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Topic: Rework Atlantean Crystal Mine

teppo

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Posted at: 2018-03-30, 21:16

Tibor wrote:

Do we have any productionsites that are sensitive to abundance of inputs, instead the necessity of output?

It at least used to be possible: we have the "unless" rule (for experience of worker) and also "economy needs x".


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teppo

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Posted at: 2018-04-14, 13:22

hessenfarmer wrote:

As it is already complicated enough to improve the AI we should consider if this has any negative effects on AI

AI sometimes builds too much, and tends to have a shortage of wood. If AI gets one additional piece of code saying "if no un-depleted coal mines, set target trunk to zero, else set to forty", I cannot think of any.

In my opinion if you build one or more coalburners you definitly need them cause coal is short anyway. in this case you would clearly build a lot of lumberjacks and forresters. Although I confess that I sometimes built some of them to burn down some logpiles.

Here out opinions differ. If you want to run the burners no matter what, then the easy solution is to put target trunk count to zero. This way, they would work exactly as not (unless economy does not need coal, which was excluded in these premises).

I think widelands should not be to helpful to the player as the need for micromanagement is a big part of the fun for me.

This does not prevent micromanagement, but makes it less profitable.

If I really want to micromanage, I play FreeCIV or something. Micromanagement can be fun in small economies, but becomes a pain if there are lots of buildings (/cities, improvements, military units. etc). In Widelands I mostly like the economy to mind its business without constant supervision, and spend time trying to see future shortages before they become acute.

I want the need to micromanagement go away. Since this change would not prevent you from micromanaging the sites as before, do you still oppose the idea?


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hessenfarmer
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Posted at: 2018-04-14, 18:38

I do not completely oppose the idea. For example I would like the charcoal to be produced to relief the coal mines and the food industry. So in a way that charcoal burners have a higher economy setting like the coal mines. But I don't see the advantage in making them only working if the economy does not need wood. In this case you will have to set the inputs of all wood consumers to zero to get the coal for example to forge some axes for new lumberjacks. That would be more difficult to manage than to activate deactivate charcoal burners as needed. Except for the frisians they are that slow that I can't think of another usage for them as in situations where coal from mines is reallyun reachable or very short or just to burn down logpiles. In the first case you normally prepare for the high demand of logs by building foresters and lumberjacks. In the second case you could easily deactivate some charcoal burners if the logs come to a critical amount.
Regarding the micromanagement I think it is unavoidable to play widelands really succesful. At least the better placed tournament players do a lot of it.
So in short I would love to see charcoal burners working while coal mines have stopped already. But I think we could leave the management of the logs to the player.
From an AI perspective the thing might get complicated as well. The algorithm is basing his decisions what building to build on the need for a special ware. so it will only build lumberjacks and foresters if there is a need for log. So with the suggested change the charcoal kiln wil not work wel for AI as the AI does not tend to produce too much superfluos wood. In my opinion the change would deeply affect the AI chain of neededness to decide which building to build.
Happy to discuss this further.


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Tibor

Joined: 2009-03-23, 23:24
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Posted at: 2018-04-14, 19:31

teppo wrote:

hessenfarmer wrote:

As it is already complicated enough to improve the AI we should consider if this has any negative effects on AI

AI sometimes builds too much, and tends to have a shortage of wood. If AI gets one additional piece of code saying "if no un-depleted coal mines, set target trunk to zero, else set to forty", I cannot think of any.

And if there are no coal mines? The rule would be for all tribes?


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teppo

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Posted at: 2018-04-15, 10:46

hessenfarmer wrote:

But I don't see the advantage in making them only working if the economy does not need wood.

If there is some wood available, trunk transportation to construction sites etc start more or less immediately after those have been created. This causes construction sited complete faster. Those construction are there for a reason, and having the buildings finished and contributing to economy benefits the player in some way.

In this case you will have to set the inputs of all wood consumers to zero

Generally - not. "Economy does not need trunk", in this context, means that there is at least this many unallocated pieces of trunk in the economy. This does not translate to "zero consumers of wood in economy", which would be silly since burner is also a consumer of wood.

Currently, if target is zero and there is unsatisfied demand, this counts as economy needing trunk. There probably could be an exception to this rule: Trunk target zero would then cause the burners to work no matter what. I have not looked how ugly that would be coding-wise.

to get the coal for example to forge some axes for new lumberjacks

Usually, that would not be necessary. Such cases would exist, unless the code would interpret "target count zero" for trunk differently from the other wares.

Tibor wrote:

AI sometimes builds too much, and tends to have a shortage of wood. If AI gets one additional piece of code saying "if no un-depleted coal mines, set target trunk to zero, else set to forty", I cannot think of any.

And if there are no coal mines? The rule would be for all tribes?

"No coal mines" is included in "no un-depleted coal mines". Why would this not be applied to each of the tribes?


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WorldSavior
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Posted at: 2018-04-16, 22:05

GunChleoc wrote:

WorldSavior wrote:

But somewhere it is told that most mines have got a 5% chance to find something when depleted, which is often not the case. And some coders overlooked that "produce ore:n" in .lua will not remove ores from the mountains, only the lines with "mine ore" do that (afaik. only on per "mine".). So: Additional ores can be extracted from the mountains, so the game is unnecessarily illogical, so it's a bug.

We have to keep "mine" and "produce" separate, because of the granite/marble/crystal mines.

That is probably no problem. I don't see anyway a way to keep that not separate. I guess fixing the bug just requires additional lines with "mine" with the attribute that they never stop the program. (percentage not 5% or 10% but 100%)

Only problem which I see there: I don't know what would happen then with deeper mines if resources in the mountain get very low, shortly before the main vein is exhausted. But why shouldn't the mines be all right in this situation?

If we change the ratio to be always 1:1, we will have to do a complete rebalancing, which has the potential of making things worse rather than better.

Really?

Does it matter that it's "illogical" as long as it's balanced? I think not.

But maybe it is not balanced because of the bug: If barbarians get twice as much gold than atlanteans, they have a big advantage in collectors, don't they? Empire is in between with deep gold mines, and their surface mines are normal.

At the other hand, the empire can extract a different amount of iron than other tribes. And the amounts of extractable coal are different between atlanteans and others.

In addition, empire and barbarians get punished for using their efficient surface mines, as they are wasting resources in the mountain, in comparison to deeper mines. That's not good, because atlanteans seem to be slightly stronger already (in autocrat - my argument is not so good for peaceful collectors where barbarians are better : / ).

And how do we interpret the 5%? According to my intuition, the measuring rod should be in relation to what the mine would get if it wasn't depleted.

Yes, you should get 5% of the amount which would get in this case (or 10%, depending on the mine). Not 2 or 1 %...

The question is, where is the real bug - do we want to completely rewrite the code, or is it just a help text issue? People don't generally have a good intuition about percentages, so the impression that you get very little is fine enough for me at the moment.

Completely rewriting the code would be probably not be that hard, would it? If the bug with the extra resources gets fixed, one can also fix the depleted-mines-bug at the same time...

The problem is that while barbarians get very little resources with depleted mines, empire and atlanteans get very very very little resources face-wink.png

GunChleoc wrote:

What happens though if you really need coal, but have e.g. a bunch of construction sites open? And your sawmills will also want logs, and your toolmaker, and your smokeries, so the economy will have need even with target set to 0. I think it might be easier to micromanage the inputs of the charcoal burners, with the logic staying as it is. Feel free to convince me otherwise though face-smile.png

I don't see any input micromanaging which would help after build18 face-wink.png

You can still set the input fo buildings for any ware you like, that hasn't changed. I was NOT talking about the economy settings here. The economy setting was removed on purpose to fix another bug.

Do you still know which one? I'm interested in that stuff...

teppo wrote:

GunChleoc wrote:

What happens though if you really need coal, but have e.g. a bunch of construction sites open? And your sawmills will also want logs, and your toolmaker, and your smokeries, so the economy will have need even with target set to 0.

In the situation described above, I would most likely lose the game regardless of what the coal burners do.

Why? Don't let them consume wood and everything looks normal.

And in vast majority cases, I would shut the burners down to let the important construction sites to finish and boot the economy to a sensible state. It is possible to imagine a corner case where the one piece of coal from the burner in a desperate wood shortage makes the day, but those cases are rare.

If coal burners would consume surpluses always, they would somewhat reduce the food consumption of coal mines and thus indirectly allow more iron/gold/etc to be produced. When there is a construction boom, they would stop working and thus let the wood to flow to construction sites. Bottom line is that in this way the burners would benefit their society regardless of the amount of wood in stock. Of course there are corner cases when another way is more efficient, but that is not a showstopper (micromanaging helps in desperate cases).

I'm also for reintroducing economy settings of trunks and similar wares...

GunChleoc wrote:

That sounds like it might work. I'd like to hear opinions from others on this before we go ahead though.

Economy settings of trunks are different to economy settings which we currently have (Currently: If stock bigger than settings, stop producing. Trunks: If stock bigger than settings, consume trunks everywhere). We had a discussion about that before somewhere (minimal and maximal economy settings)...

hessenfarmer wrote:

As far as I know no we don't.
As it is already complicated enough to improve the AI we should consider if this has any negative effects on AI In my opinion if you build one or more coalburners you definitly need them cause coal is short anyway. in this case you would clearly build a lot of lumberjacks and forresters. Although I confess that I sometimes built some of them to burn down some logpiles.

Coalburners are usually inefficient...

I think widelands should not be to helpful to the player as the need for micromanagement is a big part of the fun for me.

At the other hand, one shouldn't be confronted with a lot of boring tasks (for example increasing economy settings of one ware to a very high number), so I like it often if Widelands is helpful face-wink.png


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GunChleoc
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Posted at: 2018-04-17, 05:03

Completely rewriting the code would be probably not be that hard, would it?

Well, go ahead and do it yourself then face-wink.png

Just kidding, but unless you have actually worked in this section of the code before, there is no way you can tell if it's hard or not. Those production programs are complicated, and believe it or not, I've mostly stayed away from them so far because of that.

You can still set the input fo buildings for any ware you like, that hasn't changed. I was NOT talking about the economy settings here. The economy setting was removed on purpose to fix another bug.

Do you still know which one? I'm interested in that stuff...

I don't remember right now, but unless we already changed it for Build 19, it should be somewhere in this list: https://bugs.launchpad.net/widelands/+bugs?field.searchtext=&orderby=-importance&field.status%3Alist=FIXCOMMITTED&assignee_option=any&field.assignee=&field.bug_reporter=&field.bug_commenter=&field.subscriber=&field.structural_subscriber=&field.tag=&field.tags_combinator=ANY&field.has_cve.used=&field.omit_dupes.used=&field.omit_dupes=on&field.affects_me.used=&field.has_patch.used=&field.has_branches.used=&field.has_branches=on&field.has_no_branches.used=&field.has_no_branches=on&field.has_blueprints.used=&field.has_blueprints=on&field.has_no_blueprints.used=&field.has_no_blueprints=on&search=Search

Edited: 2018-04-17, 05:06

Busy indexing nil values

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WorldSavior
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Posted at: 2018-04-17, 16:38

GunChleoc wrote:

Completely rewriting the code would be probably not be that hard, would it?

Well, go ahead and do it yourself then face-wink.png

Maybe I should do that indeed. Or is anyone highly motivated to do it? I guess not.

I'd just have to think about how to fix another bug: Some mines consume much faster if they are depleted.

Just kidding, but unless you have actually worked in this section of the code before, there is no way you can tell if it's hard or not. Those production programs are complicated, and believe it or not, I've mostly stayed away from them so far because of that.

I did some tribe modding some weeks ago, so I've got some experience with lua files.

You can still set the input fo buildings for any ware you like, that hasn't changed. I was NOT talking about the economy settings here. The economy setting was removed on purpose to fix another bug.

Do you still know which one? I'm interested in that stuff...

I don't remember right now, but unless we already changed it for Build 19, it should be somewhere in this list: https://bugs.launchpad.net/widelands/+bugs?field.searchtext=&orderby=-importance&field.status%3Alist=FIXCOMMITTED&assignee_option=any&field.assignee=&field.bug_reporter=&field.bug_commenter=&field.subscriber=&field.structural_subscriber=&field.tag=&field.tags_combinator=ANY&field.has_cve.used=&field.omit_dupes.used=&field.omit_dupes=on&field.affects_me.used=&field.has_patch.used=&field.has_branches.used=&field.has_branches=on&field.has_no_branches.used=&field.has_no_branches=on&field.has_blueprints.used=&field.has_blueprints=on&field.has_no_blueprints.used=&field.has_no_blueprints=on&search=Search

Thanks. Build19 is already a version without economy settings of trunks, while build18 still has them.


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GunChleoc
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Posted at: 2018-04-18, 07:47

You'll have to search for "Fix released" bugs then - it also explains why I don't remember, because it's ancient history now. They don't show up in normal searches, so you'll need the advanced search https://bugs.launchpad.net/widelands/+bugs?advanced=1

I did some tribe modding some weeks ago, so I've got some experience with lua files.

If you'd like digging into this yourself, that would be good. I'm not a balancing expert - I mostly do UI. I can create a branch for you if you post a diff.


Busy indexing nil values

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WorldSavior
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Posted at: 2018-04-18, 14:38

GunChleoc wrote:

You'll have to search for "Fix released" bugs then - it also explains why I don't remember, because it's ancient history now. They don't show up in normal searches, so you'll need the advanced search https://bugs.launchpad.net/widelands/+bugs?advanced=1

I did some tribe modding some weeks ago, so I've got some experience with lua files.

If you'd like digging into this yourself, that would be good. I'm not a balancing expert - I mostly do UI. I can create a branch for you if you post a diff.

Thx


Wanted to save the world, then I got widetracked

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