I misread that and thought Wayland went in a very different direction for a second.
Ugh, I had written a lengthy post and lost it. I haven’t played Widelands itself much, but I have played Settlers 2 a lot. If anything I explain below is different in Widelands, please correct me ;)
Anyway, a TLDR for those that have no idea of what to expect: The Settlers 2 is a lot more about logistics and planning use of space than anything else. It needs very little input most of the time, it’s a very slow paced game.
The main things to keep in mind is available space, roads and resources. The game is separated in hex-ish tiles. Depending on how much free space there is, you can build a basic, medium or large building. As a rule of thumb, basic buildings require no resources to function (one exception being mines, which need food); medium buildings receive either 1 or 2 resources and deliver the worked result; large buildings are usually farms or a fortress.
So, imagine Age of Empires 1, but if you had to connect every building with a road network, with every worker and every resource traveling through it, one at a time. Once you set up something to be built, you’ll see a worker walking his way there, as well as resources being carried towards it. The busiest roads can receive a donkey that will also haul resources between the connected flags - you cannot manually upgrade roads, even if you have a surplus of donkeys.
Unlike AoE or pretty much every RTS, you don’t train units at all. You need a minimal military to garrison military buildings, which will increase your borders. Once any of these is fully built, a number of soldiers will come out of HQ and move to occupy it. HOWEVER, if you are attacked, only the soldiers within that building will protect it. You don’t participate in combat at all. The soldiers just line up and fight. When a military building is occupied by the enemy, it and everything that was within the lost border is destroyed.
Edit: Never mind, I misunderstood something. From what I remember, this post is more or less an accurate description of what to expect.
The Battle for Wesnoth is also a great free turn based strategy game
Wargus is a wicked reimplimentation of the Warcraft 2 engine
Never heard of it, definitely will give it a try. Would like to know how can I donate to the dev team!
I FUCKIN LOVE RTS THIS IS DOPE
anyone interested in RTs also chechout tza.red it’s the RTs game Tzar that came out in 2000 but with multiplayer and some good qol stuff. Run by good people and has a little community.
Idk how to make a link on lemmy but type tza.red in your address bar like the your ancestors used to.
Another great RTS is 0 A.D.. It’s more or less Age of Empires meets Empire Earth.
Fair warning, the AI is brutal. You probably want to set that to the easiest difficulty, and maybe even get an AI ally for your first game…
Added to my list cool game.
My friend group has been having a lot of fun with Beyond All Reason. Also free/open source RTS
It’s a really good game. Check it out!
“Timber!”
I remember playing this some years ago…it was a lot of fun. Back then the “Atlantis” (I think…not sure, its been some years) campaign wasn’t completely finished so maybe time to give it another shot :).
On a related, is there a list of good open source strategy games? I’m especially interested in grand strategy.
- 0 A.D.
- Warzone 2100
- Mega glest.
You’ll not be disappointed
0AD is FOSS Age of Empires, yeah?
In the same spirit, yeah. It has a pretty active community from what I’ve heard.
I’m not sure if it’s a grand strategy game, but Freeciv is similar to older Civ games.
That being said, Beyond All Reason (BAR) and Zero-k are Total Annihilation inspired and have a lot of work put in them. Definitely worth a try!
That looks amazing, thanks for sharing sag!
Cool!
Sweet! Another RTS to add to my collection!
Looks like my kinda thing. What platform does it work on?
It’s on Flathub. It’s open source C++ so what ever you can compile it for.
Window - Mac - Linux
Every one except mobile.
We really need more mobile strategy games. Seems like the right platform.
Did you tried UnCiv ? Feels like garbage to play to me. Maybe it is just too complete for my mobile game sessions… (And I don’t really like civilisation turn based games anymore.)
Mindustry (factorio like) plays badly on mobile (everything is too small, touch is not precise need to zoom a lot but you don’t see anything/can’t build long belt that way). But now I want to play it on PC.
On the other hand, Feudal Tactics is really nice to play on mobile.
Depends. For turn based, or slower strategy, or where you don’t need too much info on screen, mobile works. If it’s something fast paced (Command&Conquer) or with lots of stuff going on at the same time (SupCom) or with lots of micromanagement needed, mobile might feel awful. It’s like only ever having a mouse with a working scroll wheel to play a game.
Kinda like civilization?
No, like Settlers. Civ is turn-based. Edit: If you’re looking for a free version of Civ, the FreeCiv (PC) and UnCiv (Android) may interest you.
FreeCiv plays more like Civ 2 by default, while Unciv plays like Civ 5. The latter is also available for Windows and Linux, it’s java
Never played settlers so I went with something I had.
Well, they’re similar in the widest sense, that they’re both strategy games, you have to produce resources and fight battles to capture land.
But within the strategy genre, they’re actually pretty different. Civilization is turn-based, Widelands/Settlers is real-time strategy. I guess, the latter is at least still relatively slow-paced.
Widelands/Settlers puts a lot more focus on managing supply chains. To produce bread, you’ll need a baker, which needs flour and water, and possibly coal, so you need a mill and a farm and a well and a coal mine, and then you need people to actually carry the resources between the buildings, and yeah, it starts to become pretty busy pretty quickly.
If you ask fans of these games, that’s kind of what they love the most, that your settlement starts to look like an anthill buzzing with activity in no time.
