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Topic: Vegetarian Food

SirVer

Joined: 2009-02-19, 15:18
Posts: 1445
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One Elder of Players
Location: Germany - Munich
Posted at: 2010-05-19, 14:24

I disagree. A map that does not provide a small puddle of water for the atlanteans to fish in is bugged; it is not the fault of the tribe, it is the fault of the map.

Very same issue: a map that has no granit resources. No problem for barbarians, because they only get stone from their granit mines. Big problem for empire and atlanteans. This would also be a map bug.


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kraileth

Joined: 2010-03-14, 16:34
Posts: 59
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Likes to be here
Posted at: 2010-05-19, 16:23

Ok, if you see it that way... I didn't compare food ressources with mining ones in importance. My mistake then.

However I suggest adding a tip for mappers to mind that fact. I think with the official WL maps that's not a problem (even though I haven't played all of them yet). But I already ran into trouble in map Dry Riverbed when playing atlanteans. I think it was in position 3. There's more than enough water if you go southwest for some time. In case you don't, you won't get far in the map. Luckily the enemy is also far away. So if you already know the map, then it's no problem, but I like to play maps without looking at them in the editor first.

So the atlanteans will continue to rely heavily on fish and bread. But do you plan on making meat at least a little more useful or do you intent on leaving it rather useless? Or seeing it a more positive way: Is meat meant to be a little "bonus" to the food of the atlanteans and this tribe is more or less a two-food-types tribe? Since the hunter is immobile, I doubt that it will be used much. Save perhaps for the case where a barbarian tribe has gamekeepers at its borders.

But if it's not food that you mean by balancing that is to do for the atlanteans, what is it then? Do you mean tweaks in damage the soldiers do and that kind of things? Or is there any economic balancing that has to be done for them?

If there is still room for economic balancing, I suggest swapping the needed ressources for the corn farm and the blackroot farm. Why? Because the corn farm has spider cloth as one required ressource but to produce it your weaver needs spider yarn and for that you need (strange enough!) the corn that grows at said farm. While it is no problem for experienced players to keep at least one piece of cloth in store until you have at least one corn farm, it can happen that new players run out of it and get into unnecessary trouble.


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SirVer

Joined: 2009-02-19, 15:18
Posts: 1445
Ranking
One Elder of Players
Location: Germany - Munich
Posted at: 2010-05-19, 16:59

meat is for the atlanteans a kind of starter ware. It becomes useless, but it is sometimes useful in the early game. Actually, it is precisely as it was in settlers 2 for all tribes.

Balancing is everything: all tribes should be equally strong in total. That is if one has a benefit someplace it must have a upside somewhere else. It is very difficult to balance three different tribes, but we are quite good at the moment and we will get better when/if we start to collect the outcome of multiplayer games. I am very reluctant to change things around till then, because most of it is guesswork: we can't say which tribe is currently the strongest as we have to little data. My personal feeling is that the atlanteans are pretty strong at this point in time and I would not make things easier on them.

Concerning your last paragraph: there are already plenty of other possible deadlocks or near deadlocks in the game (not making a forester, not making a winery before running out of marble). We do not try to make them impossible and avoiding them is part of the game.

Note that I am not against changing stuff around in the tribes. But I need good reasoning and comparison to the other tribes. Currently, I am quite happy with the tribes.


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avengingwatcher

Joined: 2010-05-29, 02:32
Posts: 7
Ranking
Pry about Widelands
Posted at: 2010-05-29, 08:39

As a vegetarian, I feel obliged to point out eating fish is not vegetarian, it's still meat...you know just saying. raistware - an Ent race would be massively awesome. SirVer - Is it possible to create races yet?


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kraileth

Joined: 2010-03-14, 16:34
Posts: 59
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Likes to be here
Posted at: 2010-05-29, 11:32

avengingwatcher: If you have the time and skill, you can likely create a tribe. You may want to take a look at /tribes/atlantean/conf for example. Your best bet is surely to modify and customize an existing tribe first. Once you hit the limits of what can be done there, I'm sure someone here will answer any questions that may arise. People here usually prove to be quite helpful.


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ixprefect

Joined: 2009-02-27, 14:28
Posts: 367
Ranking
Tribe Member
Posted at: 2010-05-29, 15:01

Totally off-topic, but this just reminds me of a friend of mine who decided to become a vegetarian, though he still eats fish. When asked for an explanation, he offered: "I still eat fish, because fish are stupid!" face-wink.png [It was a tongue-in-cheek comment, and this was about a year ago. Not sure if he still eats fish.]

In the end I suppose there is a whole range of vegetarianism, and where one lies exactly depends largely on why one is vegetarian in the first place (e.g. I know some people who simply do not like the taste of meat). Each of these is clearly free to design their own tribe according to their taste. Whether such designs will be added to the official game is a different matter, of course.

And yes, it is very easy to create new tribes. As a starting point, you can just copy one of the existing ones - all the tribe-specific data is, unsurprisingly, below the directory called "tribes" - and then play around with changes as you like. All the game settings are in plain text files, mostly called "conf" in the appropriate subdirectories.

There are only a few things that are hard-coded in the C++ source code itself, e.g. the primary carrier type must be called "carrier", and I believe there are places which depend on the special names "soldier" and "headquarters" for soldiers and headquarters, respectively, but mostly you're free to change everything else as much as you like.


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avengingwatcher

Joined: 2010-05-29, 02:32
Posts: 7
Ranking
Pry about Widelands
Posted at: 2010-05-29, 21:32

kraileth - skill is never something I am in short supply of, not being cocky...just saying that it is usually time and desire, I think like most people. Once I help in some more productive areas, I might jump into such a thing.

ixprefect- yes, you are right there are different levels of vegetarianism, actually there are even different types of vegans. As a matter of course, I don't really care what people decide to eat. It's not my right to tell you how to live, what to eat, etc unless you are causing grievous harm to an animal so much that it would affect me. Hunting an animal to extinction as with whales, bothers me because you are affecting an ecosystem. A goat herder in Afghanistan or a truly organic meat farmer who treats their animals with reverence are people I can respect. Most people do he right thing most of the time, but the American factory farming has forced too many farmers to have to make horrible choices between their own morals and their livelihood. All that said my way of life is no more right than anyone else's, I just get bothered when people claim they are vegetarians, but they only eat meat a little or only eat fish. If you don't want to be a vegetarian don't but don't pretend you are something you don't have the conviction to be, it's hypocritical and makes me and others like me look bad.

As for the code, I know a little C++ and I am extensively trained on markup and programming vs scripting languages so neither bothers me much. I've only recently jumped to Ubuntu but I've found nothing to be hard about it aside from learning new key commands. In most ways it's far easier to do what I want to do in Linux. I am truly appreciative of the information and hope to become a regular as much as life ill allow.


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sigra

Joined: 2009-03-05, 19:02
Posts: 130
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At home in WL-forums
Location: Orsa
Posted at: 2010-05-29, 23:57

ixprefect wrote: There are only a few things that are hard-coded in the C++ source code itself, e.g. the primary carrier type must be called "carrier", and I believe there are places which depend on the special names "soldier" and "headquarters" for soldiers and headquarters, respectively, but mostly you're free to change everything else as much as you like.

The last few releases, there was no hardcoded "headquarters" anywhere in the C++ code (so if there is, it must be a recent regression). No need to have anything called "headquarters" in your tribe. The 3 included tribes just happen to have a warehouse type with that name. (There is "builder" hardcoded though.)


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