Topic: Discussion about (barbarian) economy
WorldSavior Topic Opener |
Posted at: 2017-03-02, 16:11
Because the debate about economy models in the thread "Bugs" goes far beyond the topic in my opinion, I suggest to do further discussions here. @Nordfriese: Now you really bombarded us with numbers
king_of_nowhere said it's 3,6 seconds. They matter because fast workers have to go more often to the flag than slow workers, so the relations of the buildings change.
I don't think that woodcutters, hunters and fishers are that fast. You could check out my values in the thread "Bugs"
I think that you made some mistakes again. I experienced that it's easy to make mistakes if you make a theory about widelands
I think that Atlanteans are the best tribe for beginners by far. Why? They've only got 1 model of economy and no one of their workers need experience. Second best are Barbarians. But they have some buildings which they have to upgrade 2 times, and a lot of their workers need experience, one of them 2 times. Why is the empire even more complicated? Barbarians have got 2 models of economy (normal mines and deepest mines). But the empire has got 4 models of economy (normal or deep mines? piggeries or hunters/fishers?).
You didn't mention the costs of buildings and tools
I can confirm that Wanted to save the world, then I got widetracked Top Quote |
einstein13 |
Posted at: 2017-03-02, 19:28
I don't think that Empire food economy is complicated. Empire is like "huge income company": first they use all natural resources (fish & meat), then they produce on their own (pigs). The economy just transform from one type to another. And about 3.6 seconds: yes, it is true value. It was measured few years ago and I've provided that. If something changed in the code - the value could change. But I don't think so. Link here, go to page 4 einstein13 |
king_of_nowhere |
Posted at: 2017-03-02, 20:00
I want to discuss abot the space needed for each building. First, a bit of introduction. consider a space with a side of 4 steps: you start from your corner, move east, east (plant flag), E, E (flag), NE, NE (F), NE, NE (F), W W W W SW SW SW SW. You should have a parallelogram with every side made by two road segments, each 2 steps long. I wish I could draw, it would make it simpler. Anyway, that's my basic unit. Into that basic unit, on flat land you can fit four small or medium buildings. Or you can fit one farm, and you have enough space left for the fields, with the roads. You can remove one field, but no more than that before the farm loses productivity. So, a farm takes as much space as 4 smaller buildings. If you don't make roads, you can fit a woodcutter+forester pair in that same space, and it's the minimum space they need to work. It's probably a reasonable enough assumption to say that a woodcutter+forester pair takes as much space as a farm. Now, if you expand that basic structure so that its roads are three segments long rather than two, you have a 6x6 unit, and you can fit 4 large buildings in it; you could fit 9 smaller buildings in that space. We can say a large building takes 2.25 times more space than a medium building. So on flat ground |-| |small building | 1 |medium building| 1 |large building |2.25 |farm |4 |woodcutter+forester| 4 But that's in a perfectly flat map. On a rougher map, you can't pack small buildings that close, so the penalty for making large buildings is smaller; at the same time, you have some places where you can build nothing but a small building, so it's easier to fit small buildings. By experience, you often can make a farm where you would make two medium buildings, or two large buildings where you would make three medium buildings. You can also sacrifice the worst part of your land for planting wood. And you can make most of your small buildings in places where you could not build anything else. So the figures are like |-| |small building | 0.5 |medium building| 1 |large building |1.5 |farm |2 |woodcutter+forester| 2 Maps like archipelago sea or fjords are an extreme case, because large spaces are counted (for archipelago sea it's 18 or 19 per player, plus one in the middle, if I remember correctly), while smaller spaces are more abundant. So there the ultimate speed of your economy is determined solely by your large spaces. Such maps, though, are very rare - actually I think there are only those two. I was going to make my own model, but I suddenly grew too lazy to rifle through all the lua files. But this is still a simple model. there are more complications. for example the value of fish/meat for empire. As long as they can supply with fisheries, fish is inexpensive. When fish runs out, they have to make piggeries, which are large and slow-working. this is a huge spike for the empire. Empire soldiers are probably cheaper than atlanteans as long as they can fish, but they become more expensive later. And, especially if we want to have an early game discussion, we cannot forget the cost of buildings. You correctly point out how empire economy is not more expensive than barbarian one. But imperial buildings cost huge amounts of marble. Empire cannot make as fast a start as barbarians because of the limitation of supplying all the marble for farms and weapon smith and arena.
And often intuition is wrong. Then again, mathematic is wrong just as often - because it often starts with wrong assumptions, or it forgets to include some small but important factor. Intuition works really well on complicated systems where you cannot make solid assumptions. Edited: 2017-03-02, 20:01
Top Quote |
WorldSavior Topic Opener |
Posted at: 2017-03-02, 20:07
By the way, the mentioned discussion starts here: https://wl.widelands.org/forum/topic/2786/?page=9#post-19785
Yes, they transform. But "just" transforming? Suddenly they need much more farms and piggeries are expensive, too. And it becomes really complicated if they have to enhance their mines ;-) So even the complicated barbarians are not that complicated, in comparison. And Atlanteans are less complicated by far
okay, thanks
Me neither
Me too! The sentence "Never change a running system" is not always good, but here it is perfect. Edit: @Nordfriese: Why should we change the barbarian economy at all? There is no reason for that, right? Edited: 2017-03-02, 20:52
Wanted to save the world, then I got widetracked Top Quote |
WorldSavior Topic Opener |
Posted at: 2017-03-02, 20:20
Nice, you build exactly like that one guy in my very first online match : D (That way to build looked very impressive, and I think it still looks so) Edited: 2017-03-02, 20:30
Wanted to save the world, then I got widetracked Top Quote |
WorldSavior Topic Opener |
Posted at: 2017-03-02, 21:39
Well, even if you know this numbers, it's not easy to conclude that much about the balancing, because the game is more complex. If you want to see how the tribes are balanced, there have to be matches. How many people complained so far about the balancing? I can only remember my own complain ("Atlanteans have unfair disadvantages in woodgnome in comparison to the empire") Wanted to save the world, then I got widetracked Top Quote |
einstein13 |
Posted at: 2017-03-02, 23:11
Remember discussion about soldiers strength? We can't make 1000 level 10 fights in the game, but we can simulate them outside the game. Balancing should contain three parts:
If you skip "calculations" because they are too complex - you have to make more testing and more coding. That is why I prefer calculations and proving there that the idea is good or bad - (almost) no testing is needed and you have feedback very soon, even faster than coding. But of course testing is needed, because calculations are ALWAYS simplified or averaged. Complaining about balancing was few times since I am here. But thanks to SirVer, the game needs only polishing, not general rewriting. einstein13 |
WorldSavior Topic Opener |
Posted at: 2017-03-02, 23:57
Okay. But this is precisely calculable in comparison to the costs of level-10-soldiers.
Yes. If you want to calculate the costs of level-10-soldiers, you have to look at to many factors. So you can just calculate it simplified...
Are there complains which are still up-to-date? I would like to see if I could argumentate against them Wanted to save the world, then I got widetracked Top Quote |
king_of_nowhere |
Posted at: 2017-03-03, 00:26
well you can calculate exactly how the fight of two soldiers will go statistically. but you cannot simulate an in-game economy. you can calculate how many resources are needed to make a soldier, but deciding which of those resources are of more worth is a completely different matter Top Quote |
einstein13 |
Posted at: 2017-03-03, 00:50
So what the game is doing? Simulating an economy.
I think that it is doable. The ways of creating each resources are finite. For example you can produce bread only in one way: grain + water. All of it can be calculated as time, needed resources (to build up), and needed space. I understand that whole economy is a complex machine, but it is still mathematical model. Currently I don't have enough data to collect all costs and say that (example) Barbarians are weaker than Atlanteans, but testing (tournaments) shows that balance is rather equal: every tribe has a chance to win with other tribe. einstein13 |