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Topic: Frisian Balancing

GunChleoc
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Posted at: 2018-05-10, 07:43

No objections from me to adding the Clay Digger. I'd like to have the new worker in trunk as soon as possible, so that we can start fixing the strings for the translators.


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hessenfarmer
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Posted at: 2018-05-10, 14:46

Ok I uploaded my latest changes. strings are not that much different. As soon as I get some feedback from the other players and especially Nordfriese I could ask for a first merge.


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hessenfarmer
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Posted at: 2018-05-12, 18:37

So I have done a 12 hours game on the official "The far north" map. I couldn't train my first hero in less than 80 minutes (exactly it took me 82). But I wanted to know how my changes would perform in a longer game. After 12 hours I had 4 training camps and 3 training arenas running at an overall 85 % due to unforeseen shortages (there is still room for improvement in my gameplay). However I manged to reach a military strength of 3621 and trained 214 heros until then (counted by my script developed for the easter tournament of einstein.
Just for comparison in eisteins tournament I just managed to have 63 heros and a strength of 2242. So some of this results (especially the numbers of heros) are due to my improved gameplay with the frisians, and some effect might be due to the different maps. But I think a good bunch is due to the improved balancing against other tribes.
Unfortunately I still don't have a benchmark to compare against, or any value that might be sufficient for the moment being. Especially I would ask what would be an acceptable time to create the first fully trained soldier.
Perhaps some feedback of an advanced player about the performance in comparison to other tribes would be helpful.
The only thing I can do further is to have a look in the production cycles of the metal indutry cause I have the feeling they might be disadvantaged against the other tribes.
So please if anybody would like to have a look into the changes on launchpad or test it with the --datadir option I would be really happy. Currently I feel a little lonesome in this task and I think we need some consensus on the changes and the performance to achieve.


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hessenfarmer
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Posted at: 2018-05-12, 23:35

I found another disbalance while analyzing the production cycles of the weapons and their consumption rate in training. From this I calculated the equalized value for all tribes of how much buildings are needed to supply the soldier training based on a fully running frisian training_arena. In the original version of the frisian this was about 3 times higher than in the other tribes. With the reduced weapons for training it was only around 2 times higher than for the others.
So after some thinking I would like to make the following suggestions:
1. change the production time for the swords to be more or less equal to the best axes of the barbarians. There is no need to assume that forging a sword is more complicated than a real battleaxe.
2. change the cycle to reflect consumption in the training faccilities. This means for the small smithy S1, S2, H, S2 and for the large one S3, S4, HG, S3, S4. Although most of the effect could be reached by micromanagement it eases up the things in the beginning somewhat.

Any objections or any alternatives? see also the newest training.xlsx linked to the bug on launchpad


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king_of_nowhere
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Posted at: 2018-05-13, 19:20

hessenfarmer wrote:

  1. change the cycle to reflect consumption in the training faccilities. This means for the small smithy S1, S2, H, S2 and for the large one S3, S4, HG, S3, S4. Although most of the effect could be reached by micromanagement it eases up the things in the beginning somewhat.

I suggest this coould be achieved by reducing idle time between working cycles. That way, even if the smithy has a skewed production, it will just skip the cycle when the economy already has enough of that resource, and it won't lose too much time


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hessenfarmer
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Posted at: 2018-05-13, 21:09

king_of_nowhere wrote:

I suggest this coould be achieved by reducing idle time between working cycles. That way, even if the smithy has a skewed production, it will just skip the cycle when the economy already has enough of that resource, and it won't lose too much time

Yes I agree in the later game the change doesn't make a great difference, cause skipping doesn't take any time already. The problem is in the early game they produce too much helmets unless you set the economy settings differently. That was what I meant when I said it can be solved with micromanagement. However there is a lot to manage and therefore it makes things just a little bit easier.

Reducing the production cycle total time is my first suggestion. And this is far more important.

By the way did you consider to playtest my branch?

Edited: 2018-05-13, 21:14

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GunChleoc
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Posted at: 2018-05-14, 07:56

hessenfarmer wrote:

The problem is in the early game they produce too much helmets unless you set the economy settings differently.

Maybe changing the default_target_quantity for some wares could help here?


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hessenfarmer
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Posted at: 2018-05-14, 21:08

GunChleoc wrote:

Maybe changing the default_target_quantity for some wares could help here?

The solution to achieve the same thing as with the production cycles is not only to lower the economy demand to probably zero but to also lower the demand of helmets by the trainingsites to zero until enough swords have been produced. So lowerin the default quantity is not doing the trick in this case (it is just 2 anyway)


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Ex-Member
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Posted at: 2018-05-15, 10:03

I think the problem is that the smith needs to upgrade to a master and will override the default settings to get a promotion. If the wares to produce better swords are missing he will make the easier helmets and short swords to build experience. Once he has upgraded he then obeys economy settings.


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WorldSavior
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Posted at: 2018-05-16, 01:03

hessenfarmer wrote:

WorldSavior wrote:

Why do you think that I've gotten some secret knowledge? face-wink.png

Because you seem to know by heart exactly what to build in which ratio to have a working economy, this is a suggestion due to me watching some replays from the last tournament. Anyhow this was fishing for compliments face-wink.png Nevertheless I hoped you really would know by heart or have at least a very reliable feeling of the amount of each building we need. So if this is the case please add the numbers to the sheet and reupload it again. This doesn't need to be perfect but it would help a lot. Reason is I'd like to have this in Build 20 and our chieftain likes to have this build in the near future.

Okay... Interesting...

If something is pain for you, you could still avoid doing it.

In principle you may be right but in particular you aren't. I said I would take the task and this feels for me like a promise for the community. However I really could use some help to get the best into b20 we could. Yesterday I started to test my first revision where I had implemented the proposed changes excluding the mining.

Excel is under construction will be finished probably tonight. Already spotted some weird things in the mines definition for the other tribes. Will share as soon as it is finished. You could use this for your task as well. Hope I get some numbers for my build cost excel in exchange: face-smile.png

How can I use it for my task? Should I do more than what I plan to do? I'll check every lua file anyway and see what will be wrong there face-wink.png

I just thought it might be helpful as you can easily play with the numbers and see results in the sheet to finetune the values of the programs. But of course you are free to ignore it. I just wanted to say it is free tu be used for whatever task it is helpful.

Ok

I consider your definition "cost per ware" as not very meaningful, as grain is more expensive than fish and products like rations are also more expensive than raw materials. In your sheet the numbers "cost per wares" of Atlanteans are two times bigger than they should be - and honey for Frisian deep mines is missing.

It was just an idea to have another value for balancing, although I knew that for example production time is not taken into account for this. You are right about the Atlanteans values - they are wrong due to an error in my formula. I wanted to decompose the food to their basic ingredients to cope for the difference between raw and refined, but I summed up all basic ingredients for bread and for smoked fish ( it is cell I3 inthe sheet) instead of seperating them As well as honey is missing - thanks for the review.

You're welcome

Some questions in return: Could you think about another concept to measure cost for mining?

Yes. You could calculate:

  • how much space on buildable ground you need for letting each mine run

  • the number of buildings which you need for that, and

  • (their costs eventually)

  • and the number of iron which you need for the tools

This would lead to an approximation of the costs. Furthermore you can take in mind that some resources can have different costs, for example wine is much more expensive at the beginning of the game than in the late game when all marble mines stop.

Why is grain more expensive than fish? I really don't understand that but should to make this work so please help me out.

For example the grain of atlanteans is corn. They need a farm for it, which consumes a lot of space and it is not cheaper than a pair fisher+fishbreeder. This pair needs less space and is almost twice times as fast as the farm. So it's normally easier to produce fish than grain, so grain is more expensive.

I don't know why your sheet says that 0,66 iron is returned by recycling somewhere. That confuses me.

I took the consumption of a weapon (or armor) and the returned value of materials in the same training cycle and calculated therefore the value of return per weapon item. The 0.66 is resulting from a weapon returning mixed metal which is 0.5 of gold and 0.5 of iron. together with a returned iron this leads into such numbers. But I wanted to have the return for recycling bound to the item to see how the values change.

Shouldn't it be something like 0.75 then? I don't get it how it can be a 0.66.

The point that you suggest that frisian soldiers shouldn't get 3 swords of several kinds but only 2 is interesting. I think it makes sense. Will the system be changed like this?

that depends on acceptance by our chieftain and Nordfriese and the rest of the community as well.

Ok

Soldier with one double-sword get's a long sword for his other hand. There is nothing to recycle this time.

The soldier replaces long sword by curved sword, keeps double-sword. Long sword gets recycled.

Soldier replaces curved sword by second double-sword, keeps the first double sword. Curved sword gets recycled."

That is exactly what I thought when doing the change although I have to admit I missed the point that for the first training there is nothing to recycle. But this can be incorporated easily.

Ok

By the way, am I the only one who thinks that curved swords don't fit to Frisians at all?

I have no opinion on this.

By the way, I'm sorry for expressing my opinion in a harsh way.

Next topic: Tinker complained about the fact that every animal gives only one meat. We had already a discussion about this, and a solution for keeping the balance (e.g. game keepers) is still not found.

GunChleoc wrote:

The animals could get an attribute "furry" if we want to go the "realistic" route here, but then we would still need some engine changes. I don't want to add any more engine changes before Build 20 - I have already put a lot of my own features that I wanted for it on the back burner so that we can get it out sometime this year.

Too much realism is not always needed. Widelands is a non-realistic computer game, so...

hessenfarmer wrote:

I don't think we need to be super realistic in this case. I only suggested this because frisians are very slow in the beginning to train soldiers and one of the bottlenecks is fur production. So the whole thing is to give the fur production a little kickstart and the best solution other than starting wares is the hunter delivering some fur. However this is very limited as the frisians can't raise game so it doesn't affect the later game where you definitly need a lot of reindeer farms to produce fur. I think this makes the solution charming as it doesn't affect the charakter of the tribe and the challenges that this tribe has. Due to the limited amount of game I thought every second cycle would be a good value maybe every third. But I think if only every 5th cycle fur is produced the effect is to small to really help them to be more competitive in the early game. @tinker: perhaps you could download the data dir of my branch and test it

Other solutions:

  • Speed up barley growth

  • Speed up barley farms

  • Maybe even reduce the number of fur which is required for a fur garment - this would fit well to the facts that 1 tabard/spidercloth requires 1 spider silk and 1 imperial cloth requires 1 wool. Besides fur garment (requires 2 fur), only barbarian cloth requires 2 reet, but reet is much cheaper than fur/silk/wool.

Nordfriese wrote:

  • Having the brick kiln produce 3 bricks at once will be a real disadvantage when clay is short. Also, 9 is a large number of wares to store in a building. And only 1/3 coal and 1/3 granite per brick seems a bit cheap to me. I´d prefer to keep it as it is.

I agree with you. I like the way how you designed brick costs. (I'm just not sure if they should require that much tools, so I think it might be good what hessenfarmer did to change this.)

hessenfarmer wrote:

Nordfriese wrote:

  • Hunter: Producing fur every second cycle seems rather a lot, I´d suggest making it every 3rd or 4th cycle for now, and wait until after build20 to replace it with an engine change that allows to make fur production depend on whether the caught animal was tagged as furry.

If there would be endless ressources of game it would be definitly too much to have it every second cycle. But on most maps there might be only 20 animal within reach of the hunter. so this delivers an additional 10 fur in the beginning to let the seamstress start her work and get experience (she needs 14 fur to get promoted) until the reindeer farms are finally working. (this needs a lot of time due to the slow growing barley). Of course you could use this for a little fur boost in the later game especially when you are close to a barbarian border, but this would need very clever gameplay and could be awarded therefore. However probably we could live with a value of every 3rd cycle if we reduce the needed experience to 10 probably. What I don't want is adding starting wares or starting workers so we need values that would ensure we can train a hero in sufficient time. So please reconsider the values from this point of view that we need to have the seamstress promoted in a reasonable time. Anyhow I will try a value of 2 and a value of 3 as well.

Have you thought about what happens if barbarians and frisians play in the same team? The barbarians could build big numbers of game keepers, while the frisians build big numbers of hunters, earning much more fur than you expect?

  • Having the brick kiln produce 3 bricks at once will be a real disadvantage when clay is short. Also, 9 is a large number of wares to store in a building. And only 1/3 coal and 1/3 granite per brick seems a bit cheap to me. I´d prefer to keep it as it is.

the reason for this was that the frisians really are coal addicts. they need a lot of coal. The reduction in granite was mainly due to the rockmines not being over efficient and there might be maps with little rocks. Clay however is endless and ensuring a good clay supply is one key issue in having a prosperous settlement. In my excel i decomposed advanced building materials into their components and making brick a bit cheaper helped for the numbers being comparable to other tribes. From what I see in the excel the frisians are the only tribe where the main building material is a refined one. So cheap is relative I think. The intention was to make it less expensive. As for the storage I have no objections to have it reduced to 6. This would mean you need to have a warehouse or clay pit nearby and that would fit into the frisians being a tribe where you need to think where you place your building in relation to others. So I would give it a try.

I think that the empire has more expensive buildings, because marble end especially columns are very expensive. Probably brick costs are not a big disadvantage...

GunChleoc wrote:

I think the point here is that the sword is curved, and so are sabres. So, we wouldn't gain anything here by renaming it to sabre and keeping the image.

"Broadsword" with a new image would work.

Yes face-smile.png

Tinker wrote:

I am not sure what the objection to curved swords is, they look good to me,

I think that tribes of this part of Europe just didn't use curved swords at this time, curved swords have rather been weapons in other parts of the world...

and isn't a broadsword just a sort of double edged sword?

Probably yes, but as far as I know also short swords and long swords usually had edges on both sides. So maybe it could be interesting to rename the double edged sword as well, for example to "Two-handed sword", "Elite Sword", "Warrior Sword" or "Big sword"?

hessenfarmer wrote:

3rd round same map. This time I managed it in 1:43 also did start the training camp to early the first time and wasted probably 5 to 10 minutes. In this round I discoverd the following things slowing me down.
1. Furnaces are deadly ineffective cause they have a distribution of 50 % smelting iron and 50 % smelting gold this costed me time when no gold was available (10 sec penalty) every second cycle and slowed down me a lot toghether with number 2. Alkl other tribes do it in a ratio of 66% iron and 33% gold (iron,gold,iron).

One can set the economy settings of gold to zero, so the smithies will skip the gold program. And as Frisians need more gold than other tribes and less iron, it's maybe not so bad that the ratio is 1 - 1 and not 2 - 1?

Tinker wrote:

You might want to look at the work cycles in the recycling centre as well. Currently it does fur, iron, mixed, iron and that allows a lot of scrap iron to build up. At time I have 40+ scrap iron and <10 mixed and <10 fur.

Perhaps the cycle should be iron, fur, iron, mixed, iron?

Yes, mabye

teppo wrote:

WorldSavior wrote:

I think there is an exception: Aqua farm needs a working clay pit nearby.

Isn't it enough for the aqua farm if the clay pit has once worked a little bit? I think I never saw aqua farms stop working when the clay pits did.

I tried it out: Removed the need of clay from the economy, and increased fish need (by setting the target to absurdly high value). The result was that fish production declined, but really slowly. Then I removed the need for fish for some minutes, and resumed it. The fish production collapsed and did not recover.

Aqua farm manages fine without a constantly active clay pit, if the aqua farm itself is running all the time.

Okay. Isn't that a problem? Maybe you need just one coalburner to solve it, but it could still confuse players, right?

hessenfarmer wrote:

What would be an acceptable value for getting the first hero on this particular map? (far north)

No idea, but as I said somewhere, the barbarians can train their advanced workers faster now, but the frisians need still a lot of time to train their advanced workers. What about reducing the required experience of frisians everywhere by 50% as well (exception: mines...)?

hessenfarmer wrote:

Currently I feel a little lonesome in this task and I think we need some consensus on the changes and the performance to achieve.

I have a lot of things to do... (And no, I'm not meaning participating in Einstein's tournament.)

hessenfarmer wrote:

I found another disbalance while analyzing the production cycles of the weapons and their consumption rate in training. From this I calculated the equalized value for all tribes of how much buildings are needed to supply the soldier training based on a fully running frisian training_arena. In the original version of the frisian this was about 3 times higher than in the other tribes. With the reduced weapons for training it was only around 2 times higher than for the others.
So after some thinking I would like to make the following suggestions:
1. change the production time for the swords to be more or less equal to the best axes of the barbarians. There is no need to assume that forging a sword is more complicated than a real battleaxe.

Speeding it up would be good.

  1. change the cycle to reflect consumption in the training faccilities. This means for the small smithy S1, S2, H, S2 and for the large one S3, S4, HG, S3, S4. Although most of the effect could be reached by micromanagement it eases up the things in the beginning somewhat.

Good idea

Any objections or any alternatives? see also the newest training.xlsx linked to the bug on launchpad

king_of_nowhere wrote:

hessenfarmer wrote:

  1. change the cycle to reflect consumption in the training faccilities. This means for the small smithy S1, S2, H, S2 and for the large one S3, S4, HG, S3, S4. Although most of the effect could be reached by micromanagement it eases up the things in the beginning somewhat.

I suggest this coould be achieved by reducing idle time between working cycles. That way, even if the smithy has a skewed production, it will just skip the cycle when the economy already has enough of that resource, and it won't lose too much time

If the economy has already enough of that resource, it will skip anyway.

hessenfarmer wrote:

GunChleoc wrote:

Maybe changing the default_target_quantity for some wares could help here?

The solution to achieve the same thing as with the production cycles is not only to lower the economy demand to probably zero but to also lower the demand of helmets by the trainingsites to zero until enough swords have been produced. So lowerin the default quantity is not doing the trick in this case (it is just 2 anyway)

Exactly

Tinker wrote:

I think the problem is that the smith needs to upgrade to a master and will override the default settings to get a promotion. If the wares to produce better swords are missing he will make the easier helmets and short swords to build experience. Once he has upgraded he then obeys economy settings.

I know this behavior from brewers and bakers, but smiths don't do that, so you mix it up probably. Anyway Hessenfarmer's suggestion is good.

Baker:

 "return=skipped unless economy needs bread_frisians or workers need experience",

Smiths:

"return=skipped unless economy needs helmet_golden",

   "return=skipped unless economy needs sword_short",

Wanted to save the world, then I got widetracked

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