When comparing Battle for Wesnoth vs Minetest, the Slant community recommends Battle for Wesnoth for most people. In the question“What are the best open-source games?” Battle for Wesnoth is ranked 1st while Minetest is ranked 13th. The most important reason people chose Battle for Wesnoth is:
Easily one of the most beautiful FOSS TBS games around.
Specs
Ranked in these QuestionsQuestion Ranking
Pros
Pro Great graphics
Easily one of the most beautiful FOSS TBS games around.
Pro Endless replayability
A large assortment of maps, classes, units and campaigns. Community addons available ingame for download, as well as a random map generator.
Pro The strategy for individual campaigns really forces you to think through available strengths and weaknesses, especially given the hex-based terrain
Pro Well established
BfW has been around since 2003 and is a firm favourite within the FOSS community.
Pro Active development
BfW gets updated frequently.
Pro Multilingual
Dozens of languages available to choose from.
Pro Single-player and multi-player
Battle it out against the game's advanced bots or go the online/hotseat route.
Pro Unique play style
The unique combination of LoC, hex-based map, terrain defence and movement, and map type, with damage types and resistances varying between units, gives a refreshingly unique play style.
Pro Immersing storyline
BfW comes with an entire lore which adds depth and variety to the playing experience.
Pro Even portable
Has a portable version
Pro Hotseat mode
Great to play with friends
Pro Consistent storyline
Pro Easily customization through LUA mods
An easy to use lua API, and a large variety of existing modifications and games that can be downloaded and installed easily.
Pro Open Source
Pro Runs fast and clean
Runs on Low-End Hardware, runs Fast, Spartan on Memory.
Pro Cross platform
Can be played on Android, Linux, Windows, and macOS.
Pro Fewer griefers than Minecraft
The smaller community means fewer players, and that mean fewer griefers than on Minecraft.
Pro Built for plugins from the beginning
Pro It's Free
Pro Fun and thorough tutorial
There is a tutorial game that you can download that teaches you how to play Minetest in a fun and intuitive way. There are even collectable gems you can try to find in the tutorial.
Cons
Con Dated and boring game mechanics
Over simplistic and repetitive.
Con Doesn't explain game mechanics well
Battle mechanics, job changes when leveling up, and traits/skills are not explained outright. However, there is in-game help which you can refer to.
Con No simultaneous multiplayer mode
This limits player counts, map sizes and a really simultaneous mode is the only truly acceptable mode for a modern turn-based multiplayer game. Should have been part of the game years ago. Maybe the engine is not suitable for it.
Con Non well documented Add-ons
I'm currently stuck on 'The Chosen Glade' stage of the Rebirth in Nature add-on, with a lot of essence(s) and souls to convert to points for upgrades; should I find the way out of there for Aucrin of course.
Con Takes too much CPU/RAM resources
Too much does not mean you can't run it with a decen computer, but still, it's way too heavy for the result. Hint: using maps of vectors of strings is a bad idea.
Con Micro management
Con Lack of mobs
Yet mobs can be installed through mods or subgames. However, if the server is not optimized, these can make the game run slower.
Con Not much to do even with mods
All I do in the game is dig underground and mine the ore within the caves. There are no monsters to fight, dungeons to explore, or any leveling systems/progression mechanics to keep me playing.
Con No weather
There's no built-in weather. However, there are mods which add this feature and extend it far beyond what you might expect from basic weather.
Con Rips off Minecraft
And not very well either.
Con Certain graphics are really bad
Parts of the games's graphics and functionality are really bad. Mob mods or default mobs look like a 4 year old drew them. However, the devs seem to be slowly sweeping through these issues. Come back soon if you don't like what you see yet.
Con Server lags
Almost everything is done server side, so the game can feel very janky on some servers.
Con Minecraft mod ecosystem separate from Minetest
Minetest is obviously an opensource implementation of Minecraft but the only problem is all the mods made for Minecraft do not work in Minetest. They could have designed their clone in such a way say fix it at 1.7.10 forge so that you could load up forge mods straight up and have them work somewhat. There's so much great content for Minecraft that is completely lost and unusable in Minetest, however at this pace of developement, maybe that will change in the future.