When comparing Warzone 2100 vs Nethack, the Slant community recommends Warzone 2100 for most people. In the question“What are the best open-source games?” Warzone 2100 is ranked 12th while Nethack is ranked 29th. The most important reason people chose Warzone 2100 is:
Although it can be confusing to get the tech you want at times, Warzone has a complete tech tree that ranges from vertical take-off and landing crafts to laser guns and missile launching cyborgs, and includes four hundred different techs and upgrades.
Specs
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Pros
Pro Big tech tree
Although it can be confusing to get the tech you want at times, Warzone has a complete tech tree that ranges from vertical take-off and landing crafts to laser guns and missile launching cyborgs, and includes four hundred different techs and upgrades.
Pro Custom unit assembling
The game permits you to research vehicle tech under three main forms, weapons, chassis, and locomotion. The player must then assemble their own design, from the tech they have discovered. This permits a wide range of customizability in units.
Pro Big game scale
Although there is a limit to a number of units, Warzone permits pretty massive armies.
Pro Open source
It's free so you can't lose anything if you don't like it and anyone can help in the development by taking the sources of the game.
Pro Potential for enormous skill growth
Nethack is a game that you can play for hundreds of hours and still not master. But you'll have tons of fun attempting to master it.
Pro Depth
The gameplay is very deep due to the amount of skills and systems present in the game.
Pro Over two decades of constant development
Nethack was first released in 1987. The latest version, 3.6.0, came out in December 2015.
Pro ASCII and tiles available
Nethack is able to run on simple ASCII graphics or use graphic tiles instead.
Cons
Con Units stay stuck everywhere
It's like there is sticky glue on everything, units just hit things and stay stuck. This creates bottlenecks in armies, and often impedes on army mobility and reliability.
Con Must micromanage, despite the fact commanders should avoid that
On the other hand, they do avoid a lot of micromanagement if the land is easy enough.
Con Burden of knowledge
There's simply too much information that the game expects you to know before you can properly take advantage of the systems in the game.
Con Feature creep
NetHack has an overwhelming amount of features mostly because the development team found them cool at the time, but with little thought of their greater impact. For example, a Nethack staple is Sokoban as a built-in minigame, which feels out of place in a dungeon crawler.
The extremely large amount of items and abilities break the game's balance and coherence.
Con Outdated controls
You need to study a wiki just to learn the most basic controls. The game is broken in this regard.
Con ASCII Art
Con Run of the mill story
The story of the game is pretty generic fantasy fare. It features orcs, elves, and trolls in an effort for the hero to save the world. While it does not detract from the gameplay, it does seem very familiar to those interested in the genre.