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Topic: Several Suggestions

WorldSavior
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Posted at: 2016-10-26, 23:08

Hopefully I can contribute a little bit as a kind of game tester... I guess that I know a lot about build18. So, some suggestions (could make more, if you are interested):

  1. making it possible that soldiers can conquer empty military buildings. Why should it be necessary that someone is inside if you want to conquer it?

  2. no messsage "you are under attack" if ALLIED soldiers are close to your buildings. i think it's a kind of bug face-wink.png

  3. make it possible to deactivate the "wimba"-shout. because you can hear it all the time, it's very annoying for me that there's just one sound like that. why not different shouts? and - what situation in the game activates this shout?

  4. explaining with a text how the fish-breeder works

  5. allowing the AI to dismantle buildings if it really needs wood/stone or something like that. if not, it is more often dead-locked

  6. mines shouldn't consume/store anymore when they dont find anything. Why should they store rations if they already know that they don't find anything? it's can be annoying, especially for the barbarians face-wink.png

(7. making it possible to receive more iron. Without iron, no soldiers: that can be a big problem)


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king_of_nowhere
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Posted at: 2016-10-27, 00:45

WorldSavior wrote:

Hopefully I can contribute a little bit as a kind of game tester... I guess that I know a lot about build18. So, some suggestions (could make more, if you are interested):

  1. making it possible that soldiers can conquer empty military buildings. Why should it be necessary that someone is inside if you want to conquer it?

because otherwise it becomes impossible to expand near borders. you make a building, your opponent attacks and conquers it before you can send soldiers in, no matter how strong your army.

  1. make it possible to deactivate the "wimba"-shout. because you can hear it all the time, it's very annoying for me that there's just one sound like that. why not different shouts? and - what situation in the game activates this shout?

it actually says TIMBER! which is the shout of tree cutters to signal that a tree is falling. it is activated, as you guess, by falling trees.

  1. explaining with a text how the fish-breeder works

yeah, that would be useful, especially considering how if you accidentally exhaust your fish you cannot make new ones and your whole economy basically stops.

  1. mines shouldn't consume/store anymore when they dont find anything. Why should they store rations if they already know that they don't find anything? it's can be annoying, especially for the barbarians ;-)

because mines still have a 5% chance to produce when empty, and it can be convenient to use epty mines just fishing for that 5% if you have nothing better. in fact, only using empty mines is one of the challenges I experimented against the AI.

(7. making it possible to receive more iron. Without iron, no soldiers: that can be a big problem)

That one is the mapmaker's fault: while you only need one gold every four or five irons, many maps include as much gold as iron. making iron much more valuable than gold. Still, I've never seen anyone running out of resources in widelands, except a few times when I made 40+ hours games.

Edited: 2016-10-27, 00:48

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GunChleoc
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Posted at: 2016-10-27, 08:11

Welcome to the forum and thanks for your comments face-smile.png

WorldSavior wrote:

  1. no messsage "you are under attack" if ALLIED soldiers are close to your buildings. i think it's a kind of bug face-wink.png

Which messages are triggered exactly here? "Your XX discovered an aggressor.", or "Your XXX is under attack.", or both?

  1. make it possible to deactivate the "wimba"-shout. because you can hear it all the time, it's very annoying for me that there's just one sound like that. why not different shouts? and - what situation in the game activates this shout?

I agree that we could have a better sound for it. In order to get rid of it for now:

  • Open data/tribes/workers/barbarians/lumberjack/init.lua in a text editor
  • Remove the line "play_sound sound/spoken timber 192", and save

  • Open data/tribes/workers/empire/lumberjack/init.lua in a text editor

  • Remove the line "play_sound sound/spoken timber 192", and save
  1. explaining with a text how the fish-breeder works

This is explained in the Atlantean scenario. We could expand on the help text for the building though - would you like to draft a short explanation? We have 2 text fields available: "purpose" and "note". We have an expanded help function in the current release candidate, so this information can be accessed more easily now.

  1. allowing the AI to dismantle buildings if it really needs wood/stone or something like that. if not, it is more often dead-locked

The AI has improved a lot since Build 18, so this problem is probably already gone.

  1. mines shouldn't consume/store anymore when they dont find anything. Why should they store rations if they already know that they don't find anything? it's can be annoying, especially for the barbarians face-wink.png

In addition to what king_of_nowhere said, if you didn't manage to level up your workers enough to upgrade the mine, keeping the mines working is your only chance. You do get a message in your inbox, so you can navigate to the building and stop/dismantle it / reduce the wares.


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WorldSavior
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Posted at: 2016-10-27, 23:01

@king: Okay... Concerning 1: Have you already tested that? If you have a really strong army, it can protect every buildung close to it...

3.: Thanks for the information! I was curious about the reason for the sound face-wink.png

4.: Yes face-smile.png

6.: Thanks a lot for this information, it's really useful face-smile.png Now it makes sense...

7.: You're right. Well, in my only online-match so far, everyone was run out of iron after around 8 hours : D (Map: "Tree of Balance")

Out of Topic: Against how many AIs did you play with only empty mines? : D And - would it be a challenge for you to play against a team of 6 aggressive AIs with improved starting-conditions at the map "Kings and Queens", blue position, build 18? face-wink.png (Not only with empty mines, of course face-wink.png )

@GunChleoc:

Thank you! You're welcome. : )

Concerning 2.: Just the message "Your XX discovered an aggressor." (if the units attack the opponent but walk close to my buildings. I played as atlanteans)

3.: Thanks a lot!

4.: You're right. I forgot that detail of the atlantean campaign. Well, I don't understand exactly how the fish-breeder works, so I cannot explain that - and I think I'm not good at writing such texts face-wink.png

5.: Okay

6.: It's all right. Because every mine still finds something at every place, it makes sense that they continue storing. And thanks for your hint, it can be helpful for beginners...

Edited: 2016-10-27, 23:43

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king_of_nowhere
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Posted at: 2016-10-28, 00:31

WorldSavior wrote: Out of Topic: Against how many AIs did you play with only empty mines? : D And - would it be a challenge for you to play against a team of 6 aggressive AIs with improved starting-conditions at the map "Kings and Queens", blue position, build 18? face-wink.png (Not only with empty mines, of course face-wink.png )

depends on map and condition. I won the "no metal challenge" map I made; that one is 1v6, but the human has a far superior land. With barbarians I won fair and square, if barely, by military might (barbarian basic mines are so cheap to operate, you can squeeze a good production even if they are empty); with empire and atlanteans I made plenty of soldiers only trained in evade, and since those were cheap in metal but counted a lot in the power graph, I could trick the AI into thinking I was too strong to attack me. I could have won eventually by keeping on like that until the Ai run out of resources, but I didn't want another 140 hours game, so I stopped there.

I won the "trident of fire" 1v5, but that time I needed a trick of placing the buildings in a way that the ai cannot see me and therefore cannot attack me (the ai is yet incapable of using scouts). So I just went on mining until the AI run out of resources, and then I could overtake it. I won in 140 hours face-smile.png

I can kill an AI player or two without metal if I meet them early and I prepare for it: just by getting some soldiers promoted in evasion, and then using them in a way that would not lose them.

I also can, with only a handful of metals, get a couple of fully promoted soldiers, then use those to kill enemies without getting killed, and defeat an AI if it hasn't yet made soldiers with many promotions.

But if we both had the same land to build up, and the AI was allowed enough time to make fully promoted soldiers, then I would lose. I can't outproduce an AI enough to compensate needing 20 foods for 1 metal.

As for the kings and queens, I won it 1v6 with all tribes. It was challenging at first and I lost a few times, but after a little trial and error it became easy enough even gainst the improved AI. The trick is to time the expansion so that you can kill the player in the south early and then turn back and defend against those coming from the north.


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GunChleoc
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Posted at: 2016-10-28, 07:23

I have created a bug report for "Your XX discovered an aggressor."


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WorldSavior
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Posted at: 2016-11-05, 22:27

@king_of_nowhere: That's very impressive! face-smile.png

@GunChleoc: That looks good face-smile.png

Edited: 2016-11-06, 03:03

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WorldSavior
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Posted at: 2017-01-09, 20:03

GunChleoc wrote:

  1. make it possible to deactivate the "wimba"-shout. because you can hear it all the time, it's very annoying for me that there's just one sound like that. why not different shouts? and - what situation in the game activates this shout?

I agree that we could have a better sound for it. In order to get rid of it for now:

  • Open data/tribes/workers/barbarians/lumberjack/init.lua in a text editor
  • Remove the line "play_sound sound/spoken timber 192", and save

  • Open data/tribes/workers/empire/lumberjack/init.lua in a text editor

  • Remove the line "play_sound sound/spoken timber 192", and save

My feedback here is now a little bit late, but that's still better than no feedback ever ;-) So: Changing the lua-file didn't work, because it is write-protected. And it seems to be hard to change that if you use Linux... And if I'd change that, I would get another version of the game, right? I don't know if it would be still compatible with the newest built.

My suggestion would be: 8. Remove this "timber"-sound, because it is annoying. I really like widelands, but by my opinion it is full of annoying sounds. It is not necessary to hear a shout when a tree falls down, because that happens really often ;-) In build 19, there is even a new annoying sound, it is probably a big animal, but I don't know exactly which one ;-) And the weapon-smiths are a little bit too noisy, aren't they?

Suggestion #9: Make it able to deactivate the message "No trees" for certain wood-cutters, as it is normal that there are moments without trees. (If not, the foresters cannot work at 100%, right?) This messages can be hard spam...

10.: And I miss another feature in the message-system: In build 18, you could quickly delete all messages by "invert selection"+delete, in build19, this feature got lost... But thanks for implementing some filters for messages! face-smile.png

Edited: 2017-01-09, 20:04

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Lokimaros
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Posted at: 2017-01-10, 00:50

Or better yet, replace "timber" with the sound of a tree falling. I've been looking for a good and fairly brief one, but as yet not found one I liked.


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king_of_nowhere
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Posted at: 2017-01-10, 03:15

i proposed suggestion 9 myself.


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