Wesnoth as the basis for a grand strategy game for many players?

[woross]

Hello lads,

I've been thinking how to turn Wesnoth into a correspondence grand strategy game for many players. The basic concept would be that there would be a larger map composed of many provinces and each province could be controlled by only one player. With the Wesnoth game turned off, players would by some other means decide which provinces to expand into or attack, perhaps once a day or once a week. Before the next big turn, in the case that players decide to attack the same province or a player attacks another, the conflicting 2+ players would turn Wesnoth on and battle out the individual battles. The winner of the given battle would receive the given province. This would drag on for weeks with a lot of small battles before someone achieves some predetermined goal on the big map.

Before we dive deeper into this, did anyone make this before? Or did anyone here at least consider this before?

The main issue I came across was persistence - how to make things carry over between battles in a balanced way and how to make the big map affect the individual battles? Obviously, this would make the game's multiplayer battles very much different from the usual battles that are independent of each other.

First of all, gold. My first idea was some form of a gold carry over (people would have one pool of gold across all battles? That'd lead to people to prolong games to hoard gold. Could figure out a way to prevent that), but maybe that would be pretty brutal and lead to steamrolls. Or perhaps not, perhaps it could be very interesting, people might choose to spend a lot of gold on one front and then have to cope with having a lack of money somewhere else. Another idea was that each province that you control on the big map would give you a slight income boost in battles, perhaps 1 or 2 gold per province, or give you a bonus of a few dozen to your starting gold.

Then, how about units? The simplest idea that I had that requires no mods or external software would be to have heroes that we'd simply symbolically draw onto the big map. In your starting province on the big map, you'd start with one leader of your faction of a given type and to expand into another province, you'd start the battle for that province with that leader. If you wanted to expand on multiple fronts, perhaps you could hire new leaders from your capital. If there'd be a big pool of gold, it could simply be a fixed cost (spend 75 gold for a nice new Elvish Druid to start another front), or it could simply be upkeep that'd reduce money from your starting income bonus determined by your province count (you have 5 provinces but 2 leaders, so you only get the bonus for 3 provinces... The numbers could be whatever works). We could make things interesting by having the leaders die - if the given leader dies in battle, his blip on the map disappears and he's gone. Since that would quickly reduce nations to nothing, we could also give the leaders the ability to retreat - for example, if the currently fought over province borders one of your provinces to the south, you could run south with your leader and resign the game to save your leader.

Obviously, with mods or external software, you could do lots of things, like implementing unit recalling from campaigns or preserving the actual hero and his current XP, things like that. But I'm a big fan of the approaches that work with just the base game.

What are your thoughts on my ideas and what are your own ideas?

[lhybrideur]

You could also have different "native" factions/units in a province so that you could recruit a new unit type/ unit types from a new faction when you conquer a new province

[beetlenaut]

This sounds like the game of Risk with scenarios deciding the outcome of battles instead of dice. I don't see why this couldn't be done completely in Wesnoth. The world map would just be a scenario that is returned to after any battle scenario. I imagine that only the leaders would be on the world maps, and they could move to an adjacent to a province to invade, or move to the capital to perform special actions. I know that there have been UMCs that operate in a similar way, and it doesn't sound hard to code. The hardest parts would be creating all the maps and playtesting to make it balanced.

Ideas along these lines have come up on the forums before, but they usually don't go anywhere. That's why you are not getting much feedback at this point. If you want this plan to succeed, you will have to make a working prototype. That's probably the only way to get interest, feedback, and playtesters.