kidkonia blogs

Having spent the last four or five days glued to my computer, I figure this is a wonderful way to celebrate the new blog and break in "Ollyblog" with a first serious blog post.

The topic of this first post involves something I discovered: it's called a "NUISANCE" (yes, in all caps). A NUISANCE is a unit in Battle for Wesnoth that consistently and without fail (as the name suggets) annoys the stuffing out of you and your tiny army.

To be fair, the majority of the armies in BfW do not have that many NUISANCEs, or at least have countermeasure NUISANCEs to bullshit the other player just as much.

Playing Dwarves leaves much to be desired in the NUISANCE area.

In short, the Dwarves or Knalgan Alliance in BfW are expensive, slow, and don't do well on the majority of the terrain. In their favor, however, they're neutral, meaning they remain unaffected by the time of day; they have above average damage output; and they're generally very hardy creatures, having a several hp boost above most of the other races. In this case, the cons far outweigh the pros.

In BfW, your defense is not based on a unit stat, but rather the terrain you are positioned on in the hexmap, something that really loosened up the game's complexity. Each unit treats that type of terrain differently (so an Elfish Archer standing in a Forest hex gets a 70% defense, whereas a Dwarfish Fighter on the same ground only gets 30%). Terrain also affects your movement speed and the length of your vision. So, not only can I only move at normal 4-hex speed on roads (where my defense percentage is 30), my favored terrain (mountains and hills) slow me down just as much as water or snow. In short, we are a rather immobile race, which makes us difficult to play against any of the other Wesnoth factions, since all of the rest of them have at least 5 base speed if not more. In addition, all of the races get nice defensive percentages on hills and mountains, so the Dwarves just get that 10% higher. In all honesty that's not much of a difference, and means that the enemy is also nearly as hard to hit as you are if you're located in a patch of mountains or hilled ground.

Another annoyance (not NUISANCE) for the poor pissed-on and pissed off Dwarves is that every single premade map in the game involves some form of river system running through it. Even the random map generators get you large, unruly bodies of water at odd angles across the map, which can potentially further frustrate a Dwarven assault. It shouldn't take any faction more then 5 turns to cross the map. If there's a river system cutting the map in half, Dwarven assault groups have to ford the river, meaning that they all get 20% defense for a turn or two.

The Dwarves get one unit that moves faster than 4 hexes, and that's the Gryphon. The Gryphon Rider unit costs 24 gold, which on your average map is a wallet-busting price depending on how well you're doing at holding off your opponent. However, they move quickly and have a really nice dual-attack damage output. They also have a 50% defense on every terrain type except mountains, on which they have a 60%. AS I said, though; actually BUYING one of these is more of a hassle than it's worth if you're not well-off. And yet they're so necessary for the first few turns: it's vital to be able to get around the map quickly, and being the only scout unit in the army, trying to play the Dwarves without buying one would be exceedingly difficult. This seems to me to be a counter-intuitive unit system.

On to my next point of frustration: magic. Dwarves are one of two factions that do not have any magic in the game at all. Period. Elves get Shamans, which heal the friendly units adjacent to them, and Humans and Elves share Magi, which have a decent ranged attack that always attacks against %40 defense, no matter what the target's terrain type is. Dwarves and Orcs? Get nothing of the sort. They don't even come close. The one Dwarvenr anged weapon that might be able to compare to it is completely unreliable and only goes off %50 of the time (way less than you need it to).

I suppose I should stop ranting and get to my point here. With these flaws in mind (not just for the Dwarves, I'm not that racist), I intend on tackling BfW's extremely flexible markdown system for creating custom campaigns and creating an Era of my own, one in which the Dwarves don't get pissed on and everything is a bit more evenly spread. I will use this blog as an update hub for any of you who happen to care.

Well, that was a nice rant to break in Ollyblog. Hope it was bearable.

Despite all of this, BfW is a wonderfully well-developed open source game that's absolutely free to download. I definitely suggest it to all of you strategy buffs out there(because you all will find ways to play Dwarves and avoid the bullshit factor), but also anyone who's generally into fantasy. The campaign follows a bit of an interesting storyline, and there's even a full history up somewhere on the Wesnoth wiki.