This thread is for discussion about how to tune the economics and buildings so that it is interesting, and the AI can use them to expand as well as the human player.

Here is unofficial patch 1.2.2. The main point is to incorporate a lot of economics feedback from Ahriman. You can install this over 1.2, or over 1.2.1; it includes all the changed files above 1.2. See this post (http://forums.civfanatics.com/showpost.php?p=8215367&postcount=30) for the contents of 1.2.1. I cannot run 1.1.x anymore since I have updated to the BTS 3.19 patch; so I cannot put these changes into a patch like 1.1.5.

* AI civs now found their spice corporation as soon as it is possible. Using a high iAIWeight did not help; so I added python for AI_chooseProduction to force it. In a few games, the AI founded its corporation as early as turn 30.

* Reduced commerce available from spice from +5 per tile to +3. There is still some underlying problem why the AI's do not expand very fast. Making this reduction does not seem to change their expansion rate; therefore, there is some other reason they do not expand. However Ahriman's feedback is that the human player expands too fast at the +5 rate.

* Fixed bug, sandstorms can no longer capture cities.

* Reduced commerce of village, town etc by -1 each, back to vanilla levels.

* Replaced harvester mechanical unit with basic desert worker. This unit made a brief appearance in 1.1.1 as the "spice collector". In addition he can now cross desert terrain just like the settler, soldier and scout. The hope was that this would make the AI more likely to found cities, but it did not help.

* Drip farm can be built anywhere there is fresh water and some food (like vanilla farm), and no longer spreads fresh water.

* Soil enricher can now only be built on bonuses.

* Mines can now be built on any hill and give +1 hammer.

* Several corporations besides the spice corporations used spice as their inputs; removed spice so these corps no longer get huge bonuses.

* Added one more hint, about spice disappearance.

* Fixed some spelling errors in the TXT_KEY strings. Now you should get "stub text" for all text in the game instead of an occasional "TXT_KEY". Of course having real text instead of stub text would be nicer. Anybody want to volunteer? Enter text into assets/xml/text/DuneWarsText.txt and send it to me.

* Graphics: Crisper images for Rabban, Baron Harkonnan and Paul; revised main menu screen.

You can get it from here:

http://jendaveallen.com/fury-road/dune-wars-patch-1-2-2.zip (5 MB)

I do not understand why the AI fails to expand much using the current economics system. Ahriman has pointed this out also. It is not hard for the human player to get 7-8 good sized cities by turn 250, but the AI only seems to get 2-3 cities. The cities grow fine and have a decent population; it just doesn't show much interest in building settlers. In other archipelago mapscript games, the AI builds settlers and sends them by galley. I know the AI understands that settlers can travel on "coast", because in some autoplays the AI starts a city at some distance from its current one.

Can anybody suggest how to make the AI expand better for this mod?

As stated elsewhere, my biggest guess is because:
a) the civ AI has always kinda sucked on water based maps
b) the AI is crippled by an inability to build farms, that increase food supply.
c) the AI doesnt' realize that hills are really good food sources (through windtraps) and so fails to choose city sites appropriately.

My point about the +3 vs +5 rate was about the rate of economy growth, rather than city expansion, though obviously these are somewhat linked; bigger economy means you can afford more city upkeep.

The roots were slightly separate; the AI cities aren't growing enough in population and it isn't founding enough new cities, and it was slow to build a spice corp and deep harvesters and get them building refineries; also possibly related to an issue where automated deep harvesters in land-locked cities don't always respond to go and build refineries on new blows, so AI had fewer spice resources than the player.

Again a linkage though, because more cities means more cultural territory means more spice blows means more spice resource means more money.
I still think you might need to spread the spice corp wealth around somehow too, but this reduction is a good idea.

Will try out this patch (though DOW2 beta for big redesign also just came out.....), hopefully should address some issues.

I did try the experiment to spread out corp wealth and it did not work. Perhaps I did not study it carefully enough. I did the following using WB. Create two cities, put spice corp and bank in one city, put two spice bonuses and harvesters within each city cultural border. Look at corp commerce income. Put spice corp in second city. Look at corp commerce income again. If the second corp was going to distribute the wealth, then the total corp commerce should decrease, because the second city does not have a bank. I did not see any change. Therefore, I do not think there is any way to avoid the multiplying effect of banks and civics on the corp income.

I am not sure why the AI is not founding more colonies. But, I don't think it is because of low population. In the autoplays I did, the AI's were always able to get their cities up to 12-15 population by turn 250, which is about as well as I could do. Somehow, they are just not interested in sending out settlers. I also autoplayed vanilla on an archipelago map, and the AI does send out more settlers. My guess is that something about the DW resource distribution makes the AI look around, fail to see any interesting colony sites, and decide not to build settlers.

We looked into this problem a little bit before, and determined that there is a threshold hard-coded into the AI which sets a lower limit on the usefulness of a potential colony site. With the default setting it was rejecting basically all sites as not being useful. Koma13 had a patch before, which allowed setting this threshold via xml, so we could lower it. At that time (version 1.0) it seemed that lowering this threshold made the AI more interested in founding colonies. But that was on a different mapscript, and koma13 has stated that with the current mapscript, this threshold doesn't seem to matter.

So, we need "conclusive evidence" on why settlers are less frequent than vanilla archipelago. I don't think it is population, but I don't know what it is.

My guess is that something about the DW resource distribution makes the AI look around, fail to see any interesting colony sites, and decide not to build settlers.

I often notice that ai builds a settler but then keep it inside city. I know that ai won't send settlers out if it doesn't has an adequate military unit to protect it. Maybe too much danger in desert? Or it's the ai_foundvalue again.
I can create a cvgamecore.dll that creates a log file and prints out in detail which decisions ai makes regarding settlers. This should help us finding the reason why ai won't settle.

Several people have pointed out that there seem to be a large number of buildings available in DW 1.2, and many of them are not so useful. I compared the number and usefulness of the vanilla buildings against DW, in the first six levels of the tech tree.

Vanilla has 13 non-wonders and 13 wonders; DW has 18 non-wonders and 21 wonders. Some of the DW wonders are not really so wonderful, like nutrient convoy; it is not very expensive, a fair number of them are available, and the effect is relatively small compared to unique wonders. Still, there are significantly more in DW than vanilla. Details inside the spoiler tag.


Vanilla buildings by tier:

1. barracks, monument / stonehenge
2. lighthouse, granary, monastery, walls / great lighthouse, moai statues, pyramids, great wall
3. temple
4. library, forge / collosus
5. aqueduct, harbor / parthenon, statue of zeus, shwedagan paya, hanging garden
6. colloseum, market / heroic epic, national epic, great library, mausoleum

Dune wars buildings by tier:

1. barracks, city water trap, food warehouse, monument / aql monument, reservoir
2. food slik, monastery, spice refinery / water discipline, kiswa, pillar of fire
3. food silo, defense grid, temple / art of kanly, underground routes, house shield, obelisks of Muad'Dib, oracle
4. trade port, crystal database / weld factory
5. qanat, spaceport, house library / nutrient convoy, incense convoy, great film library, shrine of the worm, hajj monument
6. market, reception hall / silk convoy, spice convoy, harg pass, temple of first moon, great memorial

Vanilla building job function:

monument: culture at colony
lighthouse: food on ocean
granary: health, growth
monastery: spread religion
walls: defense
temple: happiness, GP
library: culture, research, GP
forge: hammers, happiness, GP
aqueduct: health
harbor: health, gold
colloseum: happiness
market: gold, happiness

Dune wars building job function:

city water trap: growth
food warehouse: growth, health
monument: culture at colony
food slik: growth, health
monastery: spread religion
spice refinery: happiness, GP
food silo: growth, health
defense grid: defense
temple: happiness, GP
trade port: culture
crystal database: research
reception hall: happiness
qanat: health
spaceport: health, gold
house library: research, GP
market: gold, happiness, GP

Vanilla wonder job function:

stonehenge: free monument
great lighthouse: food on ocean
moai statues: gold
pyramids: any government civic
great wall: defence
collosus: industry on ocean
parthenon: GP rate
statue of zeus: enemy war weariness
shwedagan paya: any religion civic
hanging garden: health on continent
heroic epic: military production
national epic: GP rate
great library: research
mausoleum: extend golden age

Dune wars wonder job function:

aql monument: free monument, GP
reservoir: GP rate
water discipline: culture, GP rate
kiswa: industry on ocean
pillar of fire: gold
art of kanly: military production
underground routes: gold
house shield: defence
obelisks of Muad'Dib: any religion civic
oracle of hajra: free tech, GP
weld factory: hammers, health
nutrient convoy: health, happiness
incense convoy: health, happiness
great film library: culture, research, GP
shrine of the worm: happiness
hajj monument: any religious civic
spice convoy: happiness
silk convoy: happiness
harg pass: golden age
temple of first moon: culture, GP rate
great memorial: enemy war weariness


For regular buildings, here are some proposed changes.

* I am not sure of the reason for splitting up granary into three buildings; merge it back into one.

* The trade port and crystal database provide only small benefits. Eliminate them.

* Rename spice refinery to just plain refinery. It has nothing to do with spice; it gives an additional happiness for mineral bonuses.

For wonders, here are some proposed changes.

* The idea of getting happiness/health from off-world, with a limited number of opportunities, seems like a good one. There are four convoys; some of them provide both health and happiness. Instead each one should provide +2 health *or* +2 happiness; there should be a small world limit of 3 for each; there is no point to a national limit. We can adjust this a little if we find health or happiness restricting growth. Also using "off-world" in the name instead of "convoy" seems to fit the theme better.

* Several of the wonders provide benefits at coastal cities. This doesn't seem to fit Dune. Without studying it very hard, we could just delete reservoir, kiswa, pillar of fire, underground routes, weld factory. In the future if we change water for health, we can replace reservoir and redefine water discipline.

Any disagreements or additional suggestions?

* I am not sure of the reason for splitting up granary into three buildings; merge it back into one.

I agree. I always ending up building none of them. Same for trade port.

* Rename spice refinery to just plain refinery. It has nothing to do with spice; it gives an additional happiness for mineral bonuses.

This seems to be a general problem with names in dw. They don't give you what they promise (eg. desert warfare).

Several of the wonders provide benefits at coastal cities.

Remember, in dw every city is a coastal city.

Remember, in dw every city is a coastal city.

Really? So a wonder which gives +2 Trade Routes in every coastal city, gives +2 trade routes in every city? That affects some of the wonders. Others which give +1 hammer or +1 food in ocean tiles, still only benefit cities which are really "coastal".

I often notice that ai builds a settler but then keep it inside city. I know that ai won't send settlers out if it doesn't has an adequate military unit to protect it. Maybe too much danger in desert?

You sir, are a genius. Based on your suggestion I turned off the worms and storms, to make the desert safe. Now the AI happily builds 6-8 cities by turn 250. That was the problem! Interested players can try this on their own by editing assets/python/DuneWars.py. Find the function onEndGameTurn and comment out two lines:


# Take multiple actions at the end of each player turn
def onEndGameTurn(self, argsList):
iGameTurn = argsList[0]
self.Initialize()
self.Dequeue()
(iUnowned, iWormCount, iSpiceCount, iStormCount, \
iMaxStr, lStorms) = self.Count()
# self.WormAdd(iUnowned, iWormCount, iMaxStr)
self.BlowAdd(iSpiceCount)
# self.StormAddSubtract(iUnowned, iStormCount, lStorms)
self.Thumper()
self.SpiceDecay()
self.SpiceBlow()
self.TleilaxSpy()
self.StatPrint(iGameTurn)


Comment out the calls to WormAdd and StormAddSubtract, and none of these units will ever be added.

Now for the real solution. I have made sandstorms strength 1000, because it would be very odd for a player unit to attack one and win. Similarly, I have made the sandworms start out at strength 20 and increase when the players have higher strength units. I will have to find another way of doing this, so that these units can have zero attack strength. I thought I had started a thread a while back about how to make units un-attackable, but I cannot find it. Offhand I am not sure how to approach this, but I will make it top priority.

Really? So a wonder which gives +2 Trade Routes in every coastal city, gives +2 trade routes in every city? That affects some of the wonders."

We edited isCoastal() to always return true. Else you could build domain_sea units only in some cities.


Others which give +1 hammer or +1 food in ocean tiles, still only benefit cities which are really "coastal".

Yes, I think it depends on terrain/plot typ. But you still can build it everywhere I suppose.

Now for the real solution.

There is a AI_getWaterDanger in CvPlayerAI. It calculates how dangerous a water area is (it counts all enemy units in a certain range that can attack).
We could remove all barbarian units from that danger count. This will maybe also help fixing that hover spam (only a guess).

There is a AI_getWaterDanger in CvPlayerAI. It calculates how dangerous a water area is (it counts all enemy units in a certain range that can attack). We could remove all barbarian units from that danger count. This will maybe also help fixing that hover spam (only a guess).

That is a good tip. It counts units with any attack strength that are not defensive only. I have made the storms and blows attack strength 0 and defensive only. Therefore only the worms are threats. This has one side effect, units can attack and kill storms. I have started up a new thread (http://forums.civfanatics.com/showthread.php?t=326631) to see if there are any other possibilities.

There must be some other part of the code which decides how many sea combat units to build. Earlier, I found that hover spam was greatly reduced when I lowered the strength of the worms from 100 to 20; AI_getWaterDanger doesn't care what the strength is. So if we hack that function, I do not think it will affect hover spam.

If I cannot figure out how to make units un-attackable, there is one other approach I want to try first. But it will be a little painful. In Gods Of Old, there is a plague effect which acts similar to the way storms should act. To the game, it is just an "effect" displayed on the map. The python in Gods Of Old uses some nasty hacks to keep track of the locations of these effects. I had been hoping to use units, for which the game will naturally keep locations and allow movement, etc. But I can write some "moving effect" code in python and just kill the units that I'm going to kill, without doing real attacks.

* I am not sure of the reason for splitting up granary into three buildings; merge it back into one.
* The trade port and crystal database provide only small benefits. Eliminate them.
* Rename spice refinery to just plain refinery. It has nothing to do with spice; it gives an additional happiness for mineral bonuses.

Agree with all of these. I'd basically make the Refinery a Forge substitute; primary purposes is for hammer bonus, happiness or whatever is secondary. I'd consider merging this with the Weld factory.
I'd merge a lot of the trade bonus buildings, have maybe 1 per era.

But the problem doesn't stop here; in Civ, many of the buildings are available in early techs and then there are fewer new buildings in later eras, but there are still many new buildings in later eras.
Some other later buildings: cut reception hall (or merge with the theatre one). The shrine of the worm or something gives way too much happiness (like +1 per 20% science is often an easy +4 happiness).

I have made the storms and blows attack strength 0 and defensive only
Another possibility; give them a 100% withdraw chance.
Or: try implementing FFH style attack/defense values, and give them 0 attack but 1000 defense.

Congrats on pinning down the issue, that was a very good find.

Another possibility; rather than just having barbarian worm units out in the desert which might scare the AI, you could make an "on-move" event trigger similar to how Treant spawning with Fellowship of Leaves works in FFH.

Any time a unit moves into a new desert tile, there is a small chance (maybe 2%?) that a sandworm is created somewhere nearby, within a 3 tile radius.

This will slow the mod down performancewise, but hopefully not too much.

And it has the added awesomeness benefit of having worms actually attracted by vibrations of surface units!
Would be even more awesome if you could limit the unit types that triggered it, so infantry or rovers or surface vehicles did, but maybe some hover units and thoptor units did not.

Then, you get the same effect of worms in the desert popping up to potentially devour units wandering on the surface, but you don't have to have an army of barbarian worms in the desert.

And you could have any worm act like a missile unit in that it automatically suicided after combat so that the worm doesn't then hang around on the map; after eating one of your units, the worm goes back under the sand again.

And you could easily make the worms whatever strength you wanted without scaring the AI.

Another possibility; give them a 100% withdraw chance.

Or: try implementing FFH style attack/defense values, and give them 0 attack but 1000 defense.

Thanks for the suggestions. Withdraw chance only works when the unit attacks. It is a common misunderstanding, but if you are the defender, your withdraw chance does not matter. Splitting up attack/defense is a serious SDK mod which is beyond my ability.

Another possibility; rather than just having barbarian worm units out in the desert which might scare the AI, you could make an "on-move" event trigger similar to how Treant spawning with Fellowship of Leaves works in FFH.

Any time a unit moves into a new desert tile, there is a small chance (maybe 2%?) that a sandworm is created somewhere nearby, within a 3 tile radius.

And it has the added awesomeness benefit of having worms actually attracted by vibrations of surface units!

Would be even more awesome if you could limit the unit types that triggered it, so infantry or rovers or surface vehicles did, but maybe some hover units and thoptor units did not.

The worms are currently attracted to surface units. The highest attraction is to thumpers. I haven't yet added a capability to have some units ignored either by type, civ or promotion, but it is somewhere on the to-do list.

The reason I did not make them randomly appear is that I wanted the player to see them coming. If you have scouts out, you will get more warning of a worm coming into the area. I know if I see a storm or worm coming, it affects my plans, and that seems to be a good idea. If they randomly pop up, then it is random and I cannot plan around it.

I will try the map effect only approach, and see what happens.

Thanks for the suggestions. Withdraw chance only works when the unit attacks. It is a common misunderstanding, but if you are the defender, your withdraw chance does not matter

In FFH at least (maybe it there was their tweak) and in Warhammer (based on FFH codebase) there is defensive withdrawal activated on some cavalry units.
I don't know the code details though, that may have been an option they enabled.


If they randomly pop up, then it is random and I cannot plan around it.


Agreed, which is why I would have the popup 2 tiles or 3 tiles away, not on an adjacent tile (or very rarely an adjacent tile).

But as it is, with only 1 move they are incredibly easy to avoid, and never pose a threat to any non-automated units.

It seems like Worms should mostly be eating deep harvesters, but you definitely *don't* want a result that makes it so you are force to micromanage your deep harvesters in order to avoid losing them. That would get frustrating and boring fast.

Agreed, which is why I would have the popup 2 tiles or 3 tiles away, not on an adjacent tile (or very rarely an adjacent tile).

But as it is, with only 1 move they are incredibly easy to avoid, and never pose a threat to any non-automated units.

The effect I am aiming for, which maybe I have not achieved, is that you should see a worm coming and decide if your worker should finish that improvement, or flee for cover. The spice harvester only takes one turn to create so perhaps I did not achieve the effect. What do you think about making that take 2-3 turns to create? If you get a big spice blow near you, it will take a little more time before you can see the high income from it.

It seems like Worms should mostly be eating deep harvesters, but you definitely *don't* want a result that makes it so you are force to micromanage your deep harvesters in order to avoid losing them. That would get frustrating and boring fast.

I don't tend to pay much attention to the DH besides occasionally counting to see how many I have left. On automation they seem to do well at finding any new blow and building on it. So I don't think there is a micromanagement aspect, or at least there doesn't need to be.

What do you think about making that take 2-3 turns to create?

Hmm, maybe. Hopefully the micromanagement wouldn't be too much, as the automated worker would still get activated and deautomated when a barbarian unit showed up nearby. Another possibility would be to give worms 2 moves (or double moves in deep desert).

But this would still work better with worm spawning than generic barbarian worms; worms could have a much higher chance of spawning on or next to a spice tile, particularly if it have a refinery on it.
would also be cool if worms sought out refineries and auto-pillaged them when they moved onto the tile.

So I don't think there is a micromanagement aspect, or at least there doesn't need to be.

I agree that there is no micromangement aspect to them now. But, if worms sometimes ate automated harvesters, there could be incentives to micromanage if failing to do so meant that you unnecessarily lost harvesters - and we want to avoid incentives to micromanage here, since its not fun to do so.
As long as automated workers get deactivated when a worm shows up though, this shouldn't be a problem.

But this would still work better with worm spawning than generic barbarian worms; worms could have a much higher chance of spawning on or next to a spice tile, particularly if it have a refinery on it. It would also be cool if worms sought out refineries and auto-pillaged them when they moved onto the tile.

Let me describe the exact worm AI. It does the first available of these actions:
1. Thumper adjacent? Destroy it.
2. Unit or improvement adjacent? Destroy it.
3. Any thumper visible in 2 tile radius? Move towards it.
4. Any other unit or improvement visible in 2 tile radius? Move towards it.
5. Move in random direction

Having them all out there means the amount of worms is independent of the amount of player activity on the desert. Popping them nearby to units out there seems much more fake to me.

Having them all out there means the amount of worms is independent of the amount of player activity on the desert. Popping them nearby to units out there seems much more fake to me.

Maybe, but I'd ask this question; if a sandworm burrows in the desert and doesn't eat anyone, is it really there?

I would say that there are plenty of (uncountable) worms in the desert, but they only actually surface and get noticed (and become a unit that the civ engine needs to keep track of) if disturbed by human activity.

Just because you can't see them doesn't mean they aren't there.

Another possibility; make them hidden like submarines, unobservable except to units in a 2 tile radius. Except hidden units will still probably scare the AI.

Part of the problem is that 1-move worms really aren't scary at all cos even infantry can outrun them; again with the double moves in deep desert suggestion.

if a sandworm burrows in the desert and doesn't eat anyone, is it really there?

Why yes, (types ctrl-z) look! There they are.

Part of the problem is that 1-move worms really aren't scary at all cos even infantry can outrun them; again with the double moves in deep desert suggestion.

I have been down this road with dangerous animals having a high movement rate. Actually literally "down this road". I am not sure if you have played my Mad Max mod, Fury Road. There are ruined highways. There are dangerous barbarians. It was a common complaint that barbarians would zip down the roadway out of fog, and kill a unit before the player could react. In that case the solution was a custom sdk mod to disallow barbarians from using road movement.

The point is not so much that you can or cannot outrun them, the point is you have to change your plan when they appear. If you had a scout going somewhere, you may have to go somewhere else. Certainly if you had a settler you would go somewhere else; too valuable to risk. Even workers completing a several turn improvement may have to cut and run.

I am not sure if you have played my Mad Max mod, Fury Road.

Yes, I was the guy trying to turn it into Fallout.
You were unimpressed :-)

The difference is one of scale though; worms that can move 2 on deep desert are very different to barbarian bikers that can move 4 tiles down ruined highways.
Also, double moves in deep desert would help keep you close to shore.

Exploring outside the your territory *should* be extremely dangerous.

But worms should be dangerous even in the desert in your controlled cultural territory where you have line of sight. Currently they aren't, they're way too easy to avoid.

In the 3 games I played, I never really had to change my plan because worms were around, because with a 2-tile radius they never really charged for anything. The only times I ever noticed worms were when they ate my scouts set on (automated) explore mode.

Maybe if you increase their awareness range to 4 tiles, so they'll move towards your units much more?

Yes, I was the guy trying to turn it into Fallout.
You were unimpressed :-)

Sorry, I missed the connection. It's an excellent idea, but right now I'm more interested in making Dune rather than remaking Fury Road. Once your dissertation is done and you crack open Notepad to edit xml, we can talk again :-)

My to-do list is getting kind of long, I will keep the concept of changing the worm AI on the list, but maybe not at the top.

While I am off deleting buildings, I also propose to delete some improvements, following the rule "More is not better". Does anybody vote to save XenoMill, Turbine lvl 1 - 3, or Refinery lvl 1 -3? In late autoplay games I sometimes see turbines, but it seems to me that solar farms dominate.

I've been building turbines in all my games.

Don't solar farms reduce food income, a la workshops? Solar farms only dominate with the associated civics; its fine to have a superior hammer production with civics oriented that way, but you should still probably be able to get more than a net +1 tile improvement eventually even without those civics.

The point of workshops was to give some hammer income on flatlands, but to be dominated by mines on hills. Now hills are mostly for windtraps, so there isn't as much reason for the workshops to be bad.

The food penalty is also a big problem if you're going to go with water for food, only on bonus resource tiles; food is going to be very scarce.

So, if you're going to have solar farms as the only flatland hammer producer (other than maybe mines early game), I'd consider making it a flat +2 hammer bonus, with maybe an upgraded version (solar farm mark 2) that gives an even higher bonus.
And then maybe tweak the civics so one gives +1 hammers and the other gives +1 commerce.

I also think there needs to be re-examination of what improvements are buildable where; IIRC currently solar farms are only buildlable on grassland replacements, and turbines on plains replacement (or vice versa?), and deserts in there somewhere. Is there a reason for this?

Is Xenomill just the lumber shop for building on tubers? That can go. I'm fine with tubers going all together (so also the forest preserve improvement can go).

Finally: the tree planation thing that turns into a forest (buildable by formers?) is currently pretty much useless. Maybe this shoudl get worked in with the terraforming victory somehow? Particularly if you split pro-terraforming and pro-spice civics; the terraforming civic could give a tile yield bonus to forests, to make these better than solar farms.

OK; keep turbines, drop xenomill. What about refinery lvl 1,2,3?

We can study solar farm strength and improvement limitation to terrain separately. I highly doubt there was any design reason for this.

There is a batch of improvements related to the terraforming mod which was dropped into the vat-of-mods in the initial Dune Wars setup. I am pretty sure they can't be activated and/or don't do anything, but once we decide what to do with terraforming, we can batch-remove the existing terraform improvements, techs, python, etc.

I'd just go with 1 refinery; everything else that modifiers refinery yields can just go off that.

Also; I'm fine with dropping turbines, but in doing so I'd re-evaluate the yields with solar farms somehow.
If you can build basic mines anywhere its also not such a problem.

i like the refinery models :(....

nobody ikes my improvement levels?

i dont mind about the xeno' never liked it and never figured why i added it ..hehehe.

glad you guys like the turbines :)

maybe you can find other use for the refinery?


i agree with more isnt better by the way !

There are lots of bonuses that are supposed to give bonuses to refineries, but they all end up only giving a bonus to the level 1 refinery.

I suppose that you could rewrite them all to give bonuses to level 1 refinery, and a bonus to level 2 refinery, etc., but having cool art isn't really a good enough reason for extra complexity.

The only purpose behind multiple level turbines and farms is so that workers still have something to do beyond the early game; discovering a new tech doesn't instantly give +1 food to all farms, you have to spend effort to increase each farm manually. I like this.

But when the refineries are only temporary improvements anyway created by the deep harvester, it doesn't really work out.

I can see the refinery is a little confusing, and needs "something".

There are three unrelated things named refinery:

Desert refinery (actually Spice Harvester) -- improvement built on spice, generates +3 commerce for corporation

Spice refinery (I have locally renamed just refinery) -- building which acts like Forge (+happiness from minerals, +unhealthy)

Refinery lvl 1 -- improvement which is built on land, on spice, which gets commerce bonuses for various civics. Not actually usable today because spice only goes on water while this improvement only goes on land.

Refinery lvl 2, 3 -- advanced versions of refinery but the civics do not give the bonus.

The lvl 1,2,3 units can't even be built, therefore nobody can miss them if I take them away, right?

The lvl 1,2,3 units can't even be built, therefore nobody can miss them if I take them away, right?

Ah, yes, right.
Unless they're buildable on spice plants (what are these supposed to represent? They seem to act as a jungle replacement, but I don't know what they are.)

Spice plants have been gone for a while, in favor of salt pans. The refinery was unbuildable in 1.2 for sure, and probably in 1.1.2 and above. There are a couple of big patches coming today/tomorrow, you may want to install BTS 3.19.

There are a couple of big patches coming today/tomorrow, you may want to install BTS 3.19.

Will do, but we need to get the Warhammer mod up to 3.19 first.

We're actually having some leadership issues; current leader is running out of time and motivation, so I may have to partly take over. We have a big design all set up ready to get implemented, but something of a shortage of coders. So, if you know anyone.... :-)

I had an in depth look into the problem that ai isn't founding enough cities and I think I came up with a solution:

http://uploaded.to/file/kd3nyq

Patch 1.2.2 is required.

1. I created a new boolean tag for Civ4UnitInfos.xml called "<bNoDangerCount>". If you add this to a unit, that unit will be excluded from any danger count (AI_getPlotDanger, AI_getUnitDanger and AI_getWaterDanger). It's an optional tag you only have to add when set true (<bNoDangerCount>1</bNoDangerCount>).
I added this tag to all sandworm and sandstorm units.

2. There is an part in unitai that doesn't allow AI to found a city in a new area when in financial trouble. I don't think this makes much sense in our current situation (Archipelo map script, unbalanced economy). I created a tag (NO_COLONIES_IN_FINANCIAL_TROUBLE) in GlobalDefinesAlt.xml. When set to 0 this behaviour is disabled and financial situation doesnt matter when founding cities.

3. I reintroduced the MIN_FOUND_VALUE tag in GlobalDefinesAlt.xml. Right now it is set to 600 (default) but you can try to lower it.

Fix for medium hover is included.

wow great work koma13!

its a very good addition!

1. I created a new boolean tag for Civ4UnitInfos.xml called "<bNoDangerCount>". If you add this to a unit, that unit will be excluded from any danger count (AI_getPlotDanger, AI_getUnitDanger and AI_getWaterDanger). It's an optional tag you only have to add when set true (<bNoDangerCount>1</bNoDangerCount>).
I added this tag to all sandworm and sandstorm units.

Good solution, better than mine. Unfortunately it means the weekend I spent re-implementing the sandworm and sandstorm as map effects is wasted. There are a lot of other changes in 1.2.3, but your change is incompatible; for example, in 1.2.3 the worm and storm units are removed. I guess that means 1.2.4 is immediately needed.

But at least now Deliverator knows how to make lightning :-)

Yes, sorry david, I just started with it today in the afternoon. Had no time to warn you. :)

I can only give you the advise to learn to compile the sdk. It isn't that hard. Being an expert in python greatly will reduce the learning curve to edit the sdk because you already know what you want to do and where to look for (if you are used to the civ4 python api). It would also allows you to expose functions to python, vastly improving your possibilites.

But at least now Deliverator knows how to make lightning :-)

Excellent! Now we will get some decent worm signs. :D

never cry on spilled milk david :)

no rush on a new patch, the main thing is v 1.2 is now playble for other players, we can hold of on making a new patch untill we get the new deliverator food from water thing,
and some more.

Can we add airlift to the palace building? I still miss the roads (gameplay wise) and that would be a good and easy way to counter that. Also, what is the reason there are no roads on Arrakis? Isn't it possible to keep them open/free (too much sand) or is there just no need for them.

In one of the early games I spent a lot of time building roads through the desert in order to connect up with other civs. The concept of a road in the desert bothered me. If we just eliminate roads in desert, then civs can never connect to each other for trade. Once I learned how to connect civs with a tech instead of roads, then it seemed like a good idea to eliminate roads altogether.

What is the gameplay part that you miss? Fast worker movement within your territory? If there is some accidental side effect of eliminating roads, we can add that.

Do you think that granting airlift at the beginning of the game would be too powerful? I can see granting it on a building with a higher tech requirement like spaceport, or a building at the tech when you get carryalls.

as for movement - why not just give some promotions that will increese movement for certain units on certain tiles using a building - that every unit built in a city with this building - will get it for free - so the units will move faster.

Fortunately, you already did that with the Stillsuit promotion and the Sietch Tabr UB.

What is the gameplay part that you miss? Fast worker movement within your territory?

No roads are fine for flavour but I don't like the fact that you need 5-10 turns to move from one city to another. I believe it just feels odd. They have the knowledge to travel trough space but still walk by foot on ground. :crazyeye: It makes building improvements a little annoying (I build them manually, would never trust the ai to build them). We need a solution for short distances (up to 10 tiles) where using a transport would be overkill. Maybe when we can reduce the power of airlift by allowing it first only in the same area or limit it to specific units. :dunno:


as for movement - why not just give some promotions that will increese movement for certain units on certain tiles using a building - that every unit built in a city with this building - will get it for free - so the units will move faster.


Workers with paratrooper promotion. :cool:

No roads are fine for flavour but I don't like the fact that you need 5-10 turns to move from one city to another. I believe it just feels odd. They have the knowledge to travel trough space but still walk by foot on ground.

Are you attacking before you have hovers? (why?)

We may need to be more consistent about what tech we think exists. In my view, this is some alternate universe where Fremen arose naturally, rather than being dropped there by spaceships. That is the only reason why they would have to invent any of this technology. Another view, which might be another game such as Dune 2000, is that all this tech exists and the game takes place over a few months while people use all the same tech to fight. Since the main point of Civ is developing tech over time, I choose to believe that Fremen did not, in fact fight across the deserts until they had hover technology.

yeah, call it carryall pickup promotion ..

Are you attacking before you have hovers? (why?)

Well, I am currently reworking the early unit tree and indeed I have units intended for attacking before hovers are discovered. But this is not my main concern. We don't have a solution for inbetween distances that are too long to walk and to short for transporters (-> normal solution would be using roads but we don't have them). In dune they would just call/request a carry-all, therefore it would be cool if we would have something similar -> airlift or paradrops. I also think we should not always use the fremen as criterion because there are a little special in comparison to the other houses.

I also think we should not always use the fremen as criterion because there are a little special in comparison to the other houses.

This is again the same technology thing. If we have primitive fremen who appeared without space travel, then everybody on the planet is a fremen. It happens that some civs use "Fremen" as the name, but I meant more generically that all people on the planet will do this.

I agree that there is no low-tech equivalent to the galley, which people use to launch early game attacks in a vanilla archipelago map. But I would prefer not to make air power and carryalls available in the early game if we have any hope of a "pre-air" stage.

This is again the same technology thing. If we have primitive fremen who appeared without space travel, then everybody on the planet is a fremen. It happens that some civs use "Fremen" as the name, but I meant more generically that all people on the planet will do this.

Ok. But I would prefer to assume that all houses coming from outside and already have extensive knowledge. But it's nearly useless on Arrakis. They have to adopt it and develop new strategies (for example they have shields/thopters/infantry from the start but no knowledge about sandworms, desert suits, windtraps). Tech tree would focus on granting that Arrakis related stuff.

I agree that there is no low-tech equivalent to the galley, which people use to launch early game attacks in a vanilla archipelago map. But I would prefer not to make air power and carryalls available in the early game if we have any hope of a "pre-air" stage.

I don't look for an equivalent to the galley (that would be the hover transport) but an equivalent to roads. :)

I would prefer it if we tweaked the backstory a bit. This will be a bit off topic but here's why...

I've been thinking about mechanics for the Guild. It's hard to make sense of them as a Civ on Dune without other planets and their ability to fold space.

So I was thinking I would like all houses to be able to pay the Guild to get reinforcements from their homeworlds. Koma has raised the idea of immigration before. Also, he has produced some lovely Europe screens for Civ4Col. Image we have beautiful Homeworld screens for each Civ. The Homeworld screen has a finite supply of units and prices - a total rip off of the Civ4Col purchasing settlers system. The money paid for a reinforcement unit goes to the Guild civ. The Guild civ obviously doesn't get to do this. They'd also need a major penalty since they are getting paid from all quarters. So, we make spice yield little or no income for them since it is all needed for their Navigators to do the space folding trick.

I would love this because it would give us the concept of space existing beyond Dune, the reason why spice is so important and a much more complete portrayal of the Dune universe.

We make a post-apocalyptic backstory. There was a War of Assassins of Dune and something happened that wiped out virtually everyone. The reasons why technology is primitive is because of the extent of the devastation. However, importantly, the Houses still know that they are houses and that they have homeworlds. If they can get enough spice together to pay the guild, then they can get reinforcements. I like the idea of buying units, before you have the relevant tech to build that unit. You'd have to price everything so that it is very expensive to do that.

Of course it might not make sense for the Guild to be a playable civ if you went down this road, but overall I think it'd be pretty damn cool.

We may need to be more consistent about what tech we think exists. In my view, this is some alternate universe where Fremen arose naturally, rather than being dropped there by spaceships. That is the only reason why they would have to invent any of this technology. Another view, which might be another game such as Dune 2000, is that all this tech exists and the game takes place over a few months while people use all the same tech to fight. Since the main point of Civ is developing tech over time, I choose to believe that Fremen did not, in fact fight across the deserts until they had hover technology.


The other way of thinking about it is that the game takes place over a few years or decades, but that it takes a long long time for civs to ship stuff in (they have to earn enough money to pay the guild for transport) or for local factions to build up a military-industrial complex.
Its definitely a giant Fudge though. There really isn't any point in canon Dune history where it makes sense for 10+ factions to be fighting it out for control of Dune. But its fun to play, so there it is.

I'd also suggest that you make the Fremen much less reliant on transports (except for Sandworm transports), and instead make them desert raiders, with infantry that can move across the desert themselves (or by worm), but are weaker on land because they lack good mechanical units and aircraft.


So I was thinking I would like all houses to be able to pay the Guild to get reinforcements from their homeworlds.

Interesting idea.

So, we make spice yield little or no income for them since it is all needed for their Navigators to do the space folding trick.

Easiest way to do this would be to prevent them from getting harvesters, and not give them a spice guild corporation for their faction.
Or: have the current spice guild corporation (that comes in late game)

The problem is; can you ever teach the AI to intelligently order units?
I've never tried the Civ4col mod you refer to, but I don't think FFH ever really got it working well with mercenaries. Did they do it well in Broken Star, the BTS scenario?

Another issue; you'd have to somehow scale the benefits by map size. A huge map with 15 players would order in a lot more units than

This would also really mess with the commerce/hammer balance.

Maybe desirably; an extreme way to implement this would be to cut down on hammer yields from tiles, and make all units purchasable and NOT buildable (or nearly all - maybe a handful of hammer-buildable militias), so all that hammers represent is your ability to build local infrastructure (ie buildings in each city).
Would be hard to get the AI to choose an intelligently sized army, and would make improvement-building a little boring since all you would want to do is cottage every tile.

I've reposted the above in the Civilizations thread - probably belongs there.

This thread has been quiet for a while because we were working on other things. As of 1.4.1, I think we need to redesign the set of buildings. To make that easier, I have created a spreadsheet of all the existing buildings. The "notes" column is basically a copy of the popup text you would get, if you hover the mouse over the building in the tech tree. This is the "game manager help text", which it turns out you can access in python. I have done some additional rework of the fields.

You will notice some places where it looks like there is a random number with some punctuation, like "ampersand pound four digit number". In the popup text, there are a number of icons, like the health icon or the happiness icon. For the 10-15 most common icons, I have manually translated these into words so they can go in the spreadsheet. If you see these random numbers, that means they are unimportant icons. Don't get hung up on those, it is probably obvious what they refer to.

Ahriman has made a few comments in different threads about changes which should be made. At some point, perhaps Friday, I will go through and just rewrite the building definitions file. If you have any comments based on the spreadsheet, let me know. Once I get done rewriting, I will post the updated spreadsheet and also possibly build one for vanilla, for comparison.

Building comments:

Crop collector/thumpering machine buildings are weird.
Refinery hammer benefit is too low (bump it up to 25% like a forge).
Shrine of the worm gives too much easy happiness.
Water refinery really just gives +1 trade route? Useless
Not sure Fedaykin Monument makes sense. That sounds like something that might get built during the huge 5000 year reign of Leto II the Worm, not during the actual period of the first couple of books.
Feufreluches Law doesn't make sense as a Wonder - this is a civic.
Forbidden Forest is weird. What is this supposed to be?
Crysknife Monument. Why is there a monument to this?
Factory. Maybe Spice Factory makes more sense. Is there anything that gives power, except the one big wonder?
Frigate Transportation. Why is this a building? Why does it give health?
Desert Airfield and Desert Dock should probably have lower tech requirements.
Metal Refinery What is this? +1% hammers? Spaceship production bonus?
Spotter Control. 600 hammers for a +15% commerce bonus? Useless. I love the flavor of the name, but this building has no purpose. Should also come much earlier, with probably one of the aerial techs.
Poison Snoopers. Very expensive for small benefit. Serves no real purpose. Should this really be a city-building?
David Lynch Museum. I don't really think this is that funny, breaks immersion.
Axlotl Tank. This buildings benefits make no sense. Needs a total redesign.
Bomb Shelters. Boring, merge effect with bunkers.
Wind Pass. This is a geographic feature in Dune - its an actual pass. Why is this a building?
Trade Port. Cost typo as you noted. +1 trade route in *all* cities intended?
IIRC one of the shrines also gives +1 culture rather than +1 gold per city of that religion. Intended?

Two posts back I attached a spreadsheet of all the buildings in DWR 1.4. Here is the equivalent for vanilla. Also I have made a short table which compares the total number of non-UB between the two, at different tech tiers. Normal, National Wonders, and World Wonders are counted separately. Bottom line, DWR has 101 buildings compared to 84 in vanilla.

---- Vanilla --- --- DWR 1.4 ---
Tier Normal NW WW Normal NW WW
1-5 9 1 11 12 2 6
6-10 8 5 12 14 6 14
11-15 15 5 4 12 8 6
16-20 7 0 7 16 1 4
39 11 34 54 17 30
Total 84 101

I think probably buildings and wonders should be tackled separately in the reworking. Perhaps we can start a thread for wonder suggestions since Ahriman has pointed out the flaws and mysteries of the existing list.

From the numbers it looks like we have too few early world wonders.

I started this. I am addressing it by tech tier. So I listed all the normal buildings in tech tiers 1-5 and compared to DWR. Then I took all the buildings in 6-10. It is slow going, and it makes me very unhappy with the tech tree. I may need to go in phases, in which case I will probably stop at tier 10 for right now. I think I need to address wonders and normal buildings together, and I will try to stop myself from re-arranging the tech tree at the same time. I will put up "something" in about 30 hours, tomorrow noon my time.

We will need to think about what is the "right size" for a tech tree. Prior to 1.4.1, the tech tree was almost identical to vanilla in size, since it started as a "repaint" of the vanilla tree. In 1.4.1, I refolded a lot of the tech tree. I did not count, but I added a few and subtracted a few, so it is probably about the same size. Several people have suggested that the current tree is too big, especially at the right side. It will get emptier looking when I trim the buildings. But if I try to trim both the tech tree and buildings at the same time, then it may be too big a job.

hey david,

ive rebuilt the tech tree totally,

plz see the modmod thread.

hope it helps, with the current unit classes, in order to keep a unit tree flow, without making units obselete early,ive built it so every unit will have more life span.

hope youll like it.

I think that realistically the unit redesign, building resdesign and tech tree redesign must be done simultaneously.

Techs have to provide buildings or units or bonuses to improvements; thats what they do. So you can't really design them separately. I'd get a clean unit/building designed first, and then design a tech tree that supports those.

The top end of the tech tree is the biggest problem; the current earlier game works much better.

By biggest suggestion for tech tree redesign is to set up "classes" of tech:
industry
commerce
melee
infantry
mechanized/vehicle
aerial
religion
government/social/cultural
science
ecology/desertlore/terraforming

And then have these as tech-tree lines.
So industry tech 2 requires industry tech 1, industry tech 3 requires industry tech 2, etc.
And then tie the lines together with requirements.

And THEN rename the techs later.

Its definitely a big job.

Some techs can be multiple types; its easy to see a melee tech also being a desert lore tech, or an industry tech also being a mechanized unit tech.

see my tech tree, i am very pleased with it,

your plan sounds good, but i think its too stricked.
for the game i dont think there should be a rule, now 1 tech industry 1 for this and one for that.

primarily, i think the tree's num priority is to support units , the rest is secondary.

perhaps you can rename the techs, but i think what ive created surves as a good basis for the buildings.

Let me be clear; I don't mean that industry tech X necessarily has to directly require industry tech X-1, merely that you must have industry tech X-1 in order to research industry tech X. There can easily be other techs in between. Eg industry tech X-1 might be an energy source that then allows for a commerce tech and an education tech, and one or other of these is required for industry tech X.

Working on the building redesign. At the high end of the vanilla tech tree, we have a set of buildings which generate unhealth and supply power and/or +hammers. This includes ironworks, coal plant, factory, industrial park, and then power without unhealth including nuclear plant and hydro plant.

Does this whole series have any place in Dune? I was thinking the idea of power to give a +hammer bonus is worthwhile, but unless we have several competing methods for generating the power, we can just directly give hammer bonuses without using the power fields.

I was also thinking maybe power could represent use of thinking machines again at the high end. This could be specific to Ix, or it could be applicable for all and just easier for Ix. I like Deliverator's idea from the civ traits thread today about accidentally triggering a Second Butlerian Jihad. Maybe that could be based on the random event engine, related to having these buildings.

Thoughts?

I think it would be easier to make the factory and stuff just give a +% hammer bonus, and then have a generator that also gives a +% hammer bonus, rather than using the electrical power mechanic.

It should be doable to have a random event which say gives a -X hit to diplomacy with all non-allied factions and triggers only if you have a supercomputer building. Even better if it could be a -X hit that was temporary; so say -8 diplomacy penalty that lasted for 15 turns (plenty of time to get some dogpile wars started).

OK, that will make the upper tiers a little emptier, but that is probably a good thing. I was thinking of a Butlerian Jihad that resulted in mobs in the street, destroying stuff, but that can come later.

The upper tiers probably need to have some techs pruned anyway.