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Topic: Couple of suggestions

WorldSavior
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Posted at: 2017-12-04, 18:07

Speter wrote:

Speter wrote: 4) Allow attacking with the best (and healthiest) troops - this was mentioned in another post I read.

WorldSavior wrote: What about implementing the possibility to choose exactly which soldiers attack?

I can see that it could be a real problem if all your "good" soldiers charge off to attack and the enemy chooses that moment to attack your building with few (crappy or unheathy) soldiers. face-wink.png

Yes, for example.

Choosing the soldiers who take part in an attack would be good, though time consuming!

Yes. I don't know any good solution for that yet.

By the way, if you click on an attackable building, your own buildings become sorted somehow: If you let only one soldier attack, he will be from building #1, the next one also and so on. Maybe it would be helpful if one could influence this sorting (or is it already possible? I don't know. Is here anyone who would like to explain how the buildings become sorted?).

. On a related topic, it would be nice to be able to send particular soldiers off to train up.

Yes, it could be very helpful if there wouldn't only be the modes "prefer heroes" and "prefer rookies" but also a mode "do not exchange soldiers". Maybe by implementing the stop button at military buildings or something like this?

Speter wrote: At present, how narrow does a 'river' have to be before ships can't navigate it? 3 tiles? So long as the bridges (or whatever) can only be that width they would not block ships...

WorldSavior wrote: The minimal broadness for ship movement is not 3 but 2.

I'd love to see bridges! So long as the player must already have a road to both sides of the water.

One could argue that water triangles which are next to standart land triangles are shallow water. So shallow that one can build a road there. I mean, even if there is no road, workers can walk through that water. So make small bridges sense at all?

In addition, having shallow water (like kaputtnik suggested) available in the map editor would be great. That would allow the map designer to choose to make a bit of water non-navigable to ships but allow a player to build a road along it.

One question would be is shallow water like land - that is you can simply build a "road" across it; or like a "bridge" where the player must already be able to build a road to both sides before they can build a bridge.

I've already constructed shallow water just with the normal editor: https://wl.widelands.org/maps/resource-moon/

But it has got some disadvantages. In this water are land triangles (well, it can also be an advantage, as you can clearly see that this water is shallow, otherwise this could be difficult to figure out). And it's not really logic that this shallow water can be much better for fishing than normal water face-grin.png

Tinker wrote:

It would also be nice if you could cancel an attack order. I have lost track of the number of times I have been checking what attack strength I have against enemy building only to click attack by mistake before my wounded guys are healed.

Yes, it could probably be good. I think in general I like most of the suggestions which would increase the cleverness of the tribes. This is one of those suggestions. But maybe it's possible to find some big disadvantages?

GunChleoc wrote:

We would think hard on allowing to cancel attacks, because it would have a big impact on strategy.

Yes. First of all notice that it is already possible to cancel attacks, but one has to enhance/dismantle/destroy the buildings of the attackers, and of course this is different to a case where you don't have to loose your territory control...

If one could cancel attacks, one could annoy the opponents a lot with attacks which are canceled right before the fights begin. Or one could attack a building so soldiers will leave buildings and then one can make a second attack on the buildings which are almost empty, and one can cancel the first attack or something like this...

But I don't know if this are arguments which are strong enough.

teppo wrote:

Speter wrote:

I can see that it could be a real problem if all your "good" soldiers charge off to attack and the enemy chooses that moment to attack your building with few (crappy or unheathy) soldiers. ;)

Sometimes, when one military sites is attacked, the soldiers of others rush too eagerly to help. This can lead to one single untrained poor guy to guard the other post. Enemy can take advantage of that.

In my opinion, the sites should send a smaller fraction of their force to the field, and keep more people indoors.

But it can also be an advantage if all soldiers swarm out.

I think it's a bigger problem that heavily wounded soldiers swarm out to help, they should better stay inside. I mean, if they would be attackers, they would try to retreat...

GunChleoc wrote:

And then the enemy can take advantage of that you're not fully defending the first attacked site and take that one instead. Evenly distributing the soldiers to attacked sites would be better,or having the return to their home site if it is attacked - but that can also be exploited by the enemy who then sends 1 rookie to each of your other sites to draw off your soldiers.

Somehow all three cases have their advantages and their disadvantages. I wonder if it would be better if one could control the soldiers more directly like in other strategie games...


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WorldSavior
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Posted at: 2017-12-17, 16:09

I'd also like to suggest some stuff:

I suggest to replace "soldiers conquer building" by "building becomes destroyed". First of all, this would help the AI to play less pathetic, and it would also be good for the players. In most cases one avoids the conquering anyway as a defender, and it can be very annoying if one forgets to do it....

And now some suggestions for better ware transport:

If carrier and carrier animal idle at the same time , the carrier could wait at one of the flags and the animal at the other flag. This could make the transport of many wares 50% faster.

It could be good if one could forbid carrier animals to go to some streets, and also to request them

If there are several warehouses which prefer a ware X and which have got the same amount of the ware X in stock, the wares X shouldn't go all to one warehouse (which is the case right now), but they should be distributed to all of these warehouses, maybe by random.

Sometimes it can be annoying if there exist several routes which are of the same value, but the wares uses all the same route.


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GunChleoc
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Posted at: 2017-12-18, 10:38

WorldSavior wrote:

I'd also like to suggest some stuff:

I suggest to replace "soldiers conquer building" by "building becomes destroyed". First of all, this would help the AI to play less pathetic, and it would also be good for the players. In most cases one avoids the conquering anyway as a defender, and it can be very annoying if one forgets to do it....

I guess you have a point for multiplayer, but for single player it will then take a lot longer to mop up the AI when you know you've already won and have to wait additional time until you have constructed extra buildings and the soldiers have arrived - I find this already a bit boring as it is. This can become annoying in scenarios too.

IMO it would be better to forbid dismantling buildings that are under attack.

And now some suggestions for better ware transport:

If carrier and carrier animal idle at the same time , the carrier could wait at one of the flags and the animal at the other flag. This could make the transport of many wares 50% faster.

Because a flag can have up to 6 roads attached to it, you would then have 6 carriers waiting on top of each other. That would look really ugly.

It could be good if one could forbid carrier animals to go to some streets, and also to request them

This has been discussed before: https://bugs.launchpad.net/widelands/+bug/1451973

If there are several warehouses which prefer a ware X and which have got the same amount of the ware X in stock, the wares X shouldn't go all to one warehouse (which is the case right now), but they should be distributed to all of these warehouses, maybe by random.

I think at the moment, the closest warehouse is preferred, unless you select "preferably store this ware here" in multiple warehouses - wares should be distributed evenly then. Can you try if that works as expected? Because it would be better not to change things then, because storing in the nearest warehouse is more efficient unless you really need the wares somewhere else.

Sometimes it can be annoying if there exist several routes which are of the same value, but the wares uses all the same route.

Those would need some pathfinder tweaks I guess - maybe a random selection if 2 paths of equal length have been found. I'm not familiar with the path finding code though.


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teppo

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Posted at: 2017-12-18, 18:55

GunChleoc wrote:

IMO it would be better to forbid dismantling buildings that are under attack.

That would be easy to do. Would you prevent burning them down, too? EDIT: And upgrading?

Edited: 2017-12-18, 19:01

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GunChleoc
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Posted at: 2017-12-19, 10:28

Yes, I'd prevent burning them down too.

I think enhancing might be OK, because it means that the defending player will have to invest some resources for it. This can certainly be discussed though.


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hessenfarmer
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Posted at: 2017-12-19, 10:46

How is being under attack defined for a building


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GunChleoc
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Posted at: 2017-12-19, 11:00

I don't know, would have to look at the code. The messages get triggered by vision range or something, so this probably isn't implemented at all yet.

The information is there though for the enemy player and gets created once you hit the attack button.


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WorldSavior
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Posted at: 2017-12-19, 15:06

GunChleoc wrote:

WorldSavior wrote:

I'd also like to suggest some stuff:

I suggest to replace "soldiers conquer building" by "building becomes destroyed". First of all, this would help the AI to play less pathetic, and it would also be good for the players. In most cases one avoids the conquering anyway as a defender, and it can be very annoying if one forgets to do it....

I guess you have a point for multiplayer, but for single player it will then take a lot longer to mop up the AI when you know you've already won and have to wait additional time until you have constructed extra buildings and the soldiers have arrived - I find this already a bit boring as it is.

But letting conquer everything is nothing which an experienced player would do, so the matches against the AI are very far from reality. Can't you increase the speed of the match?

This can become annoying in scenarios too.

In every scenario except for trident of fire and hessenfarmer's scenarios, you can play at super high speed anyway face-wink.png

IMO it would be better to forbid dismantling buildings that are under attack.

I think that it's really necessary for a good Widelands that there are no restrictions at dismantling/destroying/enhancing buildings.

And now some suggestions for better ware transport:

If carrier and carrier animal idle at the same time , the carrier could wait at one of the flags and the animal at the other flag. This could make the transport of many wares 50% faster.

Because a flag can have up to 6 roads attached to it, you would then have 6 carriers waiting on top of each other. That would look really ugly.

Wouldn't they stand exactly at the same point, so you can see only one animal and one carrier? Right now, the carriers are standing in the animals anyway. And unlimited hordes of humans and animals can walk through each other anyway...

I think the graphical argument is not so important if the non-graphical aspect becomes improved face-wink.png

It could be good if one could forbid carrier animals to go to some streets, and also to request them

This has been discussed before: https://bugs.launchpad.net/widelands/+bug/1451973

Okay...

If there are several warehouses which prefer a ware X and which have got the same amount of the ware X in stock, the wares X shouldn't go all to one warehouse (which is the case right now), but they should be distributed to all of these warehouses, maybe by random.

I think at the moment, the closest warehouse is preferred,

True

unless you select "preferably store this ware here" in multiple warehouses - wares should be distributed evenly then.

Then the wares go always to the warehouse with the lowest stock number instead of beeing evenly distributed. And if you have a big number of warehouses which are like this - let's say they have zero stock - not the closest warehouses are preferred, but exactly one, as I said. Possibly the oldest, which is a suboptimal solution...

Can you try if that works as expected?

I did it now (see above)

Because it would be better not to change things then, because storing in the nearest warehouse is more efficient unless you really need the wares somewhere else.

I didn't talk about warehouses which are not preferring any wares...

Sometimes it can be annoying if there exist several routes which are of the same value, but the wares uses all the same route.

Those would need some pathfinder tweaks I guess - maybe a random selection if 2 paths of equal length have been found. I'm not familiar with the path finding code though.

Okay...


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GunChleoc
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Posted at: 2017-12-19, 19:44

Then the wares go always to the warehouse with the lowest stock number instead of beeing evenly distributed. And if you have a big number of warehouses which are like this - let's say they have zero stock - not the closest warehouses are preferred, but exactly one, as I said. Possibly the oldest, which is a suboptimal solution

Well, that is exactly the definition of evenly distributed - try to have the same stock in all warehouses. Of course, 0 wares is an edge case - maybe we should go with random selection when stocks are even.

At the moment, there is no memory of which wares got transported where in the past, so current stock levels is all that an algorithm can have has access to..


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teppo

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Posted at: 2017-12-20, 06:38

WorldSavior wrote:

IMO it would be better to forbid dismantling buildings that are under attack.

I think that it's really necessary for a good Widelands that there are no restrictions at dismantling/destroying/enhancing buildings.

Why? This is a honest question.

Another possibility, which requires somewhat more coding, would be not to prevent the player from dismantling, but to keep the site an active (=conquerable) military site until the construction worker has arrived on site and started working.

This would show up as a delay between requesting a dismantle/upgrade, and the actual threat going away. This does not work with burning things. A different kind of delay would be needed there.


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