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Topic: Widelands tournament Easter 2018

king_of_nowhere
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Posted at: 2018-04-06, 04:10

einstein13 wrote:

I never spot such situations. Why? The only bottleneck in my roads are around warehouses. All my (main) roads has length of 2 and have the same capacity/max traffic. So from math way, there is no possibility to add more wares than to deplete wares.

I do the same. Heck, I'm quite proud of my straight regular roads. problems arise when two major roads meet and devolve all their wares on one side, then accumulated wares exceed carrying capacity. But anyway, I've only experience the problem personally on nile, because the layout of the land forces you to make really long roads. Even then, I only got locks when I tried to force accumulation of resources in specific places. And when traffic becomes too much, getting one of those "perfect locks" is only a matter of time. I fixed some by cutting a road or two, but they returned after a while, possibly at another, close intersection.

Anyway, it happens rarely to humans. But it happens more often to the AI, which is terrible at roadbuilding. I saw it in the lands of the enemy, back in the time when I still played against the machine.

But I've seen it happen fairly often

Edited: 2018-04-07, 17:26

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einstein13
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Posted at: 2018-04-07, 00:07

Another great news!

Tando has finished his 24 challenge.

image

As previously:

Edited: 2018-04-07, 00:07

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

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einstein13
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Posted at: 2018-04-07, 22:08

king of nowhere has replayed his 12 hours challenge

His numbers are impressive:

image

Standard files directory: http://wuatek.no-ip.org/~rak/widelands/Tournament2018/08_king_of_nowhere/


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

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king_of_nowhere
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Posted at: 2018-04-08, 00:57

how about you, einsteinn? will you play your own challenge?


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einstein13
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Posted at: 2018-04-08, 01:25

Yes, I am currently playing face-smile.png

Everything was going good (with minor issues), but suddenly I have spotted that one of my major ports is stuck of everything. And it is influencing the economy. Queue around 200 wares? I have cut all the roads around this port and the queue was going out and in for about 40 minutes or so. Fortunately two neighbour ports took work of this one.

Except that I have one issue to solve: my inns aren't working properly, because I have no meat in them. But I have plenty of it in my warehouse. Is this warehouse too far? I don't know...


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

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king_of_nowhere
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Posted at: 2018-04-08, 01:44

yeah, problem with ports is that they are by definition a major bottleneck that cannot be avoided. worse thing is, the routing algorithm keeps using them if the route is shorter. I once made two ports that were 2 tiles away hoping for faster loading/unloading of wares, but what actually happened is that the routing algorithm kept transferring wares from those two ports. To avoid this I only made 6 ports, placed strategically so that only a mild amount of cargo would have to go through them


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einstein13
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Posted at: 2018-04-09, 01:05

About my current game situation: I have reached really big economy and some bugs manifest themselves. Port situation stops me with rations & meals production (Empire). And I hope that in next two or three hours of gametime it will be solved somehow. From mathematical point of view, I kept to the guidelines of my strategy and it should be working, but it isn't...

I can tell you that I have plenty of farms (more than 100), piggeries, mills and bakeries. Two warehouses are storing wheat and water each and in both of them you have resources. Another warehouse is storing food and it has hundreds of it, but inns aren't working. Why? Because of bad infrastructure? No! Because of strange bugs. It is shown only with heavy traffic. From my side there are only two solutions here:

  1. Replay the game with only 2 ports and 2 or 3 ships. That should solve the problem of heavy traffic. Limited traffic should not cause this problem.
  2. Replay the game with NO SHIPS at all. I believe that this is a solution of WorldSavior.

And there is also one more problem with my game. I have built hundreds of buildings (processing, mining, creating... will show some statistics next time), which are using lots of CPU... I have reached my computer borders and now I am playing Widelands with FPS around 10-15. With speed of 1x. Since CPU optimization around build 18 or 17 (can't remember), I have never spot this problem in Widelands.

See you tomorrow.

Edited: 2018-04-09, 01:05

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

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king_of_nowhere
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Posted at: 2018-04-09, 17:05

einstein13 wrote:

About my current game situation: I have reached really big economy and some bugs manifest themselves. Port situation stops me with rations & meals production (Empire). And I hope that in next two or three hours of gametime it will be solved somehow. From mathematical point of view, I kept to the guidelines of my strategy and it should be working, but it isn't...

I can tell you that I have plenty of farms (more than 100), piggeries, mills and bakeries. Two warehouses are storing wheat and water each and in both of them you have resources. Another warehouse is storing food and it has hundreds of it, but inns aren't working. Why? Because of bad infrastructure? No! Because of strange bugs. It is shown only with heavy traffic. From my side there are only two solutions here:

  1. Replay the game with only 2 ports and 2 or 3 ships. That should solve the problem of heavy traffic. Limited traffic should not cause this problem.
  2. Replay the game with NO SHIPS at all. I believe that this is a solution of WorldSavior.

I follow more or less the same strategy, and I got the same problems, but as far as I can tell they are not bugs. Simply, when the wares transported become too many, the transportation system is strained past the breaking point. If the map is simply wide, like for example ice wars, you don't see it, because you have plenty of roads and nothing is too distant from anything else. But nile seems made exactly to bring out those problems. In nile you have a strip of land near the water, so basically everywhere is a chokepoint. And travel distances get very long because your economy isn't concentrated into a circle, it is spread in a line. So you have a lot of wares that have to make a long trip by road, and you eventually exceed the transportation capacity of the roads. Your empty inns? probably they are waiting food that is scheduled to arrive by ship but it stuck in one of your ports, with a queue of thousands of wares to be unloaded before it. And the amount of wares your carriers can carry is a hard limit you can't surpass.

I got stuck in a similar situation, and made my first game by splitting the economy in 10 unconnected trunks, each self sufficient. But it was inefficient. then I looked at tando's final situation, and saw that he had low traffic, despite very little planning at all. He basically just built little self-sufficient productive units everywhere on the map. So I figured it out: you don't have to plan the economy. As I expanded, I gradually built small "towns" with some smokeries, mills, bakeries, smelting works, weapon and armor smith, labirinth and dungeon, all around a warehouse. Each one of those units is self-sufficient, except it must import raw resources. So metals refined into a smelting works are generally placed inside its warehouse, and then taken to feed its weapon smith. I made sure to produce raw resources - corn, blackroot, fish, logs, ores - everywhere on the map, spread out, so that everywhere would not be too far from a basic production site. So all the raw resources move only a little distance. There are a few imbalance in production that may require a missing ware to be called from afar every once in a while, but those wares aren't enough to slow down anything too much. it works wonderfully. it's basically the principle of glocal economy applied to widelands.

Sure, centralized production looks great on paper, and in mid-sized maps it helps reduce wasted resources. But your production sites can store a lot of wares, so even if some of them take a long time in being replaced, the productivity will still remain good. And even if their productivity drops because a resurce coming from afar takes too much time arriving (my problme with fish and smokeries, as smokeries only store 4 fish), you can build more production sites; space is not a problem, reducing transportation distance is. And wasting resources in not too big a problem in a 24-hour game on a huge map. Sure, you need a lot of excess stuff before this system really kicks in (like, you need every smelting works filled with ores, every mine filled with food, and some storages in every warehouse), but once you have that excess, it runs smoothly. Of course, it would be a really bad strategy on smaller maps, where it is vital to use every single scrap of metal or bit of food to gain an advantage over the enemy.

The lesson in this, I think, is that different maps require different strategies. You are trying to fit a round peg into a sqare-shaped hole.

Regarding ports, you can look in my replay how I made them: they are very efficient spaced that way. There are three ports at river intersections, and traveling over water there saves a huge amount of travel, so wares that need to cross the river tend to go there (of course the system only works as long as there aren't too many wares needing to cross). And there is never traffic between the two port triangles, because travel by road is faster in that case. So ships remain in one single place. If we call the ports ABC and DEF, then it never happens that a ware is loaded at A to be carried to D, or E, or F. A ship carrying wares from A never has any reason to go far. So all ship transit is fast. If you make more ports, you risk ships aking long detours to visit minor destinations while carrying important wares.

I repeat what I keep saying, it would be possible to get much greater efficiency if we could assign specific ships to specific routes, but with the algorithm as it is, the effectiveness of transport goes down with increasing number of ports. I learned it the hard way in some of my challenge maps that have ports (dust in the wind, the great escape). It doesn't matter how evenly spaced your ports are, or how well an ideal traffic would flow over them; the boat transportation algorithm can't handle effectively complex situation. I can only get away with having 6 ports because there is an effective road system between the two triangles. If the river was shorter, then boat transport would go to hell pretty fast, as wares loaded at A for B (close) are neglected to go carry some more water to D (very far) while ignoring B, which is along the way. And then on D the boat would take on some wares for E (close to D), but now the old wares due to B take priority so the ship would go alll the way round the map again...

Edited: 2018-04-09, 17:07

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einstein13
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Posted at: 2018-04-09, 17:52

you can look in my replay

Sorry, you haven't provided any replay and I am sad because of this face-sad.png face-wink.png


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

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king_of_nowhere
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Posted at: 2018-04-10, 02:53

einstein13 wrote:

you can look in my replay

Sorry, you haven't provided any replay and I am sad because of this face-sad.png face-wink.png

I meant load my saved game. I don't think a replay would be meaningful because every time i load the game the replay starts anew. So I'd have 5-6 replays, at best.

Anyway, my performance could be significantly improved in the early game. I am sure getting as high as 10000 (while stiill making fully promoted soldiers) is possible.


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