The Battle for Wesnoth team is proud to release version 1.2 of The Battle for Wesnoth, a Free, turn-based strategy game with a fantasy theme.
The single player mode has a new tutorial, and 3 new campaigns: Two Brothers, The South Guard, and Under the Burning Suns. The first one was intentionally designed to be easy for beginning players. The last one is set in an environment quite different from that of the typical Wesnoth campaign, and includes a few changes to game rules. The existing campaigns include new scenarios, dialogue, items, and optional bonus victory objectives. Replay of saved games has been improved considerably, allowing one to show single turns at a time, navigate through the replay, and toggle fog-of-war at will.
Battle for Wesnoth
Multiplayer has new features, making the internet or LAN mode a more pleasant experience. It allows setting a per-turn time limit, sending private messages to allies, and banning unwelcome users by IP address. The multiplayer lobby interface now displays detailed information about existing games. A few new multiplayer maps were also added.
Other changes in game content include new units, new terrain types, and further balancing of unit stats and abilities. We have added progress bars to major loading points in the game. We have also added some great new music, and a host of new sound effects. There have also been some rearrangements and improvements to the in-game help.
One major change is that we have undertaken a heavy revision of our sprite imagery; affecting almost all units except the drakes, mermen, and naga, intended to bring most of the units into consistent style and correct size. A result of this is that units (which we've revised) that belong to different teams, now show their team color on clothes and banners. We have also completely replaced the icons representing the attacks of units. There are a few new portraits and story pictures, some major improvements to terrain graphics (especially the new mountains, cave, castles/encampments, swamp, canyons, and tropical forests, not to mention a few others).
Battle for Wesnoth
Developers and Modders can enjoy new WML (Wesnoth markup language) features, including custom abilities, unit stat modification, more detailed events, and the ability to script a custom AI in Python. Additionally, we have added basic code support for the animation of walking, swimming, dying, and other special actions; in doing so we've done a major cleanup of the WML that describes said animations, making it much more consistent.
Battle for Wesnoth now supports right-to-left languages. There are new Polish and Norwegian translations, and many other incomplete ones. In total, there are 35 translations being worked on; please join us to help finish the incomplete translations for future releases.
Version 1.2 includes a gameplay feedback mechanism. Players can allow the program to send anonymous statistics of their performance in single-player campaigns to our server - this gives campaign authors the information they need to balance the difficulty of their campaigns.
