Last week's thread.

This week's Free Software Application of the Week is Widelands - wait, what? I thought you were going to review DragonFire!

Well, I was. But I encountered some difficulties. First of all, I've been really busy this past week, so I had about 1/3 of the time I usually do to work on the Free Software Application of the Week. Secondly, when I went to install Dragonfire, it had some dependency problems, and the only way to fix those (at least on my Debian machine) were to uninstall LMMS and Blender. I decided that I'd better spin up a fresh Ubuntu install. So, I got out the 10-year old PC that I use whenever I need to do a fresh install of an OS for the Free Software Application of the Week, and installed the 32-bit version of Ubuntu on it (32 bit because that's how old the processor is). Then, after installing it, and moving the entire PC next to my router so I could install the drivers for the wireless card, I went to install Dragonfire on it, only to learn that they only released a 64-bit build. That was 10 minutes ago, at the time of writing this. Seeing as I only had a couple of hours left until the promised deadline of this review elapsed, and I had already delayed it by 2 days, I decided to try to compile and test it next week, and review something that I already have tried out. So, /u/josefStallman, I'm very sorry for not reviewing what you nominated - but I'll try to do it next week.

Anyways, this week's review is for Widelands, a free game that's very similar to the game Settlers 2. This is a real-time strategy game where the focus is on economics, instead of straight-up warfare. I should warn you; if you start to play this game in your free time, you won't have any free time anymore, because it is really addicting.

The game revolves around creating buildings, most of which produce a certain type of good. For example, a lumberjack's hut produces logs, and a quarry produces granite. There are also buildings that convert one type of good into another, like a sawmill, which converts logs into wood planks. But, to build certain buildings, you must have the right type of goods. So, you start out with a few simple goods, which you can use to build simple buildings, which produce slightly more advanced goods, which you can use to build slightly more advanced buildings, which produce even more advanced goods, and so on. Before you know it, you'll have an entire chain of production set up.

The end goal of the game varies. There's the normal goal of completely destroying all of the other players' buildings, but that's not the only win scenario. If you want, you can play a game mode where the winner is the player with the highest number of certain goods in their warehouses at the end of four hours, or where the winner is the player who has conquered the most territory at the end of four hours, or where the winner is the player who finds the most artifacts. There are lots of singleplayer campaigns, too; a lot of which will teach you how to play.

This is probably one of my favourite FOSS games. The gameplay is quite slow, but it's slow in a good way. It's more about building than destroying, and it feels really good when you get a huge economy going, since you spent hours of work starting it up from almost nothing. This game can provide you with hours upon hours of fun, since each game lasts for a few hours, and there's so much to build up during those hours that you'll probably never get bored. If you enjoy playing other resource management or financial games, then you need to try this one out.

I do have one criticism of the game, though, and that is of the combat system. Although the game is mostly focused on building up an economy, it is possible to go into combat against other players. In order to expand the territory you control, you have to build a military base at the edge of your border. Once your soldiers occupy the base, your borders will expand. To conquer enemy territory, you have to occupy one of their bases, and before you do that, you have to defeat all the enemy soliders inside that base. But the combat is mostly luck-based. One soldier can only fight one other soldier at a time. One soldier attacks the other, and it has a certain chance of missing. Then, the other soldier attacks back, again with a certain chance of missing. Often, these battles will be decided just by rolls of the dice. There are certain upgrades you can give to your soldiers, by training them or equipping them with certain weapons, but these don't seem to help very much, unless you max out the stats. There have been a few times where I've sent an army out to conquer an enemy base, and my soldiers were better trained in each stat by one or two points than the enemy soldiers, but I still lost the battle because RNGesus favored the enemy. Another problem is that it's a huge pain in the ass to move soldiers from one base to another. The game wasn't really designed for combat, and it shows. For the most part, I stick to game modes like collectors, where combat isn't needed to win the game, so it's not that much of an issue, but I hope it's something that's improved in future versions.

But besides that, it's a really fun game to play. It's a pleasure to figure out the best way to use the natural resources around you to build up the economy more efficiently, or to think over the best places to put your buildings, or to tweak certain aspects of production to make the entire operation go more smoothly. Not to mention, the sprite art is pretty good, and the music is nice, too.

Basically, if your dream job is managing a planned economy, then you should pick this game up right away.

And that's it for this week's Free Software Application of the Week. Join me next Monday, where I'll be reviewing DragonFire (hopefully!). Also, I figured I should tell you how the Free Software Application of the Week is going to work from now on. You guys decided that you wanted me to choose it myself, instead of voting for it, so that's what I'm going to do. But, I'm still open to recommendations. If there's something you'd like me to review, then you can recommend it to me, and I might review it sometime in the future, if it's something that looks interesting to me. Otherwise, I'll be choosing applications that I've used extensively, until I run out of those (which won't happen for several months), and then I'll choose based on things that are submitted here, your recommendations, or just whatever the fuck I want.