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Topic: Frisian Balancing

GunChleoc
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Posted at: 2018-05-16, 07:43

Thanks for your input!

Let's continue the renaming discussion in https://wl.widelands.org/forum/topic/4234/?page=1#post-24944, it's a bit less off-topic there.


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hessenfarmer
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Posted at: 2018-05-16, 08:22

@WorldSavior: Thanks for your inputs. I will answer them this evening in more detail. For the moment being just a quick demand. Please consider to do a short round with the barbnarians on the particular map and tell me how long you neeeded to train a hero, if your time allows to do so. If possible you could upload a replay to the bug on launchpad as well but I would be very thankful for just the number.

When considering cost of bricks and production it is important to see how much of them is used it is the main building material of the frisians. The empire does not need columns for small buildings for example.
However I made the experience that clay shortage is a problem as well. So nordfrieses point about slowing production is not invalid. In my latest trials I just build only 2 brick kiln to have them operating at higher rate.


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hessenfarmer
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Posted at: 2018-05-16, 22:35

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...

is this a yes interesting or no interesting? face-wink.png I really would like to know if you could provide me some numbers or not. They don't need to be very exact just your educated guesses, as I plan to have another cycle after b20 anyway to reevaluate the whole thing based on more experince and testing in the community.

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.

I admit this approach would be much more exact. However this would need a lot of work ro extract the working times of different buildings and growing times for immovables and so on. As my capacity is currently somewhat limited I would propose to keep the current cost estimation knowing it is rather coarse. Actually I did not discover much anomalies anyhow. Question: how are your plans regarding your mine project? Would you like to incorporate some changes in the yellow marked areas in your branch? (For me the most important issues are normalizing wares per ressource to 1 for all tribes, have a look in the very fast coal production of the Atlanteans, the barbarians dep iron mine seems to be faulty, and increase frisian coal production per second a bit.)

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.

Ok I understand it now. Although taking especially production time into account is really a lot of work. I am not sure whether I could deliver this in reasonable time without some help. So probably this needs to wait for the next step. (see my proposal of a stepped Approach below)

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.

this was due to a false understanding of recycling. I thought related the return of the training cycle to a weapon but this was wrong. After the inputs in this thread I understood the recycling better and now it is reflected correctly in the code and in the excel as well. Sorry for the confusion.

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

Already in the branch.

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

Already incorporated in the branch. Thanks again.

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...

I agree on this.

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

This won't fit to the description of barley as a slow growing but robust grain.

  • Speed up barley farms

Done already has the nice side effect that the beekeeper has more flowering fields.

  • 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.

Might be an idea worth thinking about. If done so we could definitly reduce the fur cycle of the hunter. On the other hand that would return nearly all of the used fur within recycling. as we can't have comma numbers in there, I suggest to leave it like it is and help the seamstresses with a fur every 3rd hunter cycle.

  • 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?

No I didn't see this yet. However I deem this to be just a little advantage as the reindeer farm produces a fur every 65 seconds and the hunter currently does it in every 3rd cycle which results to 105 seconds plus walking times of the hunter. So yes this could be used in a team match but only at the border and it isn't that effective in the current implementation, while it still does the trick to provide some fur in the early game to get the seamstress working.

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...

brick is definitly a shortage over the whole game. I normally increase the target quanttity to have kind of a buffer. But the frisians really need a lot of bricks so I still believe the value of 3 is ok. All other tribes do not use that much refined log or other precious materials for building. the most compareable building material is the barbarian grout which is used in largely les numbers than bricks. Please look at the relevant excel to see it.

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"?

All names are possible except of two handed sword cause the other hand holds another one so a 2 handed sword could not be used

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?

I Know now and did so to achieve my best times although the cycle had been changed already. But in the later game the frisians still need more than 2 times more iron than gold so the cycle would be no problem. At least I did not discover any negative effects in the later game.

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

already did this change it is in the branch and turned out to be better but not perfect. Currently too much old garments are accumulated so probably I will add another fur cycle. old garments should be fully recycled cause fur costs barley and is not produced every cycle of the reindeer farm. So it is expensive in my opinion. While recycling does not cost anything at all. which is cheap then

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?

In the encyclopedia there is already the hint that an aqua farm needs a working claypit to run properly. Reason is that clayholes vanish after a long but finite time. This is necessary to enable to run the claypit in the same spot infinitly. When there isn't enough building activity there are several possibilities to ensure a constant clay demand. One very reasonable solution is to burn logpiles and use the extra coal whis is slowly produced but cheap.

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...)

I have thought about lowering this Value already. However I think 50% is too much maybe 25 to 30% would be ok. I will look into this and make a proposal. As I wrote this morning if you could afford having an hour or so you could do me favor in delivering a benchmark on the map. I would rate it ok if I would need 120 to 125 % of the benchmark with the frisians. (the additiional percentage would be to cover for my still bad gameplay)

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.)

I understand this. Hope you will regain some leisure time though. Anyhow just some regular pings in this thread whether you are still interested in the topic would give me a good feeling. face-wink.png
I really need some discussionand inputs to solve this. As time goes by I am just thinking about asking for a merge of my current changes to have better frisians in trunk as a starting basis for further improvements. You may call this a step by step strategy or whatever. Reason for this is in my opinion the changes already contain big improvements for the frisians and foreseeable my time will be alittle bit more limited in summer. Perhaps this will give us some more testing and feedback. Cause these are the things that I currently lack the most. What do you think?

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.

In fact the proposal is a speed up (the advanced weapons will be produced in only 75% of the original time, althought the short sword will take a little bit longer) details can be seen in my excel sheet.

Wow that was a lot of text but I rate this a very fruitful discussion and so it is worth every letter. face-wink.png


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GunChleoc
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Posted at: 2018-05-17, 08:09

I'd have time this weekend to review the code if you do a merge request face-smile.png

I am in favor of merging your changes, because it will never be perfect anyway and you could fiddle with it forever. So, taking it in stages is definitely a good idea.

Smaller branches are also easier to review than big branches.

Edited: 2018-05-17, 08:10

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Nordfriese
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Posted at: 2018-05-17, 09:30

What a lot of discussion to catch up with face-smile.png

Aqua Farms: Another option might be to have clay pits produce clay if (economy needs clay) or ((not economy needs clay) and (site has water)). Then there would be no problem for aqua farms as long as there´s enough water.

Brickmaker&Claydigger: @hessenfarmer Do you mind if I upload new graphics for the workers to your branch?

Curved Sword: Broadsword sounds good to me; again may I upload the change (name+graphics) to your branch?
I don´t think the double-edged sword needs renaming though

Also, Reebaud´s explanation of frisian attack training (first scenario) should be rephrased. Will you do that or should I?


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hessenfarmer
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Posted at: 2018-05-17, 11:12

I am on a short holiday and don't have access to my Computer. So please feel free to upload graphics and doing any change you want. As the change of production times of the swords isn't in the branch yet you could do this as well.


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hessenfarmer
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Posted at: 2018-05-17, 11:18

Change of weapon production cycle isn't in the branch as well. If you are ok with this you could do this as well . Feel free to start a merge request as soon as you feel ready for it
Thanks a lot.


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hessenfarmer
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Posted at: 2018-05-22, 20:46

Ok merge request is done. I did some last changes this morning.
1. I adapted the production times to the barbarian ax productin times.
2. I added some sounds to the smithy (took the same as for the barbarians)
3. switched the order of sleep and consume for all but the first cycle of the armor smithies ( it is the same now as for the other tribes). Result is the longer cycles are skipped if there are not enough input wares.

Many thanks to Nordfriese for the changes and the graphics he added to the branch.
I need to playtest the changes though, but lacking a bit of time currently.


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WorldSavior
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Posted at: 2018-05-24, 19:30

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...

is this a yes interesting or no interesting? face-wink.png I really would like to know if you could provide me some numbers or not. They don't need to be very exact just your educated guesses, as I plan to have another cycle after b20 anyway to reevaluate the whole thing based on more experince and testing in the community.

No, I can't...

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.

I admit this approach would be much more exact. However this would need a lot of work ro extract the working times of different buildings and growing times for immovables and so on. As my capacity is currently somewhat limited I would propose to keep the current cost estimation knowing it is rather coarse. Actually I did not discover much anomalies anyhow. Question: how are your plans regarding your mine project? Would you like to incorporate some changes in the yellow marked areas in your branch?

Depends on further arguments. Right now I'm only convinced that the frisian coal mines could need a speedup.

(For me the most important issues are normalizing wares per ressource to 1 for all tribes,

Well, resources have different costs, and the numbers of wares could also stay like they are.

have a look in the very fast coal production of the Atlanteans,

The Atlantean coal mine is slower than the Barbarian deepest, and the imperial deepest is not much slower. So I think that it's okay...

the barbarians dep iron mine seems to be faulty,

Well, it is very inefficient, but one can manage to skip it always, so I don't think that a change is necessary

and increase frisian coal production per second a bit.)

I didn't plan to change frisian mines, but when I change other mines, i can maybe also change the frisian ones. I could tell first what I would change, and maybe I could also change other buildings.

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.

this was due to a false understanding of recycling. I thought related the return of the training cycle to a weapon but this was wrong. After the inputs in this thread I understood the recycling better and now it is reflected correctly in the code and in the excel as well. Sorry for the confusion.

No problem

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:

  • 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.

Might be an idea worth thinking about. If done so we could definitly reduce the fur cycle of the hunter. On the other hand that would return nearly all of the used fur within recycling. as we can't have comma numbers in there, I suggest to leave it like it is and help the seamstresses with a fur every 3rd hunter cycle.

Theoretically there can be comma numbers, for example if two wares are transferred into one.

  • 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?

No I didn't see this yet. However I deem this to be just a little advantage as the reindeer farm produces a fur every 65 seconds and the hunter currently does it in every 3rd cycle which results to 105 seconds plus walking times of the hunter.

But the reindeer farm needs also wells and barley farms.

So yes this could be used in a team match but only at the border and it isn't that effective in the current implementation, while it still does the trick to provide some fur in the early game to get the seamstress working.

If you think so...

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...

brick is definitly a shortage over the whole game. I normally increase the target quanttity to have kind of a buffer. But the frisians really need a lot of bricks so I still believe the value of 3 is ok. All other tribes do not use that much refined log or other precious materials for building.

Barbarians use a very high number of refined logs for their military buildings... And is it the case that the empire needs significantly less marble than frisians need bricks? (Marble in marble columns do also count)

the most compareable building material is the barbarian grout which is used in largely les numbers than bricks. Please look at the relevant excel to see it.

Yes, grout is very similar. By the way, I don't have to look at the excel to know this stuff face-wink.png

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?

I Know now and did so to achieve my best times although the cycle had been changed already. But in the later game the frisians still need more than 2 times more iron than gold so the cycle would be no problem. At least I did not discover any negative effects in the later game.

If you think so...

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

already did this change it is in the branch and turned out to be better but not perfect. Currently too much old garments are accumulated so probably I will add another fur cycle. old garments should be fully recycled cause fur costs barley and is not produced every cycle of the reindeer farm. So it is expensive in my opinion. While recycling does not cost anything at all.

Recycling costs recycling centers, so it's more expensive than water. But it may be cheap, yes.

which is cheap then

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...)

I have thought about lowering this Value already. However I think 50% is too much maybe 25 to 30% would be ok. I will look into this and make a proposal. As I wrote this morning if you could afford having an hour or so you could do me favor in delivering a benchmark on the map. I would rate it ok if I would need 120 to 125 % of the benchmark with the frisians. (the additiional percentage would be to cover for my still bad gameplay)

But barbarians are slower than empire and atlanteans (in training their first perfect soldier). What about the fact that frisians are much slower than atlanteans? Maybe you should find out how fast you are at "Two frontiers" face-wink.png

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.)

I understand this. Hope you will regain some leisure time though.

Thanks. I hope the same. "The hope is the last one to die" face-wink.png

Nordfriese wrote:

What a lot of discussion to catch up with face-smile.png

Aqua Farms: Another option might be to have clay pits produce clay if (economy needs clay) or ((not economy needs clay) and (site has water)). Then there would be no problem for aqua farms as long as there´s enough water.

You would confuse everyone if you would make the economy settings of clay not working anymore - like that - instead of simply removing those settings. I think it would be better if stopping clay pits wouldn't stop the aqua farms. The economy settings of clay pits shouldn't be removed...

I don´t think the double-edged sword needs renaming though

It sounds rather like a metaphor than a weapon... Short/long/broad swords have usually two edges as well, if I'm not mistaken.

Edited: 2018-05-24, 19:30

Wanted to save the world, then I got widetracked

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hessenfarmer
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Joined: 2014-12-11, 23:16
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Posted at: 2018-05-25, 00:50

WorldSavior wrote:

No, I can't...

Ok. that is a pity but ok.

Depends on further arguments. Right now I'm only convinced that the frisian coal mines could need a speedup.

(For me the most important issues are normalizing wares per ressource to 1 for all tribes,

Well, resources have different costs, and the numbers of wares could also stay like they are.

What I meant is that one mining ressource in the map should only deliver one ware for each tribe which is currently not the case. I thought this was the starting point of your project to fix the mines. However I maybe wrong.

have a look in the very fast coal production of the Atlanteans,

The Atlantean coal mine is slower than the Barbarian deepest, and the imperial deepest is not much slower. So I think that it's okay...

Ok I see your point. it is not that important. However as Atlanteans don't need to upgrade their mines they should be slightly slower than the fastest improved mines of the other tribes. Don't you think. But this is only a small change with possible neglegible effect.

the barbarians dep iron mine seems to be faulty,

Well, it is very inefficient, but one can manage to skip it always, so I don't think that a change is necessary

compared to the deep goldmine it just seems to be faulty. i would have expected it to have comnparable if not slightly better values than the deep goldmine. At least this would fit the other tribes and other improvement stages. And the possibility to skip the mine is not a solution as most players are not aware of this fact.

and increase frisian coal production per second a bit.)

I didn't plan to change frisian mines, but when I change other mines, i can maybe also change the frisian ones. I could tell first what I would change, and maybe I could also change other buildings.

my idea was that we shouldn't do changes in the same area in parallel. So in my opinion the mining topic fits better in your project than in mine as it is not a purely frisians problem.

Theoretically there can be comma numbers, for example if two wares are transferred into one.

what I meant was we can't have it in the current implementation of the fur recycle loop.

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?

No I didn't see this yet. However I deem this to be just a little advantage as the reindeer farm produces a fur every 65 seconds and the hunter currently does it in every 3rd cycle which results to 105 seconds plus walking times of the hunter.

But the reindeer farm needs also wells and barley farms.

So yes this could be used in a team match but only at the border and it isn't that effective in the current implementation, while it still does the trick to provide some fur in the early game to get the seamstress working.

If you think so...

Why shouldn't I? Is there any other possibility? I am not that familiar with the options in online games.

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...

brick is definitly a shortage over the whole game. I normally increase the target quanttity to have kind of a buffer. But the frisians really need a lot of bricks so I still believe the value of 3 is ok. All other tribes do not use that much refined log or other precious materials for building.

Barbarians use a very high number of refined logs for their military buildings... And is it the case that the empire needs significantly less marble than frisians need bricks? (Marble in marble columns do also count)

Have a look in the build cost excel. And in the decomposition into basic material I missed coal for the frisians, so it is worse than the current values. However you are right for the barbarian military buildings they use a lot of blackwood but the frisians needs lots of bricks for the normal economy as well.

the most compareable building material is the barbarian grout which is used in largely les numbers than bricks. Please look at the relevant excel to see it.

Yes, grout is very similar. By the way, I don't have to look at the excel to know this stuff face-wink.png

I didn't mean to have a look there to recognize that grout is the most comparable ware but to see the whole picture why bricks are neede so uch by the frisians. Sorry to bother you.

I Know now and did so to achieve my best times although the cycle had been changed already. But in the later game the frisians still need more than 2 times more iron than gold so the cycle would be no problem. At least I did not discover any negative effects in the later game.

If you think so...

Any other opinion on this supported by some explanations would be highly appreciated.

But barbarians are slower than empire and atlanteans (in training their first perfect soldier). What about the fact that frisians are much slower than atlanteans? Maybe you should find out how fast you are at "Two frontiers" face-wink.png

Ok I will try this. For academical purposes I did all of my testing without opponent. Shall I do it with AI opponent? What would be a good result ( or you may call it a benchmark) there?


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