Topic: "Northmen" Tribe Page

Although I didn't have any time to play the new revision, I started testing the frisians as soon as Nordfriese had the first revision ready. However I think I need to give my five cents to the discussion about balancing and how to play Widelands.

First of all I have to admit that I grew up with the settlers series of bluevbyte and still love this kind of game best over all others. I really enjoyed the Anno series as well and had also fun with e.g. C&C. But the less dominant part of the military in the settlers series always gave me a lot of fun. Of course there are still a lot of reasons to play a settlers like (but better) strategy game with focus on the economy so here is my collection:

1. There are more than a few players who just like the nice worlds that can be created. They like watching the small but neat little people running around the map, performing their tasks ans so on. Sometimes I do this as well just zooming in as far as possible to watch for example the inn serving a meal, or the smith forging an axe. To satisfy this motivation you need a lot of variety in tribes, buildings, workers, economy options, maps and so on. In this kind of getting fun out of widelands Nordfriese did an outstanding work which we shopuld really appreciate, as this would certainly make Widelands more interesting for new players. (At least they could spend more time in learning a different economy with a lot mor complexity and dependencies included).

2. After having learned a tribe a player needs more challenges. Furthermore a lot of people (me included) enjoy beeing part of a story that is told and created or influenced by the player at the same time. That is where different maps and especially scenarios come in. As I said I love this normally best in playing a game like widelands I clearly can say that Widelands lacks campaigns and scenarios (therfore I started working on this) but doesn't lack any maps, cause a lot of people (most prominently perhaps King_of_nowhere) have created maps at all difficulty levels. The frisians deliver two new scenarios and the beginning of a cool storyline of a tribe searching a new home. Another thing that should be more than appreciated to deliver value to the game.

3. As settlers never had a good multiplayer a lot of the original settlers community is content with the above motiviations and the resulting ways to play widelands. But as widelands has a good and working multiplayer picking up the challenge to play against another player there comes the third motivation: mastering the game better than others. Although I personally had this motivation I understand fully the fun in this kind of playing widelands as well. (perhaps I will take part in the next tournament just out of curiosity).

So these are the basic motivations to play the game in my opinion. They all have their own temptations and they all deliver fun to the player. So I won't rate any of them over the others. although I have my personal favourites. Now this gives us some challenges in game development (additionally to lack of time, lack of developers, lack of reviewers, lack of nearly everything).

a. to satisfy number one we need good graphics, sounds and animations. Although some people are working on this all of the tribes still lack from one or the other. For this someone can't appreciate high enough all the work that Nordfriese has put in his tribe to make them look as well nice as unique and authentically frisian. In my opinion you can't spent so much energy without a lot of dedication to your project. I mean he really spent his heartblood in creating this tribe. But again so far well done and nearly comparable to the other tribes.

b. The fun in the number 2 way is strongly dependent from the difficulty in playing against the AI or the map. As the AI is still not very good (although I think with the new inventions by Tibor we are on the right way) You could either increase difficulty by creating more difficult maps (as did king_of_nowwhere), creating more demanding scenarios (as I try to do) or creating tribes with more complex economies (as Nordfriese did). The only thing to care about for this creations is that the map, scenario or tribe gives the player the chance to win against the (still poor AI) under the challenges that were created by the designer of the map, scenario or the tribe. ( it would be interesting somehow to comnbine for example frisians with King_of_nowwheres maps to even multiply difficulty) . so balancing for Number 2 Gameplay is rather easy. ( basically test - adjust - test again and so on)

c. Totally different story for number 3. Although some tribes might be easier or more suitable on some maps than others, they need to be fairly balanced against each other in their chances to win a tournament game in every win condition foreseen by widelands. That balancing is rather difficult the more different the tribes are. So as we could use more variety to satisfy number 1 and 2 it makes our lifes more difficult for number 3. For example if we balance the frisians fairly good against the other 3 tribes to support for multiplayer they'll probably loose some of their difficulty in a single player map.

So from my side this is the current dilemma we are in at the moment. In this case for me the only meaningful longterm solution is improving the AI as much as we can to make singleplayer and multiplayer games more comparable but this would be still hard work, and we could probably use a lot of the valuable experience of World_Savior in this as well as the theory from Tibor and many others. However for the shortterm perhaps we need to take a decision between optimnizing the tribe to be a real challenge in singleplayer or the tribe beeing a challenging choice but not without the chance to win against any other tribe in multiplayer. So here is my proposal:

We should try to incorporate as many changes that World_Savior and other multiplayer focused testers are proposing with Nordfriese still being satisfied of the difficulty of the tribe in singleplayer. I will try to help evaluating the tribe in singleplayer as well. However we should aim to have the tribe in r20 as it increases the variety of widelands in the sense of 1 and 2 a lot. As improving the AI should be a major goal for the future I assume the tribes as well as the scenarios and the maps have to be constantly adapted and rebalanced with an improving AI. This could lead to a better balancing for multiplayer as well. Perhaps we could mark the frisians as disadvantaged in multiplayer and maybe this could be a new challenge for World_Savior as well - playing with an disadvanteged tribe.

Sorry for the long text but I just wanted to make the point that discussions about the right way to play widelands are more the less fruitless. We should rather focus on getting the best experience for all users and all motivations to play widelands, as this would increase probably the community and this could lead to motivate on person or the other to contribute as well.

Best regards and many thanks to all contributors hessenfarmer.

Top

Quote

I wanted to write some thing in this post also, but i am happy i did this not yet, because i couldn't had it written better than hessenfarmer

Thanks for you post!!

Fight simulator for Widelands:
https://wide-fighter.netlify.app/

Top

Quote

First of all, a big thank you to hessenfarmer for this excellent description&analysis of the ways and motivations to play Widelands, and thanks for the praise

I uploaded another revision with fixes for three bugs in the 1st scenario and several graphical glitches (farm, reindeer farm, small armour smithy, soldier).
The default target quantity of clay is set to 30.
Barley now grows significantly slower than before (the farm is slowed down accordingly), but as one field now yields two sheaths of barley, this is equal to a small speedup. Larger graphics for barley fields will follow. They can easily be increased in diameter and still fit on a small plot.

Tinker wrote:

If Nordfriese alters Frisians to much to accommodate the wishes of one player I will undo them on my own game.

hessenfarmer wrote:

We should try to incorporate as many changes that World_Savior and other multiplayer focused testers are proposing with Nordfriese still being satisfied of the difficulty of the tribe in singleplayer.

Perhaps we could mark the frisians as disadvantaged in multiplayer and maybe this could be a new challenge for World_Savior as well - playing with an disadvanteged tribe.

It seems to me there is consensus that a not-so-small disadvantage for frisians in multiplayer is not necessarily a bad thing, provided they still have a not-too-bad chance against the AI in singleplayer.
When I play a singleplayer game with frisians against up to 7 teamed-up AIs, I nearly always win. Especially on the occasions when I use a strategy focusing on fast training. This is true both on large and small maps (didn´t test it on king_of_nowhere´s challenge maps, because I don´t often play such challenges). Ergo, the tribe has (in singleplayer) no need whatsoever of the proposed reductions in time and cost for swords and fur garments.

(@WorldSavior: If your large armour smithies are too slow, why don´t you just build one or two more? That´s what I do, and it never seems like a problem to me )

In my opinion, the tribe should remain as it now is, no further balancing needed…

Top

Quote

That's why I suggested that stuff with the starting conditions. It can bring more variety. A starting condition between headquarter and hardcore could maybe replace the demand for a challenge tribe? And every tribe could be played as a challenge tribe.

A starting condition can give you a hard start, which can turn any tribe into a challenge on small maps. On a large map however, the starting condition becomes insignificant soon. The 'characteristics' of a truly challenging tribe include slower, less efficient buildings, and this is something that cannot be influenced by the starting condition. It could make gameplay harder by for example taking away every third sword that is produced, but that wouldn´t be a challenge, just plain annoying.
So how do you intend to turn a not-disadvantaged and well-balanced tribe into a challenge on big maps by changing only a starting condition?

(@WorldSavior: If your large armour smithies are too slow, why don´t you just build one or two more? That´s what I do, and it never seems like a problem to me )

I'm doing that already. But it's annoying that frisians need two or three times more smithies than other tribes. The fact that this also valid for other types of buildings is a reason for the fact that frisians are weaker than other tribes.

I never found this annoying, it just means you need a bit more space, more building materials, and a very good infrastructure. Playtesting, I never found frisians significantly weaker than other tribes (in terms of how easily I swept through the AI as frisians and as some other tribe)…

Not to mention that the whole point of a "challenge tribe" is that they perform worse than the "classical" tribes, so it takes extra cleverness and skill to win with the challenge tribe against the classicals.

What about simply splitting the tribe up into two tribes? One where you can completely live out all of your wishes without caring about any other persons (it could be named "Northern Frisians" for example) and one which is balanced. Then someone could implement next to "random tribe choice" a "random tribe choice except for Northern Frisians", tag Northern Frisians as challenge tribe and everyone is happy, right? Maybe here could be a consensus?

If I just wanted to "completely live out all of my wishes without caring about any other persons" I´d have scripted a tribe for myself and kept it on my computer without ever uploading, mentioning or showing it to the community. That would have saved me a lot of time discussing whether a tribe is unbalanced if the tower´s healing rate is 70/s too high, and whether frisian fortresses are cheaper than atlantean castles, and whether a tribe that is called challenging should be more challenging than others.

And I do have the impression that there just might be several players here who wouldn´t exactly mind if the Frisians were not significantly improved further, whereas you are the only one so far who still wants great improvements…

Why not instead tag the Frisians as a challenge tribe, and add "any random tribe", "random challenge tribe" and "random non-challenge tribe" to the tribe selection menu? If you want to play a better balanced = less challenging version of the Frisians, you could modify your local copy of them…

Top

Quote

Nordfriese wrote:

It seems to me there is consensus that a not-so-small disadvantage for frisians in multiplayer is not necessarily a bad thing, provided they still have a not-too-bad chance against the AI in singleplayer.

That is not what I meant. Ideally every tribe should be rather balanced to each other tribe in terms of final effectiveness in producing military power. However the complexity and strategy in reaching this final effectiveness might and should be very different. So the challenge should result from complexity of the economy, dependency of production chains, higher dependency on terrain or placement for production effectiveness, and other things to increase the management necessities. Unfortunately with the current AI this isn't enough to create a real challenge tribe. But for the future the challenge should not be a result of being finally disadvantaged.

In my opinion, the tribe should remain as it now is, no further balancing needed…

see above. I think finally the Frisians should be a balanced tribe, which is just more difficult to handle. As this is currently not possible we need to decide in which state the frisians could be merged in a first stage for further improvement.
I still had no time to playtest, but perhaps Nordfriese could think of some additional measures to complicate the frisians while allowing for some balance if everything is managed in the right way.

I fully understand that this discussions could be very frustrating, I really had some similar experiences while doing the final reviews of my scenarios. But I can assure that it is worth the pain because it makes the things better, therefore I should express again a great thank you for the enrichment of widelands while asking you to take the pain of this stage to even improve the tribe for more people. BTW That doesn't mean you have to accept every suggestion. you should keep your point where you deem it necessary and argue for it.
I really would feel a great pleasure if the frisians hit trunk.

@ world_savior: Although I appreciate the idea of more and different starting conditions. But to add difficulty this does not the same trick than having a complicated and difficult tribe.

Top

Quote