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Topic: Ware priority buttons in construction sites

fuchur

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Posted at: 2015-05-10, 22:34

Does anybody use the ware priority buttons? In a recent game I had several new construction sites, and due to lack of wood I wanted to control which of them should be finished first (like a forrester). But it seemed that setting the priority for wood in these sites to high had no effect. Now I searched a little bit and found an older comment that the setting has only a limited influence: https://wl.widelands.org/forum/post/2373/ . As I didn't know better I expected that if I set a ware to high priority the construction site will get this special ware before any construction site with lower priority.

I understand that this kind of behaviour I expected will be problematic for production sites, but I think it could be useful for construction sites.


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king_of_nowhere
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Posted at: 2015-05-11, 00:59

fuchur wrote:

Does anybody use the ware priority buttons? In a recent game I had several new construction sites, and due to lack of wood I wanted to control which of them should be finished first (like a forrester). But it seemed that setting the priority for wood in these sites to high had no effect. Now I searched a little bit and found an older comment that the setting has only a limited influence: https://wl.widelands.org/forum/post/2373/ . As I didn't know better I expected that if I set a ware to high priority the construction site will get this special ware before any construction site with lower priority.

I understand that this kind of behaviour I expected will be problematic for production sites, but I think it could be useful for construction sites.

I do use them, but rarely, because it is a better tactic to avoid making more buildings than you have resources. Anyway yes, they increase the chance resources will get there, but only moderately. especially when there are many buildings requiring the same resource, so the chance that it would go to any specific place is minimal. What i do instead, if i want to prioritize a certain construction for real, is to stop the input of that ware on the other construction altogether. that's what's useful for construction sites. yes, you have to manually stop all the buildings you don't want to prioritize, but you don't have that many buildings in constructions generally.

Edited: 2015-05-11, 01:00

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GunChleoc
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Posted at: 2015-05-11, 08:58

I think it might be a good idea to give the high priority in construction sites a higher priority - it is what the player expects, and confusing when it doesn't happen noticeably.


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einstein13
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Posted at: 2015-05-11, 13:46

Hey!

I've discovered settlers III (one more time in my life) few days ago. There is also "high priority" button for buildings. But that behaviour is much more strict: if you push it in any building, others don't build at all, before high priority is built. So the behaviour is much more strict.

In Widelands all the buildings are buildable (workers are on the correct places), so that stric behaviour is almost impossible to do, also it is useless to make so strict rules.

As I can see, the wares are comming to each place with some kind of queue: one marble to A, second marble to B, next C, D, E... Oh... E has low priority! let's skip E)... A, B, C, D, E, ... (one E was skipped). For me it is good behaviour. Also very predictable. All the buildings are in progress and are built.

@king_of_nowhere:

You don't have to delete roads to stop wares to the building site! You can just micromanage that: click on the build site (open a window for building site) and set correct amount of wares you want to put inside the building.

Also you will want to partly build some buildings. For example with Empire you want to build Arena on small maps just from the beginning, when you don't have enough marble and marble columns for that. Upgrading the Arena for bigger Colloseum also can be set before you will get big empire. Why? Because You need those buildings as soon as they are possible to build. And it takes long time to build Colloseum. So You want to build buildings when you don't have enough resources. But You will only partly build them. face-smile.png I do this very often. Especially with this trick shortly described above.


einstein13
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GunChleoc
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Posted at: 2015-05-11, 17:50

einstein13 wrote:

As I can see, the wares are comming to each place with some kind of queue: one marble to A, second marble to B, next C, D, E... Oh... E has low priority! let's skip E)... A, B, C, D, E, ... (one E was skipped). For me it is good behaviour. Also very predictable. All the buildings are in progress and are built.

This is the bevahiour one would expect. I don't think that this is what we're getting though. I have seen carriers carry off the same type of ware to buildingsites where it isn't high priority. I don't know if that is intended or a bug that crept in.


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einstein13
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Posted at: 2015-05-11, 19:57

Hmm... Maybe face-smile.png But with Marble & Marble columns it works.

But now I can remember that not everything works as expected. I can see that with trunks and marble. Buildable materials and raw materials for planks and marble columns. Sometimes I need more marble columns (to finish Farm), but marble is not going to the stonemason, but it is going to building sites first. It would be perfect if wares would go to stonemason and to building sites in the same time. It can be like "low priority of buildingsite" = "normal priority of stonemasons".


einstein13
calculations & maps packages: http://wuatek.no-ip.org/~rak/widelands/
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king_of_nowhere
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Posted at: 2015-05-11, 20:15

I don't think we want the higher priority to be an absolute priority. for that, there are already other micromanagement options. I think the priority settings for buildings are fine as they are. at most, we could increase the percentages.

einstein13 wrote:

@king_of_nowhere:

You don't have to delete roads to stop wares to the building site! You can just micromanage that: click on the build site (open a window for building site) and set correct amount of wares you want to put inside the building.

Also you will want to partly build some buildings. For example with Empire you want to build Arena on small maps just from the beginning, when you don't have enough marble and marble columns for that. Upgrading the Arena for bigger Colloseum also can be set before you will get big empire. Why? Because You need those buildings as soon as they are possible to build. And it takes long time to build Colloseum. So You want to build buildings when you don't have enough resources. But You will only partly build them. face-smile.png I do this very often. Especially with this trick shortly described above.

Yes, that's exactly what i said. I never mentioned cutting roads - although i may do that sometimes to avoid sending a builder.


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fuchur

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Posted at: 2015-05-11, 20:25

@king_of_nowhere: You're right, usually it's better to not build too much buildings at the same time. But sometimes it's easier to create the construction sites and go doing other stuff. And other players may have a different opinion. While watching a tournament replay I saw one player build a lot of new buildings right at the beginning. And in my opinion life would have been easier if the military buildings would be finished first to get new free space. But it took a very long time until all buildings were finished.

Of course it is possible to reduce the maximum stock for the specific ware in all the other not so important construction sites. But then you have to remember which ones they were and come back after some time to increase the stock again. This is something you can forget to do. Or you leave all the windows open, which will block a lot of space of the map.

@einstein13: I never played Settlers III, so I don't know the behaviour there. And I rarely play the empire, so I can't tell how it works with marble and marble columns. I noticed it with barbarians and wood. There I couldn't observe a clear difference between construction sites with normal and high priority.

Like king_of_nowhere says I wouldn't suggest an absolute priority, but increasing it should make a clearly noticeable difference. Maybe construction sites with high priority will have a 70 % chance of getting the ware before all construction sites with medium priority will get it. I didn't think a lot on the number, that was just a quick guess.

I assume currently the ware delivery to construction sites and production sites is handled by the same algorithm and with the same priority settings. I rarely change any settings at production sites, so I wouldn't make a drastic change there. This could lead to bigger problems. A construction site is finished at some time and then the setting doesn't affect ware delivery any more. But for production sites this is different.


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Tibor

Joined: 2009-03-23, 23:24
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Posted at: 2015-05-11, 20:34

I just of curiosity played a bit with the relevant code and have done some changes - that would mean that priority is now absolute and wait time (how old the request is) would be secondary. It is working, optically looks good, if somebody is interested and would test it I could create a branch with this changes...


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fuchur

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Posted at: 2015-05-11, 22:33

Tibor, thanks for your work. Usually I play on windows, so a branch won't help much here. Some time ago I managed to compile widelands on linux, too, maybe I could test it there. Do your changes only affect the construction sites, or also the production sites?


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