Breaking Ground

28Jul10

The add-on written by Gambit. Yes. It’s on the 1.8 add-on server right now.

Basically, you recruit harvesters to ‘break’ the ground for income/gold. Every hex completely broken and thus becoming a chasm, awards the player 1 income. Harvesters break the ground around them and the hex they are standing on, so when the harvester breaks its own hex into a chasm, it dies. This proves to be an interesting aspect of the game, as it not only generates money and an interesting play style, it speeds up the game. Why? Because the map constantly gets smaller as everyone begins to break the ground. Typical games last around 30 minutes to an hour; much less than competing UMC MP add-ons.

Since harvesters cannot move, you have soldiers to move one hex at a time to ‘capture’ hexes, which then allows you to build harvesters on them. But as harvesters will totally destroy all the units around them, they must be built carefully. So when you get an army of soldiers in one place, what do you do? Attack! You can send your soldiers into enemy territory to take over their hexes. But at the same time, they can send soldiers to your territory as well. Soldiers are designed to be so that the attackers will probably will the particular hex, as every unit has firststrike, berserk, and 0% defense, thus making it that soldiers that attack will kill. But there are some defense things you can take advantage of:

Harvesters – In fact, they are great defensive tools in themselves as they can destroy any hex when placed properly (they can self-destruct as well) making it possible to block off the enemies’ invasions.

Upgraded Soldiers – You can upgrade soldiers to get more strikes and hitpoints, which can help you stand against an invasion. But note that attacking soldiers can upgrade too.

Archers – These fulfill the role of both defensive and offensive. They can shoot hexes from six hexes away, but each shot costs quite a sum. They can also destroy hexes to block off a bridge for example.

Offensively, you have one aid:

Gliders – They can take a soldier anywhere and immediately insta-kill the unit they land on. This prevents stalemates from happening, so they also cost quite a sum.

The goal is to destroy everybody else’s units and break the map. It proves to be a fun add-on! There is another level of strategy present, as your units can move only one hex at a time. You can’t break up your territory so much that you can’t maneuver, but you need income. Thus it is a very interesting balance of these aspects. This gets a 4.5 of 5 stars. Good job, Gambit!

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Filed under: Battle for Wesnoth   |  2 Comments
Tags: Gambit, multiplayer