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Topic: Limited storage space in warehouses.

dreieck
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Posted at: 2018-08-27, 11:30

ypopezios wrote:

@dreieck

Congestion-control algorithm prevents congestion, producers indeed stop adding new wares in the system, but the road-system is still punished for operating near its capacity limits. So the challenge remains for the user to do something about the situation, otherwise the economy will remain slowed-down.

And there is the possibility for quick and cheap short-time land-using storage: flags! If there is some land, the user can build many flags and link them with roads. The congestion control algorithm should be modified such that when one flag is almost-full, wares are transported with some preference to a neighbouring flag which is less full, even if the ware has no destination to go. If it has a destination, the route will get some preference to a less full but longer one.

This way the user can locally emergency-relief flags getting blocked by wares lying around.


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dreieck
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Posted at: 2018-08-27, 11:48

Hey,

einstein13 wrote:

From my perspective adding warehouse limits will break current economy look.

If you are comparing Settlers 3 and Settlers 2 (I will use S3 &S2 names), there are significant differences: [...]

Thanks for your elaborations on game dynamics. Very interesting to read, and it did teach me more about Settlers III.

Well, playing Widelands I observed that managing the road system seems not so importand (to the way I play, at least) than with Settlers II. It's one element of gameplay which seemed to be more important to care about in Settlers II than in Widelands.

Regarding the case were many natural resources have to be cut away to expand: One can still destroy wares by destroying the places holding them (e.g. a road-system). But this is tedious. You are right, such maps won't work well with this setting, if we like to play those maps with limited warehouse option enabled we would need some kind of "waste dump"/ "waste burner", or like:

  • Logs can be burned,
  • with stones another worker can build a wall somewhere else (which could be converted back to stones by a quarry). That wall will of course be a barrier. The wall-builder need to be assigned a working area, and if it is a real area and not a one-dimensional stripe it has to start in the centre (because later it cannot reach it anymore).
Edited: 2018-08-27, 11:55

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kaputtnik
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Posted at: 2018-08-27, 19:09

If the community agree to have this feature, i would vote for implementing it on a per map basis, not as a general option. This way old maps wouldn't be affected. Not sure if it is worth the work though.


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hessenfarmer
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Posted at: 2018-08-27, 20:51

-1 from my side. I just don't see the advantage that would justify the very big effort needed to implement this.
Furhtermore I agree with einstein. S3 storage was a totally different concept to widelands. Even in the current design it is recommendable for various reasons to have a bunch of warehouses strategically placed over the map and except of stones there isn't a ware that is not useful in the game.
In some corner cases it is even necessary to pile up some ressources while not needed to be used later on due to limited space for production buildings.


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king_of_nowhere
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Posted at: 2018-08-27, 21:13

-1. It would become really annoying to manage for large maps with big economies, and it wouldn't add anything of value, imo.

dreieck wrote:

Well, playing Widelands I observed that managing the road system seems not so importand (to the way I play, at least) than with Settlers II. It's one element of gameplay which seemed to be more important to care about in Settlers II than in Widelands.

Depends on the map.

If you have a small map with a small economy, roads aren't really all that important.

But on a big map? They are vital. Earlier this year there was a tournament for who would make the biggest economy in single player. i was limited not by how many farms or mines i could build, but by how many wares my transportation network could carry. Efficient transport is the key in all big maps. Transport is also the primary weakness of AI on large maps, the factor preventing it from getting strong.


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Ex-Member
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Posted at: 2018-08-28, 10:27

Needless to say, perhaps, but with so many against this idea I am very much in favour of it.

Small store houses near mines would help buffer food for miners and ores from them just as one example. It might help stop ore travelling three times around the map to get to a smelter because the destination is set as the ware is produced. Going to store houses near the mine before getting sent to a smelter might send it to a nearby smelter. I can think of many cases where small stores (say 10 wares capacity) could improve management of the economy.


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ypopezios
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Posted at: 2018-08-28, 21:21

Nothing new here. Still I remain impressed by the level of conservatism of this community (as a whole), no matter if a suggestion is revolutionary and breaking or just an optional imitation of Settlers. The funny thing is how some arguments are merely efforts to reword "I'm allergic to changes"...


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einstein13
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Posted at: 2018-08-28, 23:10

Especially with people who like the idea, people who has a workaround and people with logic arguments against (not "allergic").

But going back to the topic: what about introducing small building which would work as a limited warehouse? Then standard warehouse can be a bit more expensive and Widelands as a whole will work as before, plus some features face-smile.png .


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WorldSavior
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Posted at: 2018-08-28, 23:26

ypopezios wrote:

Nothing new here. Still I remain impressed by the level of conservatism of this community (as a whole), no matter if a suggestion is revolutionary and breaking or just an optional imitation of Settlers. The funny thing is how some arguments are merely efforts to reword "I'm allergic to changes"...

Changes can damage Widelands and this should be avoided. And if one wants to change something - maybe it's time to find out what Widelands really needs? Ages ago there was a poll and maybe it's time to make a similar poll.

einstein13 wrote:

But going back to the topic: what about introducing small building which would work as a limited warehouse? Then standard warehouse can be a bit more expensive and Widelands as a whole will work as before, plus some features face-smile.png .

I would be against it. It's not really a meaningful change...


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ypopezios
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Posted at: 2018-08-29, 08:01

WorldSavior wrote:

Changes can damage Widelands and this should be avoided.

The fact that any change can potentially damage Widelands, cannot justify a default negative stance to changes in general. After all, how many times in the past Widelands got damaged by a change? How big a damage was that? And how hard was it to repair it? Especially when it is about software, the easiest thing is to revert a change.

Moreover, the vast majority of arguments against specific changes have been about their side-effects, not about the changes themselves. And instead of focusing on what's wrong with Widelands that makes it theoretically so fragile to changes, people go the easy way of simply rejecting them, often without even checking if the side-effects are actual or just a fear. This is a case where good is the enemy of better.

Just to be clear, I'm not that much interested myself in the specific change about warehouses. My main concern is the general mentality that discourages creativity and kills motivation. I could easily write various counter-arguments on how what people consider to be a big change (i.e. a big threat to Widelands) is merely an extra dimension (here capacity) which can be designed to be orthogonal to the rest of the game, hardly hurting it at all. But I find it increasingly unworthy to reason against mindsets. It is an irony that Wide-lands is suffering from narrow-ness.


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