Battle for Wesnoth 1.6 Release Notes

March 22, 2009. Once again it's time for that epoch-making event, a Wesnoth stable release. The Battle for Wesnoth team is proud to release version 1.6 of The Battle for Wesnoth, a Free, turn-based strategy game with a fantasy theme and roleplaying elements. The game is available for download now for Windows, Mac OS X and various GNU/Linux distributions.

What's New in Wesnoth 1.6

We have many new features for your enjoyment this time around, including a new mainline campaign, two new multiplayer scenarios and another refresh of the user interface.

For Players

Campaigns

There is a new mainline campaign, The Legend of Wesmere, with new gameplay features including (in one scenario) the ability to use the game AI as your commander for an allied side, setting its objectives as you like. Search for this hidden feature by right-clicking on your allied commanders during scenario 7. This campaign was imported from the Wesnoth-UMC-Dev project, where it spent a few months being adapted for mainline.

Almost all mainline campaigns now use a different method of carrying over gold from scenario to scenario: the amount of gold retained is now 40% instead of 80%, but it is added to the minimum starting gold of the next scenario instead of only replacing it if higher.

Many mainline campaigns have improved storyline prose and new cutscenes or epilogs. Several have improved and redrawn campaign maps. All now have dates in the Wesnoth history timeline, and almost all have journey animations on their campaign maps. The history and geography of Wesnoth have been developed in more depth and detail: More campaigns now include references to events in the overall history, adding depth and richness to the narration.

Multiplayer

The multiplayer server can now be logged onto using the username and password of a Wesnoth forum account. However, registration is not required and one can continue to use an unregistered username.

The multiplayer lobby has been improved to allow easier management of the friends and ignores list by double-clicking on the player list.

Notable changes to default era balancing include:

Increased the cost of the Goblin Spearman from 8 to 9.

Increased the movement of the Goblin Spearman line from 4 to 5.

Increased the melee attack of the Goblin Spearman from 4-3 to 6-3.

Added the traits weak, slow and dim and made goblins each receive one of them instead of two standard traits.

Added the marksman special to the ranged attack of the Orcish Assassin line.

Increased the cost of the Walking Corpse from 7 to 8.

Decreased the cost of the Bowman from 15 to 14.

Decreased the melee attack of the Bowman from 6-2 to 4-2.

General

The game graphics have been improved with a whole new range of unit portraits. Many more units have full animations and team coloring.

There is a new basic terrain type, coastal reef, which gives most land-based units slightly higher defense than in regular shallow water, and 70% defense to most water-based units such as mermen and nagas. Forests get more variety with graphics for spring/summer, fall and winter deciduous forest terrains. There are new village graphics for human cities and primitive tribal areas.

Our composers have added five new original background tracks: Heroes' Rite, Siege of Laurelmor, Suspense, The Dangerous Symphony and The Deep Path. Also, the game now plays special music clips for victory and defeat events.

The game interface has continued to evolve, especially in making more dramatic use of portraits. Unit recall dialogs now display useful information about your veterans' traits. Add-ons now display their category when you browse them on the download server.

New game translations include Arabic, Croatian, Friulian, Latvian, Macedonian and Marathi. Existing translations have been extensively updated and revised.

For Content Developers

The map editor was much improved (thank you, Google Summer of Code). It can be started from within the game now. You can toggle overlay displays of terrain codes and map coordinates while editing. The editor can handle multiple maps in a session, and you can take screenshots of full maps. There's also a new interactive editing tool for animated journey tracks.

There are some new core units available everywhere: Troll Shaman, Royal Warrior and Dread Bat.

Less visible changes include improvements in the game AI, including a new formula-based AI that allows more flexible setting of objectives and an improved pathfinding algorithm. As usual, WML has grown more powerful with many new tags and attributes to extend the range of what campaign authors can do. The GUI engine is under heavy development; these changes will allow the entire GUI to be configured from WML. The first steps have been made, but the project is not finished yet and will continue in the 1.7 development cycle.

The support for writing Python AIs has been removed because the feature opened a serious security hole. However, we hope to build an even more powerful AI-scripting feature, possibly using a different and safer extension language, in 1.7.

Download

Battle for Wesnoth is made available under the GNU General Public License (GPL). Source code is available from wesnoth.org where you will also find instructions for building from source on a range of different operating systems. Ready-to-go packages are also available for most popular operating systems, including Linux and Windows and Mac OS X.

You can get up to date information about downloads at the downloads page.

If you downloaded previous versions of the game, you might be interested in downloading the xdelta files only.

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