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Topic: making scouts more reliable

kaputtnik
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Joined: 2013-02-18, 20:48
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Posted at: 2017-01-15, 12:16

teppo wrote:

Is there a bug report on this issue?

Can't find any and i don't remember one. Could you make one?


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Tibor

Joined: 2009-03-23, 23:24
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Posted at: 2017-01-15, 20:07

If you look in init.lua for scouts, there is the line:

vision_range = 2,

Have anybody tried to mess with this?


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GunChleoc
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Joined: 2013-10-07, 15:56
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Posted at: 2017-01-17, 13:54

That is where the increased vision range would be implemented. We need to do this for all 3 tribes. Since it's a radius, let's try with 3 and see how it will play out. I'd like to see some player testing on this one to check which value we need.

The files to edit are data/tribes/workers/<tribe_name>/scout/init.lua

https://bugs.launchpad.net/widelands/+bug/1656664

Edited: 2017-01-17, 19:16

Busy indexing nil values

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betterthanyou710
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Joined: 2017-01-12, 01:07
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Posted at: 2017-01-17, 21:07

I think a good idea would be to manually send a scout somewhere. If you could persay set it up so there were 8 arrows going in cardinal directions, then you could click that one and the scout would roughly go in that direction and persay the scout would go in a square, start from the hut, go in the direction wanted, get to a max limit and then turn around and covering a little more ground, not going straight back.


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teppo

Joined: 2012-01-30, 09:42
Posts: 423
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Posted at: 2017-01-18, 18:23

betterthanyou710 wrote:

I think a good idea would be to manually send a scout somewhere.

There are many cases where micromanaging various workers would be nice.

Sometimes, I would like to target the woodcutter/stonecutter to make a narrow corridor to some place, and clear just enough space for a new military building, for example. On the other hand, this (woodcutter thing) would make the defence with foresters trick less effective. Also the ideas behind many old maps would suffer.

Should the game develop to that direction? This is a question of taste.


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king_of_nowhere
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Joined: 2014-09-15, 18:35
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Posted at: 2017-01-18, 18:57

teppo wrote:

Sometimes, I would like to target the woodcutter/stonecutter to make a narrow corridor to some place, and clear just enough space for a new military building, for example. On the other hand, this (woodcutter thing) would make the defence with foresters trick less effective. Also the ideas behind many old maps would suffer.

Should the game develop to that direction? This is a question of taste.

I believe we should be careful to consider the potential impact on defence/attack strategies of all those kinds of changes. for example, improving scouts lowers the defensive value of a castle in a place where towers cannot be built. in this case it is a bad thing that the chance of attacking such a castle is entirely dependent upon luck and standing there to look and hope, so improving the scouts this way is good. Still, I was careful, when making my proposal, to let the castle retain a good defensive value by negating sight. we want scouts to be more reliable, not totally reliable.

We must judge all such changes on a case-by-case basis, with emphasis on the impact on defensive strategy. As I said many timees over, this games offers very little advantage to a defender, and removing what little is there brings instability.


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teppo

Joined: 2012-01-30, 09:42
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Posted at: 2017-01-18, 19:58

king_of_nowhere wrote:

We must judge all such changes on a case-by-case basis, with emphasis on the impact on defensive strategy.

I agree with all you said. The scouts are currently too lousy, I think. What I have in mind is to make the scout occasionally revisit previously-found military site locations, and stay in the vicinity for a while once found.


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GunChleoc
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Posted at: 2017-01-19, 19:38

Staying in the vicinity for a bit is a good idea, to prevent the blink-and-you-missed-it factor.

Edited: 2017-01-21, 14:49

Busy indexing nil values

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teppo

Joined: 2012-01-30, 09:42
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Posted at: 2018-01-28, 08:48

GunChleoc wrote:

Staying in the vicinity for a bit is a good idea, to prevent the blink-and-you-missed-it factor.

Latest trunk now has that, BZR8568 onward.

The scout behavior is changed for sites that are within a radius of 15. The conquer radius of the largest military sites is 12. There are some maps with rough terrain. In those maps even red spots are sparse. There could be one where a player can place a castle so that the opponent cannot build the scout close-enough; I have not found any yet, though. Please give feedback.

Slightly changing topic.

In my opinion, the scouts could stop needing foodstuff to do his job. If this was done, would the scout already be too powerful?


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Ex-Member
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Joined: 2014-09-12, 10:53
Posts: 184
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Posted at: 2018-01-28, 10:47

Rather than removing their need for rations I would rather see all primary producers needing food, perhaps one work cycle without food then one with , so full production needs half a ration per ware and if rations are short then they work at 50% efficiency. To facilitate the increased need of food fish migration into empty hexes or advanced fishers who have boats and can fish in deeper water would be needed. Also hunters would get more meat from larger animals, it is silly that a rabbit gives as much meat as a ox, this would need code changes to expose the animal type to pass to lua scripts.


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