Latest Posts

Topic: Relocating Headquarters

GreyBeard1107
Avatar
Topic Opener
Joined: 2018-10-11, 21:59
Posts: 3
Ranking
Just found this site
Posted at: 2018-10-11, 22:20

Great job by the devs. Thanks for the fun game.

So, is there any way to relocate your headquarters to a more defensible location during the game? Not having a problem, but some games have very good spots for establishing the 'center' of your empire once found. I often play endless game and concentrate on economic balance and growth rather than warfare. In The Far North there is an outstanding location in the center of the map that I would like to move operations to. Of course I can duplicate my original position and all functions to that location but I would like to abandon my starting position rather than tying up assets protecting that area and eliminate the long transit between the two sites.

I have spent a considerable time reading past discussions of ideas to get a feel for the development of the game over time. I am surprised I didn't find reference to this but it would surprise me if there had never been any discussion on this subject.

In any case I look forward to the enhancements in version 20 and compliment all of your for hard work and thoughtful discussion.

GreyBeard1107


Top Quote
WorldSavior
Avatar
Joined: 2016-10-15, 04:10
Posts: 2091
OS: Linux
Version: Recent tournament version
Ranking
One Elder of Players
Location: Germany
Posted at: 2018-10-11, 23:02

GreyBeard1107 wrote:

So, is there any way to relocate your headquarters to a more defensible location during the game?

No, unfortunately headquarters are un-dismantable and non-buildable

Not having a problem, but some games have very good spots for establishing the 'center' of your empire once found.

Hint: Often the headquarters don't have to be the center - warehouses at a better spot can do the job.


Wanted to save the world, then I got widetracked

Top Quote
hessenfarmer
Avatar
Joined: 2014-12-11, 23:16
Posts: 2646
Ranking
One Elder of Players
Location: Bavaria
Posted at: 2018-10-11, 23:02

Hi GreyBeard,

welcome to the forums. This change won't be complicated as the only thing necessary is modifying the lua file for the HQ. You could even do this for yourself in your installation to test it. All you need to do is delete the destructible=false line (as default is true) and add a buildcost line as for other buildings (the port would be a comparable building perhaps). I wouild not be against this change although I need to test this and we need consensus on that. Furthermore this is probably related to the garrisoned warehouse discussion which will hopefully part of b21 as it is the enabler for having attackable ports (as far as I understood this currently).


Top Quote
king_of_nowhere
Avatar
Joined: 2014-09-15, 18:35
Posts: 1668
Ranking
One Elder of Players
Posted at: 2018-10-11, 23:02

thanks for the kind tone.

You can't relocate your headquarters, or rebuild it, but the good news is, you don't need it. You can build a warehouse that has the same function as far as storing goods, and you can defend it with a castle/fortress/citadel. Losing your headquarter doesn't carry any special penalty.

Normally, if you lose it you already lost the game cause the enemy has crashed through your front line, but there are some challenge maps where you have to move away from your starting location abandoning the headquarters to the enemy.

EDIT: wow, 3 posts in the same minute! coordinated posting

Edited: 2018-10-11, 23:03

Top Quote
GreyBeard1107
Avatar
Topic Opener
Joined: 2018-10-11, 21:59
Posts: 3
Ranking
Just found this site
Posted at: 2018-10-12, 02:18

Thank you all for your interesting comments and help.

Your suggestions for building a warehouse at the new location is what I was doing. The issue for me was the resources required to maintain the original location. As an example, once I start upgrading soldiers I cannot control which solders get upgraded so I have many soldiers travelling a very long way to the new location to upgrade and then all the way back to the fortress protecting the original headquarters. Since they are already assigned to travel back to the fortress, I cannot replace them with others so the fortress has less soldiers for a long time. Alternately I need to maintain upgrade facilities and all supporting resource generation at both ends of the very long (>35 flags) supply chain.

This is not in any way a complaint. The system works very well as designed. I was just looking for a way to redesign my empire in the later game stages.

It turns out that deleting the headquarters causes immediate end of game as loser. Not surprising.

hessenfarmer, thank you for the tip. I modified the lua file as you suggested using the port building for build cost and return values. It works very well. I am in process testing but it seems to do exactly as I was hoping. Once all foods and personnel are transferred I can now dismantle the original and even get half the build costs returned as an unexpected bonus.

I look forward to the challenge of keeping my supply chain unclogged and reasonably responsive while transferring all goods from original to new headquarters. I expect to have few problems as I don't intend to start the process until the new location is fully self supporting and I always build a few warehouses along the road as the supply chain lengthens. This should let me mitigate traffic jams. I have already learned not to do total warehouse bulk transfer in my tests.

Thank you again for showing me how to accomplish my late game strategy. I will let you know if I run into any problems.

Regards to all, GreyBeard1107


Top Quote
einstein13
Avatar
Joined: 2013-07-29, 00:01
Posts: 1118
Ranking
One Elder of Players
Location: Poland
Posted at: 2018-10-12, 12:19

GreyBeard1107 wrote:

It turns out that deleting the headquarters causes immediate end of game as loser. Not surprising.

I am surprised about that. It was never like that.

The end of the game is when you loose all your warehouses (headquarter, ports, warehouses) or all military buildings (headquarters, sentries, towers, fortresses, etc.). So building up a warehouse and a sentry, then dismantling headquarters should not end the game. If so- it is a bug.


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

Top Quote
Nordfriese
Avatar
Joined: 2017-01-17, 18:07
Posts: 1929
OS: Debian Testing
Version: Latest master
Ranking
One Elder of Players
Location: 0x55555d3a34c0
Posted at: 2018-10-12, 12:30

The end of the game is when you loose all your warehouses or all military buildings

Since when do you need a militarysite? I thought having one warehouse and nothing else is enough not to lose. A player is defeated when he loses the last warehouse/port/hq…

By the way, if a player has no warehouses, hq or ports left but an expedition ship is under way but no port spaces are free, is the player considered defeated in this situation or not?


Top Quote
GunChleoc
Avatar
Joined: 2013-10-07, 15:56
Posts: 3324
Ranking
One Elder of Players
Location: RenderedRect
Posted at: 2018-10-12, 13:50

Without looking at the code, I think the answer is yes. A player could drag out an autocrat game to infinity by not sinking that ship when there are no unoccupied port spaces left.

Also, the ship only has enough resources to build a port, so the resulting port would be useless, because there are no resources to build a lumberjack and a quarry.

Edited: 2018-10-12, 13:51

Busy indexing nil values

Top Quote
einstein13
Avatar
Joined: 2013-07-29, 00:01
Posts: 1118
Ranking
One Elder of Players
Location: Poland
Posted at: 2018-10-12, 14:47

@Nordfriese: I might be wrong here. Need to test it. I think that I lost one game by dismantling some military sites. But my memory can be just wrong.

About ship expedition: I don't think so. I remember one game when my headquarters was destroyed and I was building up a warehouse. I was defeated then. Even after some time the empire could restore. The win/lose condition check code counts only ready buildings. Under construction aren't counted there.


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

Top Quote
Nordfriese
Avatar
Joined: 2017-01-17, 18:07
Posts: 1929
OS: Debian Testing
Version: Latest master
Ranking
One Elder of Players
Location: 0x55555d3a34c0
Posted at: 2018-10-12, 15:14

Ah, OK. It´s just that in the game I´m currently playing, an AI whose entire land I conquered long ago has a running expedition which has been sailing around the map for over 10 hours now (and it can´t find a portspace because I own them all face-wink.png ), so I was wondering…


Top Quote