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.

Even with 5 (albeit small) linux kernel patches, 2 Firefox patches.. employers weren’t interested. I’ve stopped contributing to open source completely. I’m considering switching fields. It was interesting but these days I need some ROI, personally.

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.

That is sad. Maintaining something like this really takes almost all the skills also needed for enterprise, or a dozen places.

That it doesn't get him instant hired is the sad part, what are we coming to.

> 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.

> Frequently Proposed Ideas (FPIs)

> 7. Healing/leadership should give experience

> It is felt that allowing units to gain experience without risk would make leveling-up of such units inevitable. Further, one of the motivating examples of this is so that units such as shaman can have a hope to level up in multiplayer. It is pointed out that if the experience gains were high enough to allow shaman to level up in a single multiplayer game, then it would be trivial to gain the best type of healing unit in a campaign very quickly.

https://forums.wesnoth.org/viewtopic.php?f=12&t=34904#w0fpi7 (2011)

There's actually an add-on for this (and a bunch of other things too): Advance Wesnoth Wars. It adds options for XP-for-healing but also for making terrain affect damage taken rather than chance to hit (which is fun when you get tired of the randomness).

This fork[0] of a fork of the original allegedly works with 1.18. I haven't tested it, because these days I play with the built-in predictable RNG and it suffices for me.

https://github.com/ilya-ilya/Advance_Wesnoth_Wars

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.

Isn't the strategy then to keep them behind the fighter units, wait until an enemy is 1 HP away from death, make the healer advance and make a kill, then put a fighter in front of them again?

An indirect compensation is that these units require less XP to advance, but I understand your concern too.

> 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.

This is a problem with the XP-per-kill system. Wesnoth could use a variant instead. I use the above strategy all the time to level the healers up.

Note that elven units have slow (their healers), which is very powerful in its own right for getting a kill on a unit. First slow, then deal damage with other units.

It's OSS, no?

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

Same!

> I would love to see a Nintendo Switch port of this game, if anyone is interested in making one!

I think many would be, but AIUI it's illegal. It would require modifying the source to use Nintendo's SDK which is under NDA. The GPL would require releasing the modified source, which would be prohibited by the NDA. So it's legally impossible without special permission from every single Wesnoth contributor ever.

Unless you mean a homebrew port, in which case it's doable.

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

Cataclysm: Dark Days Ahead: Like Dwarf Fortress but post-apocalyptic survival horror. Endless Sky: top-down space shooter inspired by Escape Velocity SuperTux: inspired by Super Mario SuperTuxKart: inspired by Mario Kart https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_open-source_video_game... and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_commercial_video_games...

If you like RTS Beyond All Reason is pretty amazing.

https://www.beyondallreason.info/

The amount of care they put into the little quality of life ui stuff is impressive. Something about how you can tell when the developers enjoy playing their game.

https://www.beyondallreason.info/ is high quality and in active, open development. And fun. For some weird reason 8v8 is the default experience but there are several other modes: PVE, 1v1, etc.

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.

If you like arena shooters, Xonotic is quite remarkable. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xonotic

Shattered Pixel Dungeon: https://github.com/00-Evan/shattered-pixel-dungeon/releases

Mindustry is worth a look if you like factorio and tower defense: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mindustry

Edited to add:

If you like RTS then Beyond All Reason is fantastic: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beyond_All_Reason

Not Open Source but still/now free to play (these are my favs, I played them through back and forth):

- Trackmania Nations Forever (e.g. via Steam) - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aj2u2OrZ2vI

- Starcraft Brood War - though I have not tested it via the battlenet.exe, played it when it still was payware.

- Gemcraft Labyrinth - played it when flash was a thing, but now it is again, e.g. on Armorgames

And, I got games like Portal 1 & 2, Outer Wilds, Osmos, Manifold Garden, Planet Crafter and many more for under ten, some for under five Euros each when they were on special offer on Steam. I once got Just Cause 3 for three Euros.

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/

Luanti aka minetest

Widelands as a settler clone

OpenRCT2 is a reimplementation of RollerCoaster Tycoon 2.

Just like its cousing OpenTTD which is a reimplementation of Chris Sawyer's Transport Tycoon.

Stardew Valley isn't open source, but it has been decompiled (.Net) and has a an open-source modding API inclding Harmony integration for patching the base game code and and a huge open-source modding community.

ttps://github.com/pardeike/Harmony

0ad https://play0ad.com/

My first reaction was exactly that; I can't believe it's free!

Endless Sky, GPLv3 space trading game. Being a space trucker is dangerously addictive.

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

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.

That’s absurd. It is the only game I’ve ever played other than chess. Maybe it’s not popular with FPS gamers, but a lot of people don’t like FPS.

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.

Wait, how is that build different from the one Alessandro Pira (?) has been publishing for years now?

I tried it on my tablet last month, and it's pretty unplayable. The touchscreen input needs a lot of work, half the time it does something completely wrong and random, like selecting a tile halfway across the screen from where you touched.

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

I would need more time on my hands.

I think this was featured on the Ubuntu software manager at some point and that’s how I discovered it. It was one of the few games on Linux that’s was genuinely fun to play

It feels more like a war game to be honest. I played both for a while and they share some aesthetic, but not much beyond that.

0 A.D. https://play0ad.com/ is more similar to Age of Empires.

Not at all. That would be a game called 0ad.

More like Fire Emblem

think more hexbased, turnbased, terrain and dice roll mechanics with unit upgrades being extremely important.

More like Final Fantasy Tactics

More like Heroes of Might and Magic. It's a turn-based strategy game where battles take place on a hex grid map. It's got full campaigns, lots of factions and units, resources to gather... it's one of my favorite OSS projects. Wesnoth has been in active development forever and is a real labor of love, as well as a showcase of collaborative game development.

Not really. This game uses a turn-based combat system with a hex grid. It's more like Sid Meier's Civilization, but with a drastically simplified economy and a strong focus on battles. It also has a Tolkein-esque fantasy theme instead of a real-life history theme.

If that sounds at all interesting, I suggest giving it a shot.

It's turn based, the most similar game I've played is probably Fantasy General. Closer to Advance Wars or Fire Emblem than Warcraft.

No. Warcraft 3 ist real time strategy, Wesnoth is turn based strategy.

No. This is turn based, it doesn't play like any RTS game.

Not really. It's turn-based and hex-based.

> flanking

The Zone of Control mechanic kind of simulates this. If you're not careful about unit placement, you may find your units ganged up on by more enemies then they can handle. On the other hand, if you keep a good formation, you can pretty much hold a solid line with a fairly modest number of troops. Unless of course the enemy soldiers have "skirmisher", in which case they'll waltz right past your ZoC.

Actually, Wesnoth's ZoC is the reason I never could get into Fire Emblem. I couldn't get used to not being able to protect my injured units without completely surrounding them.

Modern strategy games for leisure can be traced back to actual militaries or hardcore history buffs—systems that would try to model morale etc., often to a degree which, er, doesn't have mass-market appeal. :p

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kriegsspiel

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chainmail_(game)