Topic: making scouts more reliable
king_of_nowhere
Topic Opener
Joined: 2014-09-15, 17:35
Posts: 1668  One Elder of Players |
Posted at: 2016-12-23, 16:25
scouts are a sore point of this game. they are ok for getting a feeling of the laying of unknown land, but when they are necessary for some military actions - where you have to assault a fortress and the terrain doesn't allow construction of a tower - they are completely, absolutely unreliable. they go where they want, rarely exploring enemy military sites, and when they actually manage to see those military sites, they are only visible for a handful of seconds; you can very easily miss the only chance to attack in hours, or fidget too long with the number of troops and lose the moment when the enemy site is visible. Several fixes have been proposed, the most common being that of making military sites attackable even when covered by fog of war, of changing the scouting algorithm from a random walk to one that favors going near military buildings. nothing has ever been done, though, because of an insufficient (interest * programming_time) factor in the programmers. Here I am proposing a quick fix that requires minutes: increasing the scout vision range, either doubling it or at least increasing it by 50%. That would both make it more likely that an enemy building is sighted, and would make such sigh last longer, and it would only require changing a single digit in a fiile. Ideally I would like some more complex solution like having scouts gain experience to become trappers, make the scout tower upgradable to trapper lodge, and giving the trapper lodge neat new abilities like directing manually the trappers towards a sellectable location. That, however, is a long term plan depending on the whims of someone capable of doing it. I support a temporary quick fix. Balance-wise, this would certainly make attacking easier, but I don't think it's bad, because at the moment it is too random. The feature that would be conserved is that the attacker cannot send a soldier or two and then decide whether to commit to a full scale attack: enemy soldiers would swarm out of the defensive buildings and intercept the invaders well before the fortress would come in their line of sight, so the attacker would be forced to commit to an all-or-nothing assault. And the defender would still have the advantage of numbers and faster healing, and being able to counterattack whenever he wants. 
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GunChleoc
Joined: 2013-10-07, 14:56
Posts: 3324 One Elder of Players Location: RenderedRect |
Posted at: 2016-12-24, 14:11
Increased vision range would be the easiest solution. If we get a +1 from another experienced player, I'm all for it. Busy indexing nil values
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einstein13
Joined: 2013-07-28, 23:01
Posts: 1118 One Elder of Players Location: Poland |
Posted at: 2016-12-24, 14:28
I guess, that this solution is ok, but not the final one. Even if we change all the things about scouts (f.e. less random tracks, more control, vision for a few more seconds, etc.) we should stay with extended vision range. Why? Because scouts are experienced with extended vision range. They have telescope, eagle eye and they don't sleep at all (even blinking is prohibited for them). Just to see all the borders. einstein13
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teppo
Joined: 2012-01-30, 08:42
Posts: 423  Tribe Member |
Posted at: 2016-12-25, 10:43
I have been thinking of changing the scout to prefer terra incognita, and known out-of-sight military buildings. Would that be worth experimenting? I also agree with King-of-Nowhere: The distant site is attackable for a too short time, when a scout passes by. Adjusting up the number of attackers often takes too long. However, if is is possible to attack a site which is no longer visible: What happens, if an attack is started against an enemy building which is actually not there anymore? Should the attack start, and get canceled when the true status of the former site is learned?
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Hasi50
Joined: 2015-12-28, 15:19
Posts: 182 OS: MacOS Version: 1.2 (selfcompiled master etc)  Widelands-Forum-Junkie Location: DE - near Frankfurt |
Posted at: 2016-12-25, 11:06
teppo: yes 1) prefer unknow areas of the map, then target enemy military builidings, and in the end we need some more time to open that attack window, some 5 sec should be ok Here are the widelands where people may dwell, walking around care that evrythings well.
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Lokimaros
Joined: 2016-10-21, 16:51
Posts: 49  Pry about Widelands Location: Leiden, the Netherlands |
Posted at: 2016-12-25, 16:26
Having let my eye roam over this thread, my mind came up with the following ideas, that I'm just putting down here as food for thought, possibilities to mull over and throw out if impractical or undesirable: There are two parts to my ideas: A. A shadow map for each player: a record of where their scouts have been and what they saw, to display in shaded form after the scout moves on until fresh eyes update the location. The information would be: which player, to know flag colour and which tribal buildings to use, the road/ building type/flag condition, and for buildings, the stage they were at: being built (percentage), operational, being dismantled (percentage), demolished. This information could be used to display the visited area in shaded form. B. Scout levels, perhaps to be trained in a spy school with food. Levels or mission types I considered: A leveled scout, (if training scouts is adopted as well.) can perform all lower ranked missions, the type of mission is determined by adjusting a number added to the scout hut, like the number of soldiers in military buildings, but here it determines the mission type. Scouts never leave the hut they are assigned to by themselves, unless a higher leveled scout takes his place, but they can be sent away like soldiers, even leaving the hut empty for a replacement to come, the hut requests a scout type of the mission number, or the highest lower available. That way you can control which scouts go where. Scouting would work like this: Starting with the vision range+1, all walkable points about that far are checked, and visible/previously spotted points are eliminated, and if no points are left, add another 5 to range and repeat, until some unobserved points are found, then randomly select one of the remaining points, and go there first, from there, repeat as before. As an alternative to the spy school, a scout could level up from 1 to 2 when they reach the point of: no unscouted points in maximum range. Any thoughts? (Please don't kill me!)
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king_of_nowhere
Topic Opener
Joined: 2014-09-15, 17:35
Posts: 1668 One Elder of Players |
Posted at: 2016-12-25, 17:15
yeah, but the point is that all those ideas are very unlikely to be implemented because programmers prefer to do other stuff. the problem with scouts has been going for years, and those kind of soolutions have been proposed for years, and nothing was made. just increasiing the vision range is a quick fix. I fully agree that in the future it would be better to expand the scouting thing.
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Lokimaros
Joined: 2016-10-21, 16:51
Posts: 49 Pry about Widelands Location: Leiden, the Netherlands |
Posted at: 2016-12-25, 23:35
On the other hand, if/when such a programmer gets an itch, it helps tremendously to have a target for them to implement, rather than to have to trawl through reams of forum posts to find numerous ideas, but no consensus, in which case it's good to work to such a consensus and have a page somewhere with them, a wishlist.
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teppo
Joined: 2012-01-30, 08:42
Posts: 423 Tribe Member |
Posted at: 2016-12-26, 08:30
It is rather unpleasant to first implement something and then not have the improvement included into trunk. Actually, it seems that the scout now already has a preference for unknown land, but still has no special preference for enemy military sites. It was worse a long time ago. Edited: 2016-12-26, 10:31
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teppo
Joined: 2012-01-30, 08:42
Posts: 423 Tribe Member |
Posted at: 2017-01-15, 09:53
Is there a bug report on this issue?
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