Battle for Wesnoth

I didn't play it much here but wanted to upvote it here to show support for the community who've put so much blood, sweat, and tears into this game.

This is the best free to play game you can ever play which is also completely free, and I am not saying "considering it's free, it's kinda good", I am saying "it is good on top of being free without any strings attached". It is a phenomenal community driven project that truly does get better with time, not worse or outdated, quite the opposite. (Trust me, I may have only 100 hours on Steam, but I have probably around 800 through offline launcher). That being said... BfW has two absolutely grating issues that get only worse over time. Let's get that out of the way: It's the XCOM accuracy syndrome. My archlich boi gets to attack five times, his attacks are magic therefore there's always 70 percent chance to hit per attack no matter what, but he forgot his bone glasses back at the lair and he only lands one while a scrawny puny hummie mace wielder with two attacks with a 40 percent chance each lands both and thus ends my reign of mishaps. For one thing, chances to hit or miss increases respectively. It's a hidden math you can find online where if you expect to hit once, you are basically guaranteed to get it with five attacks, but if you need to land three, you better save scum. Same goes for getting smashed - if one hit would be dangerous, don't go in there. Approximate calculations become almost impossible once there are enough units on the battlefield since you usually always have less resources, units and maneuverability and you never know where the RNG hits during the enemy turn, so you basically simulate the best scenario and hope for it, or save scum. It's also a fact that when RNG poops on me I tend to notice, but it happens to enemies as well, it's just that grating to experience in any game. That leads me to the second issue - it gets so incredibly tedious after a while. Even if you speed up the animations, there is so, so much clicking involved, moving pieces, calculations, necessary reloads. The most epic campaigns are also the ones I get intense headaches from, because there was so much units on the board that even my gpu took notice (which is saying a lot given the absolute lightweight structure of the game). But, remember - I have several hundreds hours, if not more, on it. I am pretty much burnt out, and even then I want to see what's new from time to time, because the game does keep getting better - sprites are polished up, portraits get redone, campaigns are balanced and expanded, overall narrative is getting tighter and more in tune with the gameplay. New features get added, and it is absolutely free, like this is an open source game, from what I know, you can support, you can participate, you can do you own thing, because there is a robust editor included, you can even edit the campaigns, make your own, download community-made campaigns or play mp (I did not try that yet). It's fun to be discovering new unit types, upgrade lines, new spells and attacks. Some skirmishes become a stuff of legends (or nightmare fuel). Someone complained about the campaigns being basically the issue of "odds are always stacked against you". Naw, I beg to differ: I have played all the campaigns (except for the newest one), some of them multiple times, and I can safely say: - Most of the times there is native terrain available (even cave dungeons tend to have that for elves, look for mushrooms), but sometimes it's available around your home base (meaning you have a nice defensive position), sometimes all around the map (a lot of dwarven missions, frankly) and sometimes you are, for narrative reasons, later pushed out of your comfort zone (elves tend to pursuit their enemies relentlessly, they sometimes even comment that fact). - Being perpetually low on gold says two things: You overspend or don't push for early turn end, usually both - having more than 0 zero gold and finishing earlier usually gives bonus gold. - Remember the hidden math of accuracy, or resign yourself to save scumming. - If you are constantly being outgunned, you lack veteran units. - If you constantly being outnumbered (more than usual, keke), you invest too much in a few veterans. - Sometimes, lowering the difficulty is the answer. All in all, it's a great game and a testament to the fact that we can create good, passion-driven, gameplay-first games without sacrificing stability and longevity of the project, because as you can see this game has been around for more than twenty years, lol, I haven't played the earliest iterations, but even from where I have begun there have been huge leaps on all fronts.