Topic: Few suggestions

Hello,

First, I'd like to say that Widelands is a great game - it is like Settlers 2 but with more features and variety ... and finally, with the ability to colonize other islands it gives even more fun :) I played all the available campaign scenarios and one map 192x192 with AI and a bit of seafaring (with build-18 (release)).

So, after those games, I have noticed that some improvements should make the game nicer to play:

• Once, when I finished building a port, next to the enemy border, the port has been attacked by soldiers and destroyed. I wonder that if it is possible to attack the port, it should be also possible to garrison soldiers in it, like in military buildings. I think that adding a garrison tab to the harbour (and HQ) would work perfectly, because it would be possible to control how many soldiers should defend it (so leave in building even if they could go to some military building) and what strength they should have (weak vs strong). Unfortunately, I had no occasion to check if player can attack ports, because it looks like AI does not use ports and ships yet but it should be, as mine was...
• Regarding attacking ports, I think that it would be a nice idea to be able to attack the fully occupied island (maybe by performing an attack on port building). I would however limit this ability to conquering the port areas, not disembarking soldiers at any location.
• I played on a map where it was possible to get to most of the locations by land as well as sea. While I had a lot of ships, I noticed however that goods were transported from one side of map to another via roads (that took ages) instead of ships, even though ships could take it much faster. Also, while I had a lot of ships (around 20), it looked that they were sailing half-empty between some ports, while others were served only sporadically... I have lost a lot of land because no ship wanted to transport soldiers to the built military buildings on an island, even though I had spare soldiers. I think that the transporting system should be somehow rebalanced.
  • maybe it should prefer ships if the land route is much longer? I can imagine that this problem could be tricky, because there may be no ships available to transfer the goods so the land route could be faster in some cases.
  • maybe it should be possible to assign a ship to transport goods between specific ports only - sea routes (most of my ships were sailing between few ports, while others were almost not served)?
  • it would also useful to have lake transport on rafts like in setters/settlers 2
• I have noticed also that some ships were never unloading some of transported goods (a bug?). I was checking them from time to time and it looked that while some of the goods were unloaded, other goods weren't, and the list of them was pretty the same, so I do not think they were unloaded on any port. I could imagine that maybe there is some bug related to transporting goods that are no longer needed, or maybe the final target harbour was always being changed to other which were closer - I am just guessing here...
• An another thing I have noticed was that I had a building with missing one stone, and while, later there was a lot of stone available in nearby store or there was a quarry nearby, the stone was not being delivered for a very long time. I am guessing here that either this stone was ordered from the other part of island (and it was being transported through half of the map), or it was loaded on a ship, and this ship was travelling somewhere else. I am guessing an option two, because I have seen a few cases where ships were delivering some goods and people with a huge delay (like a 30 - 60 mins of game-play).
• Finally, it would be lovely to see other images of soldiers with different levels. All settlers had it I know that in Widelands it will be more tricky because of various levels of trainings (evasion, attack, defence), but then at least it would be nice to see a different weapon and armour style
• With continuation of above, it would be nice to see the animations of working buildings like blacksmith etc

Anyway, the game is great and I am looking forward to seeing the next release

Thanks!

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Hey Tibor,

Thanks for a quick reply. I gave a look on dev version and it has quite a few changes, however I will have to start game again because old saves does not work. I'll try it tomorrow after work and tell about observations.

Thanks!

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any of the isssues you raise are already considered things to work on. let's see in detail

• defending ports: if there are soldiers in the port, they defend it automatically, like if they were garrisoned.

• attacking from ships: there are ideas to do that in the future, but it would take a lot of coding. maybe in build 20.

• ship transport is inefficient, there are plans to try to improve the algorithm.

• ships not unloading wares is because they are bringing it somewhere else. sometimes they load some ware for port X and for port Y, they go to port Y, there they load wares to port Z and go to port Z, and stuff sent to port X is still in ship and will take forever before the ship actually arrives in X. That's one of the things we are trying to improve.

• the missng stone is also explained by that thing with ship. If the missing stone is in a ship, you have to wait for it. in your case, you could have removed the stone from the building (using the building windows) and then asked for another stone, so it would have sent it from the nearest warehouse. I don't know if I was clear, i can't explain it better.

• some people are working on new graphics all the time. i have no idea if they also working on different soldiers.

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Garrisons in ports: There were indeed some plans (https://blueprints.launchpad.net/widelands/+spec/garrison-on-headquartes, https://code.launchpad.net/~widelands-dev/widelands/storages_garrisons/+merge/178704), but the last comment was made one year ago.

Ports act like headquarters: They are attackable. When soldiers are inside, they defend the building. The planned change is an interface which allows the player to set the minimum garrison - similar to military sites.

Assigning soldiers to an expedition could be an option, but remember that these troops will not be reinforced/replaced when soldiers have died.

"Only few people know how much one has to know in order to know how little one knows." - Werner Heisenberg

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Yes, there is lots of things to do and lots are done. From my point of view: we need build 19 Then we can start about thinking about new ideas. Lots of work was done to seafaring + AI (I am interested in it the most). If you will have some time- try dev builds. They should be stable enough to play

einstein13
calculations & maps packages: http://wuatek.no-ip.org/~rak/widelands/
backup website files: http://kartezjusz.ddns.net/upload/widelands/

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