Widelands (91.4Mb)
Widelands is a slow-paced real-time strategy game aiming for game play similar to Settlers II by BlueByte from which the developers of Widelands have borrowed loads of ideas. In this game, you start out on a small piece of land with nothing more than a few of useful resources. Using those, you can build yourself an empire with many thousands of inhabitants. On your way towards this goal, you will have to build up an economic infrastructure, explore the lands around you and face enemies who are trying to rule the world just like you do. The game runs on several operating systems such as Linux, BSD, Mac OS X and Windows. Widelands is still a work in progress game, with development still required in graphics and bug fixing (some bugs have yet to be fixed, but the game is very playable).
Widelands has single-player, network and internet multiplayer modes, single player campaign missions and an internationalisation system with translations for Czech, German, English, Finnish, French, Galician, Hebrew, Hungarian, Polish, Russian, Spanish, Slovak, Swedish and Dutch.[2] Players may select one of three different tribes. Widelands provides two tutorial missions. Advanced players can create their own maps with the included map editor and it is also possible to import and play original Settlers II maps.
The following is a short review from Strategy Informer:
In Widelands, you are the regent of a small tribe. You start out with nothing but your headquarters, a kind of castle in which all your resources are stored. In the course of the game, you will build an ever growing settlement. Every member of your tribe will do his or her part to produce more resources - wood, food, iron, gold and more - to further this growth. But you are not alone in the world, and you will meet other tribes sooner or later. Some of them may be friendly and trade with you. However, if you want to rule the world, you will have to train soldiers and fight.Widelands offers a unique style of play. For example, a system of roads plays the central role of your economy: all the goods that are harvested and processed by the tribe must be transported from one building to the next. This is done by carriers, and those carriers always walk along the roads. It is your job to lay out the roads as efficiently as possible.
Another refreshing aspect of the game is the way you command your tribe. There is no need to tell every single one of your subjects what to do - that would be impossible, because there can be thousands of them! Instead, all you've got to do is order them to build a building somewhere, and the builders will come.Similarly, whenever you want to attack an enemy, just place an order to attack one of their barracks, and your soldiers will march to fight. You're really a ruler: You delegate in times of war and in times of peace!
Widelands offers single-player mode with different campaigns; the campaigns all tell the story of a tribe and it's struggle in the Widelands universe! However, settling really starts when you unite with friends over the Internet or LAN to build up new empires together - or to crush each other in the dusts of war. Widelands also offers an Artificial Intelligent to challenge.In the end, Widelands will be extensible, so that you can create your own type of tribe with their own sets of buildings. You can create new worlds to play in, and you could even create new types of worlds (who says you can't build a settlement on the moon?).
Reference accessed HERE January 2011
Video:
You can see a few You tube videos of Widelands HERE ( Military Game play Pt 1), HERE (Military Game play Pt 2) and HERE (The Sinking of Atlantis)
The following two images are from an earlier build (build 14). The latest build is v15, but v16 is already in development. One of the videos gives a sneak preview (The Sinking of Atlantis) of build 16
Download:
You can download Widelands HERE. Windows
Once you’ve downloaded the setup file named ‘Widelands-buildXX-win32.exe’ from the above link, double-click it and follow the instructions. Afterwards simply start Widelands by clicking on one of the generated icons (desktop, start menu, ...). there are versions for windows, MacOSX and Linux. The windows version requires Microsoft Visual C++ 2008 Redistributable Package (x86).
