This is an excellent pure strategy war game in a swords and sorcery environment with elements of Lord of the Rings, but not a copy of. The graphics are very good for SVGA but not quite to the quality of Widelands. But the landscape is rich and diverse. It follows a story line through each scenario of a campaign. The game runs very robust on most computers, probably because they is no background activity except for graphics animation. The game is free but a contribution would be good for future development, the developers deserve it.

The game play is really good for strategy enjoyment both visually and in play with each game scenario challenging and diverse. The game has branch options in choices of how to proceed in some scenario battles.

The interface is very good also. You can go back in steps or reload a game from start. It gives you much information of your status. The game has autosave options in which you can go back in case you made bad strategy decisions. The tutorials are also good for getting you started. It has an excellent blog site with much help and advice.

This game will keep you occupied for hours and days, good for replaying. It has boo-coo campaigns with each campaign having a number of scenarios following a storyline. This game can keep you occupied for years. Better then any chess game. Well worth the support and download.

Warning, this game is very challenging on difficulty but it does have very good strategy guides and spoiler walk-throughs in case you do get frustrated. If they only had a futuristic Civ game like this with graphics like in Widelands, it would be heaven. It's about 5 to 10 times more difficult then Widelands.

Battle of Wesnoth-Epilogue

Well it's been quite a game, all kinds of different characters, landscapes and things to get. I finished the main game campaign, "Heir to the Throne".

I first started this game in normal difficulty. The problem is once you start a game on a given difficulty level you are stuck at that difficulty through each succeeding scenario. Well, I got midway through the game and found myself overwhelmed, so I went back and started at beginner-fighter level. It's all about the fun of a challenge and story line.

So I got up to the final battle with the evil queen. The forces seemed overwhelming and I lacked gold to recruit the heavy artillery. I could trow some of my treasured forces from earlier games at them as fodder, but that didn't get me to win the battle. It was my goal not to feed my past battle colleges to the beast just to win a game, that would be vicious, not my nature, although I am of questionable morals. So I resorted to the hints and strategy blogs on the Wesnoth site. The walk- through is also helpful but that's taking in some things you may not agree with, there's different ways to win the game depending on how you developed your resources and what branches you took on past scenarios.

After reading different wining strategies I employed the best one. After 6 tries I defeated the queen without loosing my significant battle buddies. So now, after that, I will go through the game and take better courses of action to see just how good I can make it in the final outcome. That's ignoring about 20 other campaigns of other characters surrounding the story of Wesnoth country.

For a free game it rocks, even if it was retailed, and it's always undergoing development in play, new campaigns, addons. I really don't care about the lack of sophisticated graphics like other commercial strategy games may have, Fate is one, so it's a nice, relaxing game to wind down the day from.  It's like a super chess game but with battle fields instead of a checkered board. No getting your adrenaline pumped up increasing stress levels to dangerous levels, just pure mental and graphical enjoyment.

I can't find a good space game that I really care about and doesn't leave me frustrated with lack of development or its just one battle after another. I would have it similar to a Civilization game of expansion and development while overcoming obstacles that are encountered along the way, similar to Star Trek. And I hate encombersome politics in my games that the Sid civilization series has. If it wasn't for politics we would have flying cars by now.

So Wesnoth is my main game for now. Give it a try.