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Topic: my singleplayer WL experience, with some suggestions

lordoftheswing

Topic Opener
Joined: 2010-05-30, 15:39
Posts: 2
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Just found this site
Posted at: 2010-05-30, 16:39

Hi. I used to play settlers 1 in 1995. Alot. I was 12 years old and addict.

Thus one could understand that i was delighted to see a GPLed similar game. I am author of GPL software myself actually which you might even have stumbled upon while developing (in) html/css/js/php.

So here is my observation of WL:

1: I miss the kayak (water) roads. 2: AI doesn't deal with its environment properly, e.g. doesn't make extra lumberjackers when it's in a tree-filled location. Thus unfortunately continues building extremely slow. I actually played 15 hours (mostly afk) letting a aggr. AI alone. It never had attacked me. It had no more then 100 soldiers total. It had hardly found its way trough the woods. (was on the "far north" map). It didnt even finished it's dungeon building, cause it had already used up all it's diamonds on territorium claiming buildings. Had no food system, no mines. No nothing.

3: I would like to be able to simply k(l)ick 1 "master miner" from a deep mine when it has 2 master miners. So that i can train more master miners faster. I now have to demolish a mine first. I cannot believe that experienced miners are so attached to their mine, that you need to burn the mine down to get them out ;-).

4: settlers 1 had shovelers, they "bulldozed" the land before a building actually got build. In WL you simply can't build where the land isn't flat. I respect the choice however it would be nice to see them shovelers back.

5: i don't see the scouts walk around. Just see land appear randomly.

6: I played a game versus 3 AI's and the game used all my computer resources (game speed remained the same but with low fps). I can't believe that since i can even play Crysis on my system with acceptable frame rate and nice looking settings.

7: Mines seem to go empty too soon face-sad.png

8: Simply love to see huge battles screen filled with knights... So far i've unfortunately yet to see that. The game just needs abit more action as a sortof climax after all that building.

9: Would be nice to build walls like you build a road.. With a gate. Gate can be attacked and hold a soldier foreach building place the wall its on the fly selected length consumes.. However this would be just handy so you can stack all your soldiers at one spot when you're just defending. and would disallow attacking at any other place then the gate. Would be more interesting if bow shooters were added.

10: As a LOTR fan i would like to see another tribe , evil tribe face-wink.png

11: Ofcourse, in ancient days, ppl also knew how to make waterways around their territorium. Would be nice to see something like that done.

Ofcourse i prefer WL now above the old settlers games cause WL seems actively being developed. Maybe i will someday try make some music for the game, just for the sake of variety, since i already love the music that's currently in it.

Just my 2 cents, hope you like some feedback... I maybe give more feedback later or not, time will tell..


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ixprefect

Joined: 2009-02-27, 14:28
Posts: 367
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Tribe Member
Posted at: 2010-05-30, 18:13

Welcome, and thank you for the feedback.

1: I miss the kayak (water) roads.

Give it time. See the discussion on seafaring that is taking place right now on this forum.

2: AI doesn't deal with its environment properly, e.g. doesn't make extra lumberjackers when it's in a tree-filled location. Thus unfortunately continues building extremely slow. I actually played 15 hours (mostly afk) letting a aggr. AI alone. It never had attacked me. It had no more then 100 soldiers total. It had hardly found its way trough the woods. (was on the "far north" map). It didnt even finished it's dungeon building, cause it had already used up all it's diamonds on territorium claiming buildings. Had no food system, no mines. No nothing.

Yes, the AI is not terribly efficient. You're welcome to help out face-wink.png

3: I would like to be able to simply k(l)ick 1 "master miner" from a deep mine when it has 2 master miners. So that i can train more master miners faster. I now have to demolish a mine first. I cannot believe that experienced miners are so attached to their mine, that you need to burn the mine down to get them out .

This'll probably appear at some point. In fact, there's been a half-baked implementation of something like that for a while, but it has a number of problems (Dwarik, I'm looking at you :P).

4: settlers 1 had shovelers, they "bulldozed" the land before a building actually got build. In WL you simply can't build where the land isn't flat. I respect the choice however it would be nice to see them shovelers back.

We'll have to reconsider some of the calculations of where can you build what type of building anyway - see some of the other discussions on the forum. So who knows... I also have the impression that the ability to build big buildings disappears awfully quickly. We'll see.

5: i don't see the scouts walk around. Just see land appear randomly.

They walk around alright, but there are a number of bugs with scouts in build15 which are being fixed.

6: I played a game versus 3 AI's and the game used all my computer resources (game speed remained the same but with low fps). I can't believe that since i can even play Crysis on my system with acceptable frame rate and nice looking settings.

Most of the slowness actually comes from the inefficient terrain rendering, which is being improved - there's a branch with OpenGL support that you can try out if you like. There was also an inefficiency that caused slowdowns in large networks with traffic jams, but this has been fixed in trunk.

7: Mines seem to go empty too soon

That's a matter of opinion face-tongue.png

Note that mines still have a (low) chance of producing something after they claim to have run out.

8: Simply love to see huge battles screen filled with knights... So far i've unfortunately yet to see that. The game just needs abit more action as a sortof climax after all that building.

I see that fairly regularly, so maybe you just haven't come so far yet ;p

9: Would be nice to build walls like you build a road.. With a gate. Gate can be attacked and hold a soldier foreach building place the wall its on the fly selected length consumes.. However this would be just handy so you can stack all your soldiers at one spot when you're just defending. and would disallow attacking at any other place then the gate. Would be more interesting if bow shooters were added.

I don't know. This may sound like a neat idea at first, but I don't think it would actually be all that useful. Walls are useful in games where you have a small settlement and units that can move around freely. This is not the case in Widelands: Fighting is equivalent to changing the size of your settlement, so there's not too much point in having walls.

10: As a LOTR fan i would like to see another tribe , evil tribe

There are already three very different tribes. Keep it easy.

11: Ofcourse, in ancient days, ppl also knew how to make waterways around their territorium. Would be nice to see something like that done.

I'm not sure I follow you. Once we've implemented harbors and ships, they will obviously be usable to transport wares along a coastline...

Ofcourse i prefer WL now above the old settlers games cause WL seems actively being developed. Maybe i will someday try make some music for the game, just for the sake of variety, since i already love the music that's currently in it.

That would be neat face-smile.png


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edwardecl

Joined: 2010-08-31, 15:42
Posts: 8
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Pry about Widelands
Posted at: 2010-09-01, 15:46

I think he means waterways like canals? Would not be a terrible idea for transporting goods inland.

I would love to see the shoveler back though. I remember in the original settlers you could use them to cheat and flatten all your land by building the second tier building let them do their thing and burn the construction site and repeat all around your land, and have all castle spaces.


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