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Topic: Improving default economy settings

stonerl
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Joined: 2018-07-30, 00:03
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Posted at: 2019-02-20, 20:38

@ WorldSavior: Are you gone propose some changes for the default settings?


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Goofy
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Posted at: 2019-02-21, 08:54

Hello dear hessenfarmer and GunChleoc,

finally I have done these tutorial missions! YaY! face-grin.png

...And I want tell you, it was very helpful! face-smile.png It reminds just to some relationships in an easy way, and it takes not much time!... Very, very good! face-smile.png

Now I could understand what hessenfarmer meant about some flags... face-grin.png Because I haven't expected to find it there...

hm... yes, I agree, maybe it is better to find it at a button in the warehouses... ...on the other hand, if you know, where it is, it is just easier to get it... face-glasses.png

For that special case to exploit maybe only one mine (close to the border of an enemy for example), I would need to set the number of the stored ore (or mineral, or marble) to a high number ...is there a maximum?... And in addition to be sure it is focused to only one mine, it would need to set the lights at that special mine to green? Or would it be needed to stop better all other mines, which are using the same products?

...At the moment I'm not sure, if an additional button at each mine would be helpful...? Maybe a button, which ignores the settings of the storing materials temporarily and switching the lights to green as to say: "Pillage only this spot at first", so other mines of that kind would stop automatically, because the limit of the storing material would exceeded by only exploiting that special mine and you had not think about a fictional number in the store-settings... face-upset.png

face-smile.png


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GunChleoc
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Posted at: 2019-02-21, 10:31

In order to prioritize a mine, this this what you can do:

  1. Give less food/no food to the other mines
  2. Change priorities
  3. Stop the other mines

Busy indexing nil values

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WorldSavior
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Joined: 2016-10-15, 04:10
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Posted at: 2019-02-24, 14:01

teppo wrote:

WorldSavior wrote:

Yes, fish is cheap for empire, while meat is expensive. Still, the production of fish stops at some point, and then one does not need to consult all the statistics to know the "burn rate" of remaining fish, and can prepare for a future with lots of saturated fat. As long as both fish and meat is around, the economy is slightly more robust against traffic jam -like disruptions.

Is the effect on the transporting system really so big? And anyway: As long as fish is available, piggeries are not needed. And if fish isn't available anymore, you need to produce meat anyway. So it's better for empires if fish is preferred to meat.

No, the differences are small.

So it's not a big problem.

Maybe this is since you probably know by heart the ratios of different buildings needed.I have not bothered to learn these ratios by heart => need to iterate a bit before having it right. Preferring meat would make all this easier.

Why is it easier? Iterating with piggeries is harder than iterating with fishers. You just need to know how fast those buildings are when it's time to replace fishers with piggeries. A fisher produces around 90 wares per hour, somethimes more, a piggerie 60, a farm between 45 and 50...

The benefits might be small, but since I no point preferring fish over meat (except Atlanteans), the benefits still outweigh the drawbacks.

For me, the drawbacks look not small but the benefits do. The drawbacks would be that expensive pork would be preferred over cheap fish, which weakens the empire.

hessenfarmer wrote:

After thinking a long time about this topic I would vote +1 for lowering the default economy settings as well. I really almost every time reduce most of them too. except for some advanced wares which I normally prefer to produce a little bit in advance to get more time when upgrading their consumers.

However I would like to see a proposal from WorldSavior for the values so we could discuss the things in detail. (Furthermore if we agree on the values we could easily implement them).

Would it be okay if I would send someone the lua files for this? I don't know if it will be fun for me to discuss everything in detail, including to write everything twice down (one time in the files, one time here). At the other hand we have feature freeze now, so probably i should wait.

By the way, thanks for starting this discussion as it led me to clearly make my mind about these settings.

You are welcome

Nordfriese wrote:

I think the default setting for fur could be increased to 15 or 20, 10 is a bit low IMHO.

I think that 10 is not too low... When I play Frisians, I lower that most of the times.

And I´d also suggest to increase coal target for Frisians a bit because of the high importance for bricks.

I'd rather lower it face-wink.png

Frisians should build their brick kilns very early, so often the coal is already reduced before the coal mines can start to work.

What I always found strange is that the settings for iron/ironore and gold/goldore are identical, in my opinion gold is less important than iron and should therefore be lower.

Yes

Because one thing I noticed from the tournaments is that the stronger the players, the smaller the stocks in the early game. A pro player spends everything immediately. So, going on the other side I ffigure that a weaker player willl want more things in stock.

Whether the settings should generally be high or low is a matter of taste and gameplay stile. I for one don´t care about getting supersoldiers as fast as possible, so I don´t need to spend spend spend everything at once; but I like having high stock levels to make shortages less likely, so I set the targets usually a bit higher than the defaults.

The new default settings should help the AI and all players. It's helpful when the settings are lower.

kaputtnik wrote:

I think the economy settings is a thing a beginner doesn't has to worry about. I played widelands for years without knowing what exactly these settings are about and what consequences they may have on game play. Today i know a little bit about them, but i can't say i understand the consequences exactly face-grin.png

Anyway:

My guess is that the initial settings are quite old and not adapted to other adjustments in the meantime. So i am all for adjusting them.

I'd rather suggest that stock setting could be decided before the game, as a preference setting. that would let anyone pick his own.

I am against such a setting, just because this would mean a player has to know what consequences they have. Having them as a preference setting would mean an advantage for good players and saves some time for them (because they won't need to adjust them during game play), which is also an advantage. So good players have two advantages if preference settings are implemented.

But it would make the game better because of bigger comfort. What's the point of limiting good players? Aren't they advantaged anyway?

Instead of preference settings i would like to have other places to access them (not at a flag): Warehouses (including headquarters) and ports. I think having the button at those buildings is semantically better than having it at a flag.

Why not both? Flags are everywhere, so they lead to easy access. I see no point in removing the settings from the flags...

Goofy wrote:

I hope my comment will be right here at this topic? :-S

To be honest: No. But at the other hand, Widelands discussions often develop into discussions with several topics at once anyway.

Goofy wrote:

For that special case to exploit maybe only one mine (close to the border of an enemy for example), I would need to set the number of the stored ore (or mineral, or marble) to a high number ...is there a maximum?

I don't know. I've already setted settings to several thousands once, which took a long time. That's why I suggested that infinity should be possible as a setting, I consider this as an important point on the to-do-list of the developers. (Or at least buttons which increase settings not by one but by fifty at once or something like this).

... And in addition to be sure it is focused to only one mine, it would need to set the lights at that special mine to green?

Setting (priority?) lights to green just makes sure that the mine will get twice as much food as yellow (concerning the statistically distribution), afaik.

Or would it be needed to stop better all other mines, which are using the same products?

Yes

Goofy wrote:

Now I have discovered, where I can find the economy settings... I hope... face-grin.png

It is inside the Building Statistic, if I click on a building there... face-smile.png

...And I guess, if I set there the productivity of a mine to 100%, it will always continue extracting ore and minerals as much as it possible by using the existing resources of food, beer and wine?

No. If you change the percentage in the building statistics, all buildings whose productivity are below that number are considered as "unproductive". By the way, don't take "productivity" too serious, it's bugged and wrong anyway face-sad.png


Wanted to save the world, then I got widetracked

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GunChleoc
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Posted at: 2019-02-24, 20:05

We will keep the economy settings at the flags too when we implement them into the warehouses.

Feel free to submit Lua files if you want, we can create a branch already and then wait with merging until after Build 20.


Busy indexing nil values

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WorldSavior
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Posted at: 2019-03-04, 21:19

Okay, maybe I will send soon something


Wanted to save the world, then I got widetracked

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WorldSavior
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Posted at: 2019-05-04, 12:51

Tribal-Chief wrote:

I saw on launchpad a proposal to set default wares to 0, (or perhaps 1) this is the best suggestion I have heard this year,

Oh thanks

but my comments to launchpad ene up in outer space or somewhere.

Interesting...

GunChleoc wrote:

Widelands already has a very steep learning curve, so setting it all to 0 would be too hard for most new players.

Setting all to 0 wouldn't be so good. But setting some to 0 could teach new players that it also works this way (especially with tools) - which is an useful information.

We decided that it would be best to allow players to define their own favourite settings, and I have created a bug for it: https://bugs.launchpad.net/widelands/+bug/1827696

Yes, that would be the best.

Nordfriese wrote:

Setting the target to 0 for tools means that whenever a new building is completed, I have to wait several minutes until a worker is created. No thanks.

On small maps, this is the best way. In most cases one has to wait until the building has gotten its input anyway. On big maps I sometimes don't set economy settings of f.e. scythes to 0, because buildings like farms don't need input.

Roads are not normally promoted one by one, but several in a short interval.

Really? I thought that it goes rather like this: First only the first segment of the road gets promoted, the others don't because there is logically no overloading yet. Then this segment gets an animal, so it will take some more time until the second segment gets overloaded and so on. Looks like there is plenty of time to create new animals.

Just one carrier animal in store again means a delay.

That the setting is "1" doesn't mean that there will be less than two animals in stock, because roads also get often demoted, or because the animals are still on their way while there are less than 2 in stock. My proposed setting is good for small maps, because aiming for a stock of 10 animals is a waste of resources there. (especially important for Frisians)

Metals and ores area quite important, just so few in stock is too little.

They shouldn't be in stock, they should be turned into something higher face-wink.png

And when weapons and foodstuff have a target of 0, then it´ll take much longer until I get a newly built trainingsite ready to run.

Not if the trainingsite is completed before they smiths are ready to work. And anyway: If the economy settings of weapons are bigger than 0, it's much harder to begin with training some soldiers to the highest level.

Inexperienced players will fairly often be in the situation where they need to produce new soldiers fast or get overrun, having only one basic weapon in store then is a joke that means losing for sure.

For me it's not a joke, but having 30 basic weapons in stock is one. My proposed settings favor training of soldiers, which helps against being overrun. And anyway, by default barracks store enough wares for the quick creation of 8 soldiers, this has also to be taken into consideration.

Nordfriese wrote:

I propose setting this merge request to Rejected, and I could implement bug 1827696 soon. Then we can add the settings proposed here (or on the forum) as a predefined alternative set of target settings.

Implementing this blueprint would be even more useful than my work on this face-wink.png

But why not making my proposals the default and the old economy settings the alternative ones? For example, why should barbarians have five felling axes in stock rather than zero?

Hasi50 wrote:

We would have to rethink all the Tutorials and Scenarios.

Why?

Some novice players may be trapped in on of the tribes special pitfalls even faster then now (e.g. trying to build a silk infrastructure without silk, winery without Marble etc...)

Because the mill will not shred all corn and because the weaving mill will not produce tons of tabards? Interesting face-wink.png And by the way I more or less only changed settings of barbarians and atlanteans yet, and settings of Frisian and imperial wares which are also barbarian and/or atlantean. So the impact on a marble economy is really low.

By the way, the settings of marble columns are not that low (10), which favors the marble deadlock because much marble becomes columns.

If you want to create a challenge for experienced players, lets have a startcondition like "Limited Start Resources" or such

Why do you think that my suggestion is supposed to be a challenge, or even a challenge for experienced players?


Wanted to save the world, then I got widetracked

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GunChleoc
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Posted at: 2019-06-21, 08:44

How would everybody expect the loading of the profiles with our new dropdowns to behave when some wares/workers have been selected?

  1. Update the target quantities only for the selected wares/workers
  2. Update the target quantities for all wares/workers

We had some disagreement there during ode review, so I'd like to hear from the community.


Busy indexing nil values

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kaputtnik
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Posted at: 2019-06-21, 09:14

GunChleoc wrote:

How would everybody expect the loading of the profiles with our new dropdowns to behave when some wares/workers have been selected?

  1. Update the target quantities only for the selected wares/workers
  2. Update the target quantities for all wares/workers

A difficult question without doing testing... but since i have tested a little bit i would vote for 2. with the addition to unmark previously selected items. I think loading something should always load what 'something' contains at all.

The problem with 1.: One has to know from memory which profile affects which ware.

In the end i think it depends on the way one uses the economy profiles: E.g. one can make Profiles for 'Build up' and 'Military', another one may want to have more fine grained profiles, e.g. 'More logs/xy' and 'Lower logs/xy'. Maybe this can only be clarified during play testing.


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Nordfriese
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Posted at: 2019-06-21, 10:50

A profile is intended as an "all-inclusive" packet of settings. It always contains settings for all wares.

If you want to make settings that apply specifically to one group of wares, that can only be done with option 1). E.g. if you want to have profiles "stockpile metals" and "don´t store metals", you don´t want to apply them to logs, rations etc as well. Just select the metals before choosing the profile. With option 2), it would change all other targets as well, which is undesired.

When you wish to apply a profile to all items, you can do this by selecting all wares or none. All other buttons affect only the selected items; it would be inconsistent to ignore the selection for this one.

I assume that you´ll usually apply a profile directly after opening the economy options window, when no wares are selected, so with 1) there would normally be no need to unselect anything to apply the profile to everything anyway.


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