.

...

I think you better just play homm3 instead. I finished champing like 10 years ago in wesnot but it was meh.

Shirley, you don't refer to Descent into Darkness? I can see how one might not realize that ending was the ending (though continued in the sequel to Burning Sands).

I love these Homm-esc games. Can you lovely anons recommends me more?

ADD:
- footpads are a great unit. Cheap, high def on most terrains, blunt damage AND range attack.
Work wonders against skellingtons.

Master of Magic (+Unofficial Patch 1.50 )

Warlords 3: Darklords Rising

How about some turn-based World War 2 strategy games? I feel there was a period of time when those were plentiful. What would be some good ones?

To add to this:
-the unit that lands the killing blow gets the kill xp. So you can use your high-level units to beat down enemy high-levels, and let your level 1 guys get the kill for big xp.
-Any unit that enters combat and lives gets a bit of xp as well.
-Elves don't have any movement penalty in forests and get a defensive bonuses in them. Make use of this.
-Skellies who enter deep water become invisible.
-Don't move through water if you can avoid it. If you have them, send in merfolk or aerial units to deal with enemies in the water.
-If you get any unit with a charge attack (like a lancer or knight), save-scum it. They'll get fucked up if they get hit themselves.

Havent played many but I quite enjoyed Panzer General 2.

Neat, this looks very much like what I was thinking of.

Probably one of the most original, polished, fan-supported, all around good open source games. Also has a good online multiplayer scene aided by its excellent balance and tons of good mods.

AI is aggressive to the point of berserkness, I don't think I've ever seen it retreat. Take advantage of this when playing against it, and bait it into traps, especially making it overcommit to an attack at the wrong time of day.

In general, emphasis isn't on brilliant tactical maneuvers that will probably work, but on multilayered strategies that can still adapt downward to succeed even if many component parts of it fail.

Its series is mostly WW2, but spinoffs include some other historical periods, SF, fantasy, and even a cool Warhammer 40000 installment.

The RNG is cancer.
Other than that pretty fun.
Good advice here
I will add that if you want to have fun don't fall into the temptation of savescumming. Between the game autosaving every turn and being cripplingly reliant on RNG, the temptation to restart turns after your loyal, strong knight got murdered by a 1HP orc grunt standing in a river in the middle of the day. Don't. Struggle on, or if you feel like this will cost you the campaign, restart from the beginning of the mission. If you savescum as frequently as the game tempts you to, you'll find yourself reloading when your 3 peasant army fails to slaughter the Enemy's chief as that's what their maximum damage output could achieve.

My man check out War in the Pacific

My nigga. Last time I played that I pissed off my friend because I thought I was going to lose 100% so I fought a dragon on the last turn and somehow killed it, which incidentally pushed me just into 1st place.

play swamplings and the undead vainilla campaign

It's too bad every level has you on the offense against a time limit, which limits the usefulness of defensive units.

thats about how i feel

But there is no animu art?

Wesnoth is a lot of fun, but be prepared to screwed on accuracy and damage rolls. Try to mitigate those with what time of day you attack and your terrain bonuses. There's also quite a few matches happening online all the time if you want to play against a real person, but those matches can (understandably) take quite a bit of time.

People think strategy is all about how simply moving units around and besting another player. Yet at its core, it isn't, its about dealing with uncertainty. Thats why the best strategy games have significant random elements, to create uncertainty… Most of the games people cite as "good strategy games" actually aren't strategy games at all. Chess is not a good "strategy game" neither is X-Com, starcraft or most RTS. They have their own strategy elements, but not games that require good understandings of probabilities and their effects on planning.

No, I'd say that handles probabilities fairly well.

i certainly dont like always knowing the outcome, otherwise it can boil down to pure math, dimming down the 'game' aspect

Besides Panzer/Pacific General, you should check out Panzer Corps. It's basically a modern remake of Panzer General. Panzer Tactics is another knockoff that was released on PC recently, it's kind of an uglier, babby's first Panzer General.

Try Blackguards.

The first is ok despite a god awful story. The second is an abomination before the eyes of gods and men.

Agreed on your opinion about managing contingencies rather than just maneuvering, but Chess and X-Com (at least inside the BattleScape) literally aren't strategy games at all, but tactical ones. The typical distinction between the two genres is that strategy games include some kind of resource exploitation (recruitment, construction, harvesting, etc.) alongside combat, whereas tactical games are just the units you're given outfighting their opponents on the field.

Nah, those can be fine too, as pseudo-strategic puzzle games, like Massive Assault.

theres certainly room for such games to exist. just not always my cup of tea.

trust me OP. not worth it. very boring. very depressing.

Disciples 2 combat is so fucking boring I dropped it completely. Kinda the same problem Anachronix (which I love) has, if I'm gonna play a PC game I'm trying to stay away from JRPG bullshit unless it's a classic Wizardry.

Wesnoth is pretty much Fire Emblem for freetards tbh

Sweet mother of unit upgrades. The spearman has 3 possible upgrades. This is fucking great.
Does it have even further tiers and how the fuck do I keep upgraded units alive?

The randomness is a problem but maybe not quite as big a problem as it's sometimes made out to be. I think I would still feel the urge to savescum in it even if more deterministic mechanics allowed for more strategic play.

I get the feeling that if you are defending you end up dealing more damage.

More like Fire Emblem with one of its worst paradoxes removed. Nintendo could learn from it.

Someday I should get back to work on my patch to eliminate random hits while preserving game balance.

Which one you faggots ?

I'm fighting undead if that helps.

Pikemen. Javelineers don't get a third evolution.

So it shall be.

Endless Legend is a better game.

your wish is my command

Yet it has SJW devs and obscene pricing.

Why ? How big is the night bonus really ? This skellington is fucking my horsemen up.

I guess skeletons are just superior to horsemen due to piercing damage resistance ?

Skellingtons are resistance to most physical damage types besides bashing weapons. It's on the castle keep so there's a defensive terrain bonus there too.

Don't I negate it by being on the same terrain and surrounding it ?
Even if not, just look at the damage difference when I'm trying to attack with a spearman. It's huge.

Does anyone actually use human mounted units? I always feel like they're too risky. You might get lucky with the Charge double damage attribute and wipe out enemy units or you might lose your own unit just as easily. They have shit health and defense so you can never really afford to not wipe out said enemy units on offense or you'll die in the retaliation.

Normal units are pretty slow form what I see here. I need horsemen and footpads just to get the objective in time.

Skellies seem pretty damn strong vs spearment/pikemen/archers/horsemen. Only footpads fight them somewhat ok.

Dunno how you guys manage to get the objective in time. I am going to end up restarting these over and over again.

monkey's paw, indeed

what kind of level designer made a "lel so fanny" smiley face out of the terrain? there's a difference between being tongue in cheek about something and then having reddit tier humor

I never even noticed the face when I first played through that mission.

Maybe it wasn't the intent, the level design just happened to look like a face. Did that ever occur to you?

it did, and i judged it too coincidental to be the case, and subsequently discarded that idea. I don't suppose that occurred to you, though.

No, I gave you the benefit of the doubt and assumed you weren't enough of a moron to make such a dumb decision.

this just in Holla Forums isn't allowed to play games with smileys

that's called a strawman. I never said nor implied anything about playing the game. I was criticizing the level designer for having pleb tier humor. Reading comprehension, m8.

>i think you're wrong because subjectivity, therefore you're a moron, that face is OBVIOUSLY not there intentionally because I myself don't think it is
Do you understand the irony of calling me a moron or do I need to spell it out for you?

I'm calling you a moron for making a brash assumption based on very little information. I don't know whether it was intentional or not, and I'm not going to assume either way because I find it "too coincidental".

Looks kind of like Age of Wonders (which I really enjoyed). Might give it a shot after I'm done with xcom.

There is no way anyone looks at that and doesn't see a face.

...

The issue isn't whether that looks like a face or not. The issue is whether or not it was intentional or accidental.

Thats you, that's how stupid you sound.

I'm aware of that and my input was that there is no way it was not intentional because it impossible not to see a face.

There's nothing wrong with dropping in a generic smiley face, what was complaining about was that it was a meme, except as pointed out BfW (and the entire HttT campaign) predate any sources of memes such as Reddit or post-cancer 4chan.

That post also left out the word tier from the post it quoted. Don't be disingenuous over such a little argument.

It could have been unintentional at first, only for the designer to see it and decide just to leave it like that.

I wouldn't count something like hiding smileys, hearts, and other symbols in your art as meme-tier.

I wasn't arguing if it was or not.

Now that's out of the way, what are the better traits that I should want in recalled units besides intelligent?

Elaborate.

Units with a lot of melee attacks benefit from strong, quick for slow moving units, dextrous for elf archers, and resilient is good on pretty much anything.

If you really want you can save scum for traits but I wouldn't bother unless you're playing on hard.

What part of didn't you get?

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Am i hallucinating or did Wesnoth's main storyline got different art in the main story?

Depending on what you play, campaign or one battle.

Intelligence is beneficial only in multiplayers and skirmish maps since it gives quicker access for more specialized units, but in campaign it doesn't give any stat bonuses, like resilient, strong or quick.

If you play in campaign games, you can get loyal units, and you should consider upgrading them and guarding them more carefully since they don't cost upkeep.

and holy dumb fucking shit mang, get a grip on the unit bonuses and traits, if i'm not wrong, that campaign gives you footpads to negate the skeletons and they can be used at night to cover your daytime units

That's mostly the special ability of the horseman, actually: When it attacks with a "charge" attack or whatever it's called, both units do double damage. Add in night and the skellis resistance to piercing attacks…

Not sure what you mean, but it probably did. The unit description art has changed so many times there needs to be an archive just for that.

They moved away from their animu roots.

At least I still have my sexy elf girls.

I vaguely remember the previous artstyle in the main campaign was sort of anime style

at least I don't have amnesia.

Kind of missed that.

The mission does not give much choice on when to attack. You have to push early or you can never reach the boss in time because he keep spamming undead.

No. This is the third mission. You start with a hero only.
The problem is: the castle has 6 orc guards which deal considerably high damage. Footpads are shit against them. And undead start swarming after them.
And even with footpads it takes a while to kill stuff because of the low damage. I chose challenging so that might have something to do with it.

I guess I have read some guide because there is very little explanation on the unit and skill descriptions. I still don't understand how much % of what the day/night bonus is.

Everything in the game is documented somewhere in the manual. Go read it.

Might play it then. Anime was a mistake.

Depeding if you start the game anew, your help system automatically fills in the unit knowledge.

Fuck, I think I need to replay the damn game, keep forgetting shit.
Footpads, while they are pretty shit initially and they have damage vulnerability, they are fucking annoyance if you're against them and you don't have units that have marksman or magic abilities to deal with these shits, even on plains it's 50% hit chance, 70% or 80% chance to hit them in hills and forests, and they tend to make good diversions too.

Movement is the single most important attribute in the game in my opinion. I like Quick because one extra movement point can decide everything.

I see their strength, but their damage is considerably low. When trying to take down something fast, they suck. Even their upgraded forms.

This game has an android port with over 100.000 downloads. Fucking normalfags.

What a joke.

Well it's one of the few games that really does translate fine to a touchscreen.

This was one of the best games to play on my pre-touchphone UMPC with its stylus and a few choice keybinds to its face buttons. The PC version fortunately includes smallgui and tinygui options that let the game work at resolutions as low as 400x300.

Oh, and speaking of Android, guess how the iOS port is? That's right, it's commercial software you have to pay for, and the kike that made it stopped updating it years ago (in spite of which he's still raking in shekels), so now they're scrambling for somebody else to update it. And, of course, there's no normal port for jailbroken iOS on Cydia.

Holy shit. These deathblades have 4-5 attacks. Why would I even get the fat skeleton when this one gets a gorillion attacks ?

Its been a very long time since ive played but I think deathblades cant get any higher while the other choice can.

Fattie skelly can evolve to become even fatter, or become a skelly general (buffs lower level units).

These sort of decisions remind me a lot of disciples and that is why I really like this game.

Yes they are limited but they are pretty damn strong. Looks like they have a good defense bonus too.

He can, but will he be able to ? The game is pretty punishing at times, especially for frontliner units. This skelly can 100% dish out crazy damage each fight. The other one has greater hp but can deal less damage or miss altogether. This one with 4-5 attacks is bound to hit something or do crazy 50 damage counter attacks.

I heard about this. I saw it in the store, but after looking over the box I didn't see the seal for the original devs on it. I have learned this to be a pretty bad sign so I didn't buy it.

Reincarnation fixed a lot of the problems of Renaissance. It's not perfect but worth playing imo.

Well I can't argue with those quads, got a torrent? I don't have any of those games nor the expansions.

magnet:?xt=urn:btih:e522121372239996e2b918c0f43a68fccd730baa&dn=Disciples+III+Reincarnation-iNLAWS&tr=udp%3A%2F%2Ftracker.leechers-paradise.org%3A6969&tr=udp%3A%2F%2Fzer0day.ch%3A1337&tr=udp%3A%2F%2Ftracker.coppersurfer.tk%3A6969&tr=udp%3A%2F%2Fpublic.popcorn-tracker.org%3A6969

Why thank you. Have a rare.

You can still do better than throwing a horseman who takes double damage from the skeleton's attacks, which are already buffed 25% by the time of day so you're taking almost triple damage from one hit, while barely even dealing the horseman's base damage thanks to 50% pierce resist and night debuff on the lawful horseman.

Also, deathblade vs. revenant depends on what you want to use them for, revenants are an offensive powerhouse but can only take one more spear/arrow compared to the standard skelly, while revenants get almost 50 hp, which can keep them alive a hell of a lot longer with the damage resistances, and they're not completely fucked if they come into contact with sources of arcane, fire or impact damage.
Tl;dr deathblades take ground, revenants hold it.

Problem with any undead army is lack of healing unit. That's why I prefer Revenants.

Holy fuck this game is fucking trash I don't know where to begin. How can you fuck up this badly holy shit. I would be even more angry if I had spent money on this garbage. Thanks anyways.

Tactics - low level, unit battle command, short-term
Strategy - mid level, movement and tactics of an army, objective oriented
Logistics - grand level, long-term management of entire military divisions and grand campaigns

No shit nigga! What vital organ do you think you'll pierce?

Iron Maulers eat all skeletons for breakfast. You need blunt damage for skelingtons or holy damage.

Get a paladin going, or a white mage.

You get neither. These are missions. But I did win it with max rank footpads.

I hope there is a archive for the art and such. I'm always interested in seeing how things like that progress.

Imagine convincing yourself to buy it after looking up gameplay, reviews, and screenshots that all point to it being just a waste of time and money. The fact that there's no complete wiki or let's play should have been the final warning I needed. I could almost see myself playing through the story if it wasn't for the good awful voice acting and writing

And to think I was going to buy it to show support and shit. I'm guessing it's outdated compared to the pc version?

It hasn't been updated since 2013.

it looks a lot prettier than i remember

Most people played it in the early days. I know I first played it around version 4 or 5 I think. Just goes to show the constant refinement that's gone into it.

The sprites for old versions are easily accessible at the following URL, though not portraits, which appear to be scattered all over the forums:
units.wesnoth.org/

You mean 0.4-0.5? I think I got in with 0.8.

You were able to return it right?