Topic: Give me ideas for new challenge maps

I just had three more ideas:

• a map without any stone

• a map with up to 16 players

• a challenge map where the AI should have trading outposts, not headquarters again

Funny : I uploaded an 8 player map recently that has few stones (a couple of rocks and place for 1 mine halfway to your first opponent), and I wanted to try it in FFA with AI with trading outpost.

I played yesterday a game on an other map where I gave the IA trading outpost, I think it's a good idea.

As for new ideas, what about these one :

The logistic nightmare. seafaring map (or not but it popped in my head as one) where you HAVE TO have shitty building placement. No medium or big spots near your mines (coal /) iron/ gold are far away from another, all big and medium spots far away from eachother and generally speaking inconvenient spot placement, no way to make straight roads, only way to attack opponent is through a choke, such things.

No big spot would aslo be an idea, but I don't know how to make sure you cann't steal any from the defeated opponent. Except if you make a map where you cann't attack, only defend (seems tricky but might be faisable), you can adjust how long you have to defend with an artifact or territorial win condition (just puting the lat artifact behind a more or less huge wall of stones or sth like that). Well, I let the idea in the air, but I just realised that other tribes (I have to try other tribes than barbarians more seriously :p ) have training buildings that fit on medium spots. Might not be balanced ! then again, if it's to play against AI, it doesn't necessarely have to be balanced.

I thought of a vegetarian or vegan challenge, but it seems quite complicated. For barbarians (all tribes?) it means no upgrade and for some other it means no seafaring right? Maybe I'll try to think of a vegan tribe Plus I think gamekeeper can produce animals out of thin air, right ? (they don't need pre-existing animals on the map contrary to fish breeders iirc)

That was it for now, I'll think of other ideas.

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king_of_nowhere wrote:

BoeseKaiser wrote:

No big spot would aslo be an idea,

if you have no big spots, then you cannot build an economy. if you are not building an economy, then you are not playing widelands. I'm all for limiting availability of stuff to make a challenge, but the challenge should be surmountable to make sense as a challenge.

Yep, I've thought of the idea a bit more and came to the same conclusion. Not every idea can be good. I guess scarcyty of big spaces could be a mechanism to exploit, but I don't know how.

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BoeseKaiser wrote:

king_of_nowhere wrote:

BoeseKaiser wrote:

No big spot would aslo be an idea,

if you have no big spots, then you cannot build an economy. if you are not building an economy, then you are not playing widelands. I'm all for limiting availability of stuff to make a challenge, but the challenge should be surmountable to make sense as a challenge.

Yep, I've thought of the idea a bit more and came to the same conclusion. Not every idea can be good. I guess scarcyty of big spaces could be a mechanism to exploit, but I don't know how.

See "Fjords" and "Archipelago Sea"

BoeseKaiser wrote:

I just had three more ideas:

• a map without any stone

• a map with up to 16 players

• a challenge map where the AI should have trading outposts, not headquarters again

Funny : I uploaded an 8 player map recently that has few stones (a couple of rocks and place for 1 mine halfway to your first opponent), and I wanted to try it in FFA with AI with trading outpost.

That map looks very interesting

As for new ideas, what about these one :

The logistic nightmare. seafaring map (or not but it popped in my head as one) where you HAVE TO have shitty building placement. No medium or big spots near your mines (coal /) iron/ gold are far away from another, all big and medium spots far away from eachother and generally speaking inconvenient spot placement, no way to make straight roads, only way to attack opponent is through a choke, such things.

Do you know the map "dust in the wind"?

No big spot would aslo be an idea, but I don't know how to make sure you cann't steal any from the defeated opponent.

Big building spots? Only barbarians and frisians can create some economy then, and even they are very limited.

Except if you make a map where you cann't attack, only defend (seems tricky but might be faisable),

There is alread such a map: "No metal challenge"

you can adjust how long you have to defend with an artifact or territorial win condition (just puting the lat artifact behind a more or less huge wall of stones or sth like that).

That sounds clever and could be a nice upgrade for "No metal challenge".

Well, I let the idea in the air, but I just realised that other tribes (I have to try other tribes than barbarians more seriously :p ) have training buildings that fit on medium spots. Might not be balanced ! then again, if it's to play against AI, it doesn't necessarely have to be balanced.

Only Atlantean dungeon and Frisian camp. The best trainingssites are always big. I think that it doesn't disturb the balance that much...

I thought of a vegetarian or vegan challenge, but it seems quite complicated. For barbarians (all tribes?) it means no upgrade and for some other it means no seafaring right? Maybe I'll try to think of a vegan tribe

Lol... It's almost impossible to train soldiers without using fish or meat (exceptions: Frisian long swords, Barbarian helmet 1, imperial helmet).

And yes, Frisians have to use fur for creating cloth, which they need for ships. Empire makes sails from sheep wool.

A new tribe would be interesting.

Wanted to save the world, then I got widetracked

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Yo! I played some of your maps and here's my experience with them:

"to make the desert bloom"

I've beaten this map with Frisians. I like the backstory and theme of this map. But because you can take as much time as you want to build up, it's not difficult, just long. Unless you build a military building close to the enemy and let them conquer it, bringing the fight to you. Then you may be in trouble!

I spent too much time conquering the entire desert, which was pretty pointless as most of it is useless ^^;

I also wasted one of the oases for fruit farms before realizing that fruits grow just fine on dry sand.

"No metal challenge"

I've beaten it with Frisians using recent trunk (bzr9141). It took me 11 hours to get a lead in military power, so it was quite tense. However, it took another 4 or so hours for the AIs to reach me. At that point I had a fair lead over them and managed to drive them off. Only 4 of them were a threat though. The purple player (Barbarians) had only poorly trained soldiers and I don't think they scored a single kill against me. The green player (Empire) failed to leave their starting position at all.

All in all, pretty fun challenge. The worst part were constant annoying messages about depleted mines. :-P

"concentric rings"

I tried it out using build bzr9141. Played Frisians, against random opponents.

I managed to zerg rush the first enemy (Atlanteans) with only rookies before they could train their soldiers. Finished them off in about two and a half hours.

Unfortunately I suffered some losses and wasn't strong enough to fight the second enemy (Barbarians) when I reached them. I had to play defensively and slowly train my soldiers. This wasn't going well as I ran out of iron and had to rely on scraps from depleted mines. I finally killed them off after 15 hours, although I think I could've done it a little earlier.

After that, none of the subsequent enemies posed a problem. The 3rd, 4th and 6th enemies (all Empire) all ran out of marble and stopped expanding at some point. It seems this map doesn't have enough marble for Empire AIs to play reliably, or they're very bad at managing it. Or both.

I don't know what went wrong with the 5th enemy (also Empire). They simply stopped expanding at some point without any apparent reason. They didn't lack soldiers, building materials or space...

I might have screwed up by not putting the AIs into one team. I didn't think it would matter as they can't reach each other, but it might still have affected their decisions.

After 50 hours I've conquered most of ring 5 and stopped playing, as it was getting really repetitive and boring at that point, with most of the AIs clearly being less challenging than intended...

I loaded a replay to peek behind the fog of war and I'm unsure whether I'd be able to get to the last ring on time. The last enemy (Atlanteans) expanded dangerously far, but were advancing really slowly at that point, so I'm unsure what would've been the end result.

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