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Topic: Atlanteans 2

king_of_nowhere
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Posted at: 2019-06-08, 04:23

ok, here's my first report.

exactly how difficult you want this mission to be? as it is, it is a challenge map or a luck-based map.

I did something similar to niektory, except in my case the enemy did build a tower, so I was toast. can't think a way to jumpstart the economy fast enough. I may try, and I may succeed, but so far I think it is too difficult.

I also saw that red and yellow player are at war. Can't say I'm happy about it, because, again, luck. Maybe the two will kill each other, maybe one will conquer the other soon, or they will stop fighting while yellow focuses everything on you. Overalll, the mission could be mildly difficult or impossible, depending completely on factors the player cannot control.

One of the objectives is to build a scout, but a scout without a food supply is useless. makes more sense to conserve what little food you have until you can establish a food economy. So, if you want to have a "build a scout" objective, you should give a reward for it. Sort of like in ffrisian 2.

Most importantly, the objective about building a toolsmith does not mention the need for a smelting works, which I almost overlooked. And then the lack of a farmer. I almost consumed my last cloth without building a smelting works, which would have left me stuck. And if you let the toolsmith consume cloth, you may be left unable to build a farm. So, the objective should be something like "build a smelting works, a toolsmith and a farm". In fact, unless you want to trick the player into locking himself, you should not mention building towers until later; towers consume spidercloth.

I'm not going to suggest improvements because they would depend on what you want to achieve with this mission.

P.S. Don't take this criticism for bashing. It's normal that the first playthrough will reveal many issues.


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hessenfarmer
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Posted at: 2019-06-08, 08:02

Hi, Just a Short answer as I am AFK only on my mobile. Thanks for the feedback there is no bashing in it. It more the less confirmed my own impressions the Mission in its current State is a Legacy of SirVer and Nasenbär which I am trying to finish now and I am happy about your assistance.


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king_of_nowhere
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Posted at: 2019-06-08, 17:56

knowing the map a bit better, i tried again. this time i was able to expand quickly, build a few foresters on the front and a fortress to block the enemy. then the yellow never managed to attack me. the red conqueered the yellow eventually.

Still, hard to do if you're not prepared for it, and still luck-based, as the forest wall defence is far from foolproof. If you want the map to play out that way, you should give objectives for the player to do just that. maybe instead of "scout the island" make it "we have seen an enemy advancing towards us, plant a forest to stop him". and a few large building spaces could then be removed to decrease the chance that yellow player will manage a tower anyway.

The time is also tight. If you want the mission to be hard it's ok, otherwise you should slow down the yellow player a bit.

access to the mountains is difficult. A lot of mountain land just cannot be controlled, especially the big chunk in the south-west. expansion in the south-east is also blocked soon. Again, I don't know if that's intentional.

I expanded north and found the red player. it had a half dozens coliseums in the area. it's absolutely pointless to make so many. I don't know if that's a problem with the AI, or if they were pregenerated. If they were pregenerated, they are useless, but maybe you placed them for art alone. know that the economy is less effective because of them, though.


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GunChleoc
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Posted at: 2019-06-08, 19:15

king_of_nowhere wrote:

maybe instead of "scout the island" make it "we have seen an enemy advancing towards us, plant a forest to stop him".

I think objectives like this would be good - they have the side-effect of teaching the player a few tricks.


Busy indexing nil values

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hessenfarmer
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Posted at: 2019-06-11, 10:10

Hi everybody,

thanks for all the feedback so far. I'll try to explain some things and give you better understanding of the current plan which is far from being definite.

First of all some story background intended by SirVer and Nasenbär which I'll try to keep if possible. The atlanteans are still fleeing Lutas the water god. Now they have no other choice to land on the island with only some wares left. (e.g. almost no tools and only few iron and coal.) There they find two tribes at war, being in a very weak position for themselves. they meet with the tribe of a very ugly man (yellow), but Jundlina brings another sacrifice (after scarifying her husband before mission 1) by charming him and probably bribing him. So the atlanteans help the ugly barbarians to win over the empire (red). (There is another bend foreseen in the storyline but I don't want to reveal this by now.) So that was the basic story. And that Is why I set up yellow and red with developed economies.

Although I tried to set up yellow and red at equal power so far red one always won over yellow, but this is good for the storyline described above I believe. If you want to see how they were set up initially you need to edit the mission_thread.lua file in the scripting folder of the map. In line 11 you need to remove the leading "--" before p1.see_all = true. If you are doing so you see the whole map but attacking am AI player is not possible anymore. I am telling this just if you are curious. Although I would consider any proposal to change the setup if I can implement it. (The flood of coliseums was not made by me but by the Ai afterwards).

The mission should be hard but not too hard. Let's say perhaps on the same level as empire 4 perhaps. And it should depend on clever management of the economic shortfalls due to starting conditions and map (e.g. iron is hard to find). So we need to remove luck influence definitely. to achieve this I think it is best to build a scout and after detecting the yellow player we could leave the decision to the player if he tries to charm him or tries to fight both. in the latter we should have a real hard mission to achieve. If we try to charm the yellow player it should cost us some gold every x minutes, but we will be allied. which still will be hard as the red player gets stronger much faster then our ally. If we are going to charm the yellow guy we would have eliminated a lot of the luck factor as it does buy us enough time to built up our economy I believe. If we are going to fight we should deliver the fortress - forest trick to the player although it is explained in the first Frisian mission as well. We will also deliver that for a victory against both enemies it needs some luck. How does that sound to reduce the luck component?

Regarding the other improvements mentioned by King of nowhere and nieketory I will implement them, together with the logic to collect the achievement of the Objectives which is currently not implemented. Especially the map access to some areas will be improved.


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GunChleoc
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Posted at: 2019-06-12, 13:15

If we are going to fight we should deliver the fortress - forest trick to the player although it is explained in the first Frisian mission as well.

We can't expect the player to play Frisians first, so I think we can have it. I also didn't need it to win the Frisians, so I didn't even remember it.


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king_of_nowhere
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Posted at: 2019-06-12, 18:52

well, if you can spend most of the mission as ally of yellow player, then it becomes a lot easier. yellow is the one who's rushing you early.

the coliseum spam is a problem of the AI, it seems.


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simplypeachy

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Posted at: 2019-08-10, 20:58

I narrowly survived the initial barbarian assaults, aided by the empire player mopping them up. Thankfully I enjoyed a reprieve - just long enough - to train some soldiers and maintain a strong defence. It was a fun challenge to build up from having no tools and I enjoyed the desperate race to expand to find iron ore. I suspect that for less-seasoned players this map may be too difficult, however much I enjoyed the challenge!


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hessenfarmer
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Posted at: 2019-08-10, 21:55

Latest version on launchpad contains already the code to get an alliance with yellow player. However I can't motivate myself currently to focus on this task. the idea is to help the yellow player survive while building up an economy which I plan to make difficult by having regular demands of a tribute.
Anyway I am glad you had a good time with the existing fragment of a mission.


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hessenfarmer
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Posted at: 2022-04-21, 13:31

Finally I found time and motivation to finish this.
Any playtesting would be very welcome.

https://github.com/widelands/widelands/pull/5196


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