Wyrmsun Review

There was this one game in my youth that I loved playing, back in my better days, when I didn't have back pain, carpal tunnel, erectile dysfunction, and gum disease. It was called Lego Battles on the Nintendo DS. The game was an RTS (Real Time Strategy) that focused on building infrastructure, resource collection, and throwing waves at your enemies.

Shit was a banger. I played it so much, my DS broke from my lack of carefulness. Anyway, I found a similar game with the same systems called Wyrmsun.

In Wyrmsun, you start as a tribe, along with a selection of not-so-useful bonus buffs; Such as +1 accuracy, +1 damage for melees, or for archers. Your task is to eliminate enemy tribes through any means necessary. At the start, however, it can be difficult to create an army, so investing in your research can be a good thing. But do acknowledge that knowledge by itself can't protect you when you get attacked, so reaching a perfect balance is optimal. Eventually you can branch out into different factions, unlocking an artstyle change with other things.

In Lego Battles, at the start, you could mix and find synergies through different era troops, along with probably doing the same thing; I don't really remember Lego Battles all too well. I'm just gonna assume it's like the same, I like it, but not enough to put it on a emulator.

I recommend Wyrmsun, but keep it mind, it is somewhat of an uncomplete game, play it anyway, maybe you might make a good mod for it, as it's creator intended. As of now, 2025, there are only seven mods for Wyrmsun on steam, one mod is by the creator. For context, Wyrmsun was released in 2015. I'm shocked how unpopular it is. I can think of a big factor on why: It's cause there aren't hot women in this game.

There wasn't a good tutorial for humans, goblins, or dwarvens. It was very hard to learn the basics and finding what's meta. It took a while to know before I knew what to do. And even then, it was unfortunately very easy to break the balance in the game through a mechanic called "Heroes".

In Wyrmsun, through Heroes, you can make a special unit in the main menu and give him his own history, and eventually recruit him with gold in the town hall. As per usual, they're all male. This hero can level up and has his own gear and inventory. Even upon death, he can be bought again, no drawbacks, lest you can't afford him.

One very important mechanic I learned too late was leveling the hero to promote him from chief to lord. Promotion increases his damage, health, accuracy, and probably movement. The drawback is that the hero will be more expensive.

I had assumed that the only way to get cooler units was through editing the hero text files, and for a while, it was a pretty cool solution. I got to have knight lords, creatures, and flying griffins as special units. And with a max of four of these units, the world basically became mine, well as long as I didn't get overwhelmed, since they weren't OP.

I was also under the impression that higher leveled heroes were good, cause there's an achievement for it, and the hero gets even more health, some damage, slightly more accuracy, along with useful abilities. Except, higher levels are more like a hinderance and not worth investing in. You could edit the hero file and not do the level grinding too. The max level you should stay at is level 7 if you want to keep the price low and have abilities.

Higher levels can get into some nasty prices, for example, 50k copper for a level 100. This very steep price will dictate your future, whenever you win or lose. And sometimes you can be unlucky, spawning with one copper mine, which only has 50k gold stored in it. It's not enough. There's a much better solution to buffing your hero, albeit unconventionally.

This method is called spamming "upgrade-elixir-of-strength" in ConsumedElixirs for as long as you want, in the hero text file. For whatever reason, there is no limit to having mulitiples. Yet in the game, you can only consume one of each elixirs. This is probably the most broken thing I've come across. As you can have an archer running around the world, doing 2k damage to buildings, of course one-shotting even stone buildings, all for a most generous price of probably 2k or 5k copper, since the archer is probably level 1.

Although heroes have an item-bound inventory, good gear is very hard to come by through the markets, an unfun and bad mechanic by the way, I think legendary gear takes like an hour to come by and they're costly. And most gear you come across in the market aren't worth it. There should at least be more pages. It leaves much to be desired. But what is worth your time is armour that gives you prefix swiftness and suffix speed, whatever it is. It's so good, you won't even need horses, you become the cavalry.

So having infinite "upgrade-elixir-of-strength"s and full legendary gear with prefixes and suffixes with speed gives you a "siege-weapon", goliath, modern tank in the shape of a peasant farmer, incredible, isn't it? But that's not all. You can have planes as well, or more like modern "unit_dwarven_gryphon_rider"s, that can fly around quickly and bomb your enemies. You can be very creative when it comes to this sort of thing. Just ignore that OP stuff limits creativity.

It would've been nice to have some hero presets, I'm not amazingly creative.

Hero traits are not very useful, except "upgrade-keen", it increases your sight by 1, and that's better than the rest of the bad traits.

Right here, I'll add like a few of my hero scripts that I had made, but before you decide cheating through these means, try to experience the base game first. It can be very fast, especially playing on the brutal difficulty.

Late game sucks, case in point, it's slow, monotonous, and even more resource hungry. Especially if you're doing some of the quests, or torturing yourself with "conquering" the entire map of Europe. This is kinda my trauma talking, normal custom games aren't that terrible I suppose. But because of the lack of quality of life features, it becomes arduous to take settlements. To the point where there should be a way to delete settlements or at least have a delay. Builders are needed to construct a town hall, but it can take very long for them to travel and then build the damn thing.

This is where my first mistake comes into play, as I decide to try and pursue a different win in a quest. And because the only win condition is a domination victory, I had tried conquering Europe, and that was when I attacked my neighbours. Unfortunately for me, they are bots, are resilient, and all of their units act on their own. So after conquering a settlement and moving on to take more land, a hiding enemy builder would come up and singlehandedly rebuild the settlement. It would create this never ending feedback loop that never reveals any of their units, settlements, or buildings. Keep in mind that the entire map of europe has at least 60 settlements all around, most are vacant, some have good mines.

I didn't consider it at first but eventually I had to cheat and remove the fog of war (fow off), the downside to that is not being able to see movement on the map, double edge sword. And somehow it can only get worse, sometimes the enemy leaders can be pretty smart enough to disembark with builders and settle in an island. It doesn't sound that bad, until you realize boats are very slow and aren't cheap to build. And they only hold up to four units. It's so hard to attack an island if you play fair, it's the worst thing ever to experience.

If I were to do this quest all over again, I would have three archers going around the map, missiling anything they see, while I have fog off.

Custom games are special, they can be balanced, and likely have nothing to do with water, an issue on it's own. On some maps, you can unknowningly be cut off from your enemies forever from the start, with no way to fight each other. On others, it's alright. If you have a big army, it's likely that they'll be defeated in detail when you fight in the cacophony of trees. Defeat in detail means being isolated and picked off from your group. It's an annoying issue too.

It's likely you won't have to face it, if you only have one OP unit though haha.

Naming systems aren't beginner friendly. Maybe they're historically accurate, but it's confusing. Like as a newbie, how would you know the difference between an Erala and Bura? Eventually you'll learn what both are, and when you advance into the next age, the naming changes, but it's not ideal.

Another very inconvenient way to determine what class they are is through their portrait. If you're new, you won't be able to tell what classes any of them are. And this is for all the races, it is difficult to tell what any are at a glance, lest you've played for a while. [Insert picture of all the classes as an example]

Building roads and walls is impossible for a human to do. Not only are they slightly expensive, but you can only build one at a time, and get this, it takes like 10 seconds or longer for them to complete the road. And you obtain the ability to build roads through advancing and becoming another faction. I don't even think the road walking speed bonus exists. It's not even worth putting effort into.

I've never touched walls either, but they're more expensive and it's the same issue. I bet it's really cool to use cause I always come across the issue of being flanked randomly in my town while my main force is out fighting.

I hate that there isn't a map zoom, nor is there a way to full screen the map to see what's going on. My eyes aren't the greatest and I dislike having to move closer at my tiny monitor to see what's going on on the map. And on some quests, the map is stupidly huge. It's literally 144p. [showcase tiny map here]

Feels like this game should've been released in the 90s with it's aesthetics.

Why do the dwarves and goblins have no useful starter tribes? And they can't be Christian?

Maybe it's just inexperience, but I don't know how to make the goblin tribes work.

The navy in Wyrmsun is devastatingly underpowered and not worth using, to my knowledge.

Siege weapons are better in terms of usability, but aren't satisfying to use, nor are they worth it.

When fights are fast, that's when the game is satisfying. Though lately, when playing on Brutal difficulty, I've found myself annoyed at how boring the opponents are. It's tiny wave after wave of enemies, it doesn't sound like a problem, but when they keep coming, it's so easy to lose the main force. Especially with the slow ass heals. L priest. GG no heals.

I had felt like I was fighting an endless horde.

If you wait too long, your enemies start fortifying like hell. Having catapult towers anywhere they can, it's worse with the mod "No building sites", they literally spam these towers everywhere. It's even annoying with OP heroes, which says something. Don't let your enemies get strong.

Flying units are very annoying to deal with, that is if you went with OP melee heroes. Big mistake.

For a game released in 2015, you would think it would have more than just a lan server for multiplayer. I ain't gonna use a VPN for this game.

It is not explained how you get different heroes or unique weaponry?

There is no documentation or list on all things. It isn't transparent.

As a final rating, I would say: 5/10 stars. It's okay. It's cool for an open source project, but there's nobody here cause there's no multiplayer, community, mods, or hot babes.