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Topic: Report Frisians Playing

Fresenius
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Posted at: 2018-08-26, 10:27

Hello everybody!
I recently played a round with the new tribe Frisians and I like to offer you my experiences. First of all it was fun to play and investigate. Some unconventional ideas have been realised.

Military

Education of soldiers is difficult in this tribe and regularly exposes them to disadvantage against other tribes. Perhaps I was just too inexperienced, but that was my impression. The tribe starts with building up HP instead of DE or EV and this appears to put them under stress. I found it rather unsuitable that the Helmet (leading to HP+1) costs 2 Iron and a coal. This is too expensive and given the overall Iron hunger of this tribe leads to Helmet production rarely taking place with the weapon smithy. So my suggestion here is to reduce demand to 1 Iron and a coal. This should result in more fairness in military build up between the tribes.

My second remark is over the "evade" property. My observation was that Evade is too strong in effect and puts a lot of disadvantage to those folk who don't happen to have it. Frisians don't appear to ever build EV values, so they also suffer disadvantage from that. In general I have doubts whether the discrimination of DE and EV makes good sense in this game as they appear to kind of have the same effect.

Economy

The economy is refreshingly interesting and sprinkling with some new ideas like the recycling center! It tends to be a bit confusing in the beginning, but that's not bad, and it offers additional playing depth. In the course, it leads to a blow up of grain demand when honey bread is kicking in. What penetrates my eyes is the huge Iron demand which poses a strategic challenge and might make some maps difficult to play with this tribe. Perhaps putting out the resource demand for garment would be an idea. You could perhaps invent a Flax resource and farm and root it to garment production, or maybe just Reeds.

Overall it's nice to see the game is under development!


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hessenfarmer
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Posted at: 2018-08-26, 17:31

Fresenius wrote:

Hello everybody! I recently played a round with the new tribe Frisians and I like to offer you my experiences. First of all it was fun to play and investigate. Some unconventional ideas have been realised.

Hi Fresenius,
thanks for your remarks. I'll try to respond to them separatly:

Military

Education of soldiers is difficult in this tribe and regularly exposes them to disadvantage against other tribes. Perhaps I was just too inexperienced, but that was my impression. The tribe starts with building up HP instead of DE or EV and this appears to put them under stress. I found it rather unsuitable that the Helmet (leading to HP+1) costs 2 Iron and a coal. This is too expensive and given the overall Iron hunger of this tribe leads to Helmet production rarely taking place with the weapon smithy. So my suggestion here is to reduce demand to 1 Iron and a coal. This should result in more fairness in military build up between the tribes.

The problems in getting frisian military training started are a little bit different from my view. First of all I think the helmet is not too expensive in comparison to other tribes. (e.g. the barbarian helmet mask has exactly the same cost). Furthermore the iron of this helmet gets refunded when upgrading from HP1 to HP2. However I could think of lowering both the cost and refund to one iron. But that will only have a small effect on the problem of building a strong military. The real ( and intended) problem is that you need weapons from an advanced building (broad sword and double edged sword from the large armour smithy) with more experienced workers to complete the basic cycle of a training camp which would allow you to have them trained in a training arena. So this is diffferent from any other tribe. So it will take longer to get military training fully running. Until then it is just recommendable to recruit new soldiers and probably train them with garments and helmets. The helmet production could be increased by micromanaging the demand for long swords as the production cycle is short sword, long sword, helmet, long sword. By setting the demand for long swords to a low value the smithy would skip this cycle if enough swords have been produced. But I will put the proposal to reduce the helmet costs in the thread regarding frisian balancing.

My second remark is over the "evade" property. My observation was that Evade is too strong in effect and puts a lot of disadvantage to those folk who don't happen to have it. Frisians don't appear to ever build EV values, so they also suffer disadvantage from that. In general I have doubts whether the discrimination of DE and EV makes good sense in this game as they appear to kind of have the same effect.

There has been a lot of calculation done by the user einstein to have some more the less balanced values which result in comparable chances to win battles with equal trained soldiers. So frisian are in disadvantage regarding evade but have a very high attack rate when fully trained. The frisians have no EV by intention due to the character of the tribe. A frisian soldier is pride not to evade a blow of an enemy like a coward. He is using his trained technique to block the attacker and hit him hard in return. So I think we should keep these values as they are, cause fiddling around with them has difficult side effects.

Economy

The economy is refreshingly interesting and sprinkling with some new ideas like the recycling center! It tends to be a bit confusing in the beginning, but that's not bad, and it offers additional playing depth. In the course, it leads to a blow up of grain demand when honey bread is kicking in. What penetrates my eyes is the huge Iron demand which poses a strategic challenge and might make some maps difficult to play with this tribe. Perhaps putting out the resource demand for garment would be an idea. You could perhaps invent a Flax resource and farm and root it to garment production, or maybe just Reeds.

In fact they don't need more iron then other tribes they need less of it if you take the return of the recycling center into account. If you want you could have a look in the excel table "training_new.xls"attached to this bug https://bugs.launchpad.net/widelands/+bug/1765746. It just takes time to get all the stuff running properly to make use of the recycling. But they are designed as a tribe for advanced players. Therefore managing them isn't easy at all.

Overall it's nice to see the game is under development!

Thanks a lot. Contribution is always welcome face-wink.png


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WorldSavior
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Posted at: 2018-08-26, 23:17

Fresenius wrote:

Hello everybody!

Hi

I recently played a round with the new tribe Frisians and I like to offer you my experiences. First of all it was fun to play and investigate. Some unconventional ideas have been realised.

Military

Education of soldiers is difficult in this tribe and regularly exposes them to disadvantage against other tribes.

Yes

Perhaps I was just too inexperienced,

no...

but that was my impression. The tribe starts with building up HP instead of DE or EV and this appears to put them under stress. I found it rather unsuitable that the Helmet (leading to HP+1) costs 2 Iron and a coal. This is too expensive and given the overall Iron hunger of this tribe leads to Helmet production rarely taking place with the weapon smithy. So my suggestion here is to reduce demand to 1 Iron and a coal.

I've already suggested that, too. It's reasonable.

This should result in more fairness in military build up between the tribes.

My second remark is over the "evade" property. My observation was that Evade is too strong in effect and puts a lot of disadvantage to those folk who don't happen to have it. Frisians don't appear to ever build EV values, so they also suffer disadvantage from that. In general I have doubts whether the discrimination of DE and EV makes good sense in this game as they appear to kind of have the same effect.

Economy

The economy is refreshingly interesting and sprinkling with some new ideas like the recycling center! It tends to be a bit confusing in the beginning, but that's not bad, and it offers additional playing depth. In the course, it leads to a blow up of grain demand when honey bread is kicking in. What penetrates my eyes is the huge Iron demand which poses a strategic challenge and might make some maps difficult to play with this tribe.

Which high iron demand exactly? If Frisians recycle everything, they need less iron ore for their soldiers than other tribes. But without recycling they need a lot. And they need iron for every training step, while every other tribe has got two training steps which require only food. That's why I suggested that a long sword should cost only one iron which can be regained by recycling.

Perhaps putting out the resource demand for garment would be an idea.

How?

hessenfarmer wrote:

Fresenius wrote:

Military

Education of soldiers is difficult in this tribe and regularly exposes them to disadvantage against other tribes. Perhaps I was just too inexperienced, but that was my impression. The tribe starts with building up HP instead of DE or EV and this appears to put them under stress. I found it rather unsuitable that the Helmet (leading to HP+1) costs 2 Iron and a coal. This is too expensive and given the overall Iron hunger of this tribe leads to Helmet production rarely taking place with the weapon smithy. So my suggestion here is to reduce demand to 1 Iron and a coal. This should result in more fairness in military build up between the tribes.

The problems in getting frisian military training started are a little bit different from my view. First of all I think the helmet is not too expensive in comparison to other tribes. (e.g. the barbarian helmet mask has exactly the same cost).

But the mask is the level 2 helmet...

Furthermore the iron of this helmet gets refunded when upgrading from HP1 to HP2. However I could think of lowering both the cost and refund to one iron. But that will only have a small effect on the problem of building a strong military. The real ( and intended) problem is that you need weapons from an advanced building (broad sword and double edged sword from the large armour smithy) with more experienced workers to complete the basic cycle of a training camp which would allow you to have them trained in a training arena. So this is diffferent from any other tribe. So it will take longer to get military training fully running. Until then it is just recommendable to recruit new soldiers and probably train them with garments and helmets.

Sure? I think that the first attack upgrade is the best one. Garments need the master worker first, and I'm not sure if helmets pay off in comparison to attack 1.

Economy

The economy is refreshingly interesting and sprinkling with some new ideas like the recycling center! It tends to be a bit confusing in the beginning, but that's not bad, and it offers additional playing depth. In the course, it leads to a blow up of grain demand when honey bread is kicking in. What penetrates my eyes is the huge Iron demand which poses a strategic challenge and might make some maps difficult to play with this tribe. Perhaps putting out the resource demand for garment would be an idea. You could perhaps invent a Flax resource and farm and root it to garment production, or maybe just Reeds.

In fact they don't need more iron then other tribes they need less of it if you take the return of the recycling center into account.

Not more iron ore. But more iron probably, or am i wrong? So they need many furnaces and recycling centers. By the way, recently i playtested again and i discovered that scrap metal tends to pile up. So I wondered: Maybe the recycling centers shouldn't skip their work steps when the economy doesn't need coal? That could be clever (maybe), because a recycled iron/gold needs only half a coal while a new iron/gold needs one.


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Fresenius
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Posted at: 2018-08-27, 21:29

It would serve this discussion (and perhaps other balancing threads) if someone with the knowledge could kindly update the "Soldier Levels" page in the wiki and supply it with Frisian stats plus also verify any other information there. It's not really good to discuss balancing without proper knowledge of the current settings.

Frisians are a bit too complicated. That appears natural in building up a new tribe, and perhaps it will become a bit more simplified in the process. My points about military buildup are two: 1) the speed by which some elemental advances can kick in, and 2) the effects of Evade. In both I see heavy disadvantage to the Frisians.

1. First Advancements
The Empire can set up fish and bread and can start advancing EV in the Arena. Atlanteans have to take little more steps foodwise but can advance to EV2 in the same building (Labyrinth). Frisians require Iron in all their advances plus a garment which is delayed in being enabled and also costs an Iron. Their first advances are only HP and, as I try to point out, are not a match for the easy to attain EV qualities of other tribes.

2. Evade Strength
Evade is very powerful and it sucks if your opponents can easily have it while you can't. I question whether the Frisians (in current settings) can hold the stress of an early conflict. It's not the case that their soldier recruitment is simplified, no, they have to pay an Iron and a smith's activity for this. Again this is not a match e.g. for the Empire's wood splines which suffice for a soldier. Evade according to "page" has a probability of 47 or even 64 %. This is WAY too much in the context of the mentioned differences of the tribes. The Frisians would have to gain huge HP power in order to compensate EV properties.

The question for the Frisians is whether it makes sense to suffer the early disadvantages for the sake of later attack advantages. If so this would render the Frisians as a tribe for large maps (large building space) only. I have doubts whether this can be held as then this tribe cannot be mixed with the random AI setting, for instance. Hence making life easier for them to build up HP values is a minimum of measures to be taken.

- HP1 with 1 bread and 1 beer
- HP2 with a plated fur (2 plated furs for 1 iron and 2 furs / 2 garments)
- HP3 for a long sword and 1 beer

More to that I suggest to consider

- eliminate the first step in garment production and replace it with furs. So for soldiers it only takes a sword and a fur to recruits. Then Plated Fur could more easily be produced, too and some valuable land space saved. As I said, the tribe is somewhat too complicated now.

In order to compensate the EV threat, HP values for the levels 1 to 3 have to be made real stout, or otherwise EV considerably nerved with all the tribes.


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WorldSavior
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Posted at: 2018-08-28, 01:43

Fresenius wrote:

  1. First Advancements The Empire can set up fish and bread and can start advancing EV in the Arena. Atlanteans have to take little more steps foodwise but can advance to EV2 in the same building (Labyrinth). Frisians require Iron in all their advances plus a garment which is delayed in being enabled and also costs an Iron. Their first advances are only HP and, as I try to point out, are not a match for the easy to attain EV qualities of other tribes.

That's true, but better than the HP update is the attack 1 update which is approximately as good as both barbarian EV updates together (By the way, Frisian basic soldiers are stronger than imperial and barbarian ones, and they start with more than atlanteans do (which have almost the same power)).

  1. Evade Strength Evade is very powerful and it sucks if your opponents can easily have it while you can't. I question whether the Frisians (in current settings) can hold the stress of an early conflict.

I think they can - because of their strong soldiers which are not super expensive. Frisians just cannot win in a late conflict.

It's not the case that their soldier recruitment is simplified, no, they have to pay an Iron and a smith's activity for this. Again this is not a match e.g. for the Empire's wood splines which suffice for a soldier.

Actually imperial soldiers require also a helmet, so their soldiers are probably not cheaper than frisian ones.

Evade according to "page" has a probability of 47 or even 64 %. This is WAY too much in the context of the mentioned differences of the tribes. The Frisians would have to gain huge HP power in order to compensate EV properties.

Frisians have good defense stats, that can also compensate evade.

The question for the Frisians is whether it makes sense to suffer the early disadvantages for the sake of later attack advantages.

Do they have there advantages? I don't think so.

  • HP1 with 1 bread and 1 beer
  • HP2 with a plated fur (2 plated furs for 1 iron and 2 furs / 2 garments)
  • HP3 for a long sword and 1 beer

Weapons give usually an attack bonus, no HP bonus...

In order to compensate the EV threat, HP values for the levels 1 to 3 have to be made real stout, or otherwise EV considerably nerved with all the tribes.

The plan is that evade gets compensated by defense and attack. Could work.


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Ex-Member
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Posted at: 2018-08-28, 10:55

I do not see why anyone thinks Frisians are more difficult to play than other tribes or that they are disadvantaged militarily.

Perhaps this is because I have played them since the first beta or because I seem to play differently than most people. Normally I do not do much fighting, that is the boring part of the game, but I also have never lost a military game using Frisians even if I never bother with much training, I often build one of each training camp and leave them to get on with.

With regard to delays due to training workers for promotions the current system is completely stupid, it is a troublesome minor hinderance, I have promotion levels set at 3 times the current levels and have more buildings that need promoted workers. If you are playing a game that takes 24 hours or more it is silly that you cannot do some things for the first 20 minutes, my method means full production does not get started for 2 or 3 hours. These delays are set for all tribes.


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dreieck
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Posted at: 2018-09-14, 11:34

hessenfarmer wrote:

In fact they don't need more iron then other tribes they need less of it if you take the return of the recycling center into account.

Btw.: Is it intended that in the first frisian scenario one cannot build a recycling center? (OK I did not play it to the end because the enemy did defeat me, maybe it would have come later, but it seemed that at some point all the rest of the buildings got available, but not the recycling center, and I played quite a long time in this mode before I could not stop the enemy anymore.)

Edited: 2018-09-14, 12:29

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Nordfriese
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Posted at: 2018-09-14, 11:40

Is it intended that in the first frisian scenario one cannot build a recycling center?

Yes – I deliberately disabled recycling, because there would be too few new stuff to explain in the second scenario otherwise. Also, the first scenario would be much easier with recycling. It´s supposed to be difficult face-wink.png


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dreieck
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Posted at: 2018-09-14, 12:29

WorldSavior wrote:

Fresenius wrote:

In order to compensate the EV threat, HP values for the levels 1 to 3 have to be made real stout, or otherwise EV considerably nerved with all the tribes.

The plan is that evade gets compensated by defense and attack. Could work.

From my understanding, if we compare just two soldiers/ tribes, in the end it does not matter if a soldier has HP, AT or DE. We have four variables, yes, but the parameter space can be reduced to two without loosing anything, and in a statistical sense reduced to 1. I tried to argument it here.

Edited: 2018-09-18, 11:33

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GunChleoc
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Posted at: 2018-09-14, 18:55

Fresenius wrote:

It would serve this discussion (and perhaps other balancing threads) if someone with the knowledge could kindly update the "Soldier Levels" page in the wiki and supply it with Frisian stats plus also verify any other information there. It's not really good to discuss balancing without proper knowledge of the current settings.

Hi Fresenius,

Would you like to help us with that? The current stats can be accessed via the in-game help, so you could source the numbers there. We don't have the source file for the image as far as I know, so whoever takes this on will need to start from scratch.


Busy indexing nil values

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