Since we have some disagreement about whether there are too many buildings, units, etc, I would like to create a mod-mod. In this mod-mod, I will remove a lot of the buildings and units. If the mod-mod becomes more fun, perhaps we can agree to keep it. If not, we can discard the mod-mod.

I will start with 1.3.9b and do the following:
* Remove all the UU and UB except where they are unique, eg BG Reverend Mother
* Remove a few of the bonuses and tweak the placement amounts of the others
* Remove some of the civs; later when we have enough uniquenesses for these, we can add more
* Having removed the above, the tech tree may seem big and empty; I will see about making it a little smaller and more oriented to the remaining units.

Hopefully I can post something in 48 hours or so.

I like the idea of simpler, but I hate the idea of factions that don't have a bunch of UUs (though the current UUs don't do a good job of expressing faction strengths).

Interesting to try anyway.

It depends what you mean by "a bunch" of UU. In BTS, each civ has exactly one UU and one UB. Do you hate that? Suppose the only UU that the Bene Gesserit faction had was the Reverend Mother, and maybe one good UB. Would that be too few? I want to concentrate on a very small number of units with unique mechanics.

I was just replaying FFH, and I played a couple of Grigori games. Basically they have two UU, the adventurer (with unique mechanics) and the dragonslayer, and one UB, the inn. Probably they have some late game stuff too, but in the first 300 turns, that is all I saw, and I did not even use the inn. Still it felt very different from vanilla because of the unique mechanics. That is what I am aiming for.

In BTS, each civ has exactly one UU and one UB. Do you hate that?

Yes. In vanilla, each faction still plays basically the same. I haven't played vanilla in ~18 months.

I'm somewhat colored by the Warhammer mod design I've created; one of the design goals for that mod is to make each civ play very differently. So Brettonnia has fantastic knights and good cavalry, but weaker peasant infantry. Sylvania has a handful of incredibly powerful vampires to anchor their forces, but generally weak disposable troops. The chaos civs have powerful offensive infantry but weaker defensive troops. Dwarves have very limited mobility (no cavalry) but tough infantry and great siege equipment. Wood elves are mobile in forests and have big combat bonuses in forests and have great archers, but weak siege capability. High elves are good all round but have low population growth and so smaller cities and expensive units. etc. etc.

Obviously this is a very different mod, and you aren't going to go at all in the direction we hope to achieve of *most* units being replaced by UUs.
And the buildings/tech tree in Warhammer will remain much simpler than here.

But I think faction differentiation is a big part of what makes a mod fun, particualarly one based on a universe like Dune. It just feels wrong if Fremen play basically the same as Bene Gesserit who play the same as Harkonnen. If I'm playing Fremen I should be favoring the desert, and trying to launch hit and run pillage raids or attacking enemies while in transit; I should have combat bonuses on desert tiles but less ability to fight a sustained war on land. If I'm playing Harkonnen I should be favoring slow be very heavy troops. If I'm playing BG I should be trying to stay out of wars, using influence and spy missions to expand my territory. If I'm playing the Trade Guild I should have big trader bonuses; lots of extra trade routes and trade yields, trying to have open borders with lots of factions to reap a big trade-based economy. If I'm playing Atreides I should have diplomatic advantages and be able to have most people like me, and use alliances and defensive pacts to my advantage, so I'm never getting dogpiled.

I'm somewhat colored by the Warhammer mod design I've created; one of the design goals for that mod is to make each civ play very differently.

We agree on the goal.

I'm an advocate of this approach. It's much easier to take everything out and then have the gate rule "If it doesn't add anything don't add it."

A lot of FFH2's uniqueness comes from the changes to promotions and experience. Also, in magic and other things they have entirely new categories of unit ability over vanilla.

For example, the Grigori mages can cast two spells per turn (IIRC). That is civ differentiation built on top of a new mod mechanic.

If you really want to do a reworking of things from the ground up, I would begin by considering what unit abilities and promotions make sense on Dune. Then you think which civs and units should be stronger or weaker in each area.

In terms of achieving distinctiveness between civs, I think having a handful of UUs per factions is good, but if these are just vanilla style UUs (more movement/more strength) then that is dull and as Ahriman says doesn't do enough to make civs play differently. So there has to be some new categories of unit ability and promotion available. For example, you could have a reduced fat vesion of the Reverend Mother called Acolyte. Some the more powerful UUs abilities would be reduced and some omitted.

Also key, I think, is to prevent certain factions from building certain units. You can use NONE for a lot of the unit classes in civilization infos. The list of available units for the Fremen should be very different from the Harkonnen. What you prevent civs from building can create as much unique character as what you let them build.

Allowing the tech tree to evolve is important - they are a number of stages that don't make a lot of sense right now.

In summary, I think if you want to get each civ to play differently you have to be prepared to do something more fundamental than just create a single special powered UU for each one.

ahh superb idea david!

great approach,

i would be happy to help here, maybe it nice to have two versions, a lite and full.

perhaps indeed later on we will use only one.

great , im looking forward to see what you will come up with.


if you want,
i can also merge in a component that created unique tech trees for each civ.
also, in order to create a unique unit for a civ, that doesnt replace any unit class that the other civs can build,
you need a fictive unit class - see my ficitve tech.

i totally in for re making the units, with giving each nation a totally different tree of units.

where do we start?

This is harder / more painful than I thought. Today I accomplished:

* Removed Ecaz, Fenring civs (I will keep all the unique bonuses)
* Combined two Fremen civs into one; moved Paul and Leto 2 to Atreides leaders and deleted Ghanima.
* Removed bonuses: cloud, hares, hawks, stillsuit, missionaria, and the other two groundwaters. Made insect bonuses initially visible. Moved art files around to consolidate "bonus" and "imp" directories.
* Removed every UU and UB except Reverend Mother and one or two others. Cleaned up the resulting dozens of unused art directories. (I will keep a separate zip of the directories removed, in case we want to put back some units later.)
* Condensed unitcombats: removed recon (desert scout), rapid strike (cutterpillar, heavy roller)
* Reorganized mech units: kept 4 as Ix UU, deleted the other 6
* For each remaining unitcombat, tried to rationalize the strength range and the rock-paper-scissors aspects.

I need to rationalize the tech requirements for the units. I haven't even touched buildings, except to push all the landing stages into my "contract" format. This means I will need to add the contract picklist for this to be playable.

Tomorrow I will generate a table of all the units and their stats, so you can see the details. It is similar to Ahriman's post in general concept, although all the details are different.

This is a major re-arrangement of the art directories, so it will come with a full fpk file. If keldath feels strongly that the existing huge unit variety is important, I will keep this as a mod-mod; otherwise I will call it 1.4.

This all sounds good.

I haven't even touched buildings, except to push all the landing stages into my "contract" format.

My only reservation is that I'd still like civs to get their own unique resource before having the option to choose any of the others. I have you on record (http://forums.civfanatics.com/showpost.php?p=8305622&postcount=79) agreeing. ;)

I still like Stillsuits as a unique resource for the Fremen. The BG unique resource needs a better name, but I still like the idea of giving them that early advantage in trade and diplomacy. These ideas can be developed and added a later stage though.

Maybe you should call the modmod Dune Wars Streamlined...

This is harder / more painful than I thought.Keep going - I can only say pretty happy that this happens! :)

Because, in my experience, a full rebuilt at some point, after the basic outlines are laid out, is the best thing that can happen to a mod! Hopefully, seeing this happening relatively early with Dune Wars, it will make it really good as well! :goodjob:

Cheers, LT.

Personally, I would like to see the mod become simpler still. Fremen/Atriedes, Harkonnen. Faction based victory conditions. Make a game out of it.

Yes, I like it. We can make a cardboard game board with twenty squares on it, and each turn you can roll your six sided die and move that many squares. When you reach the end you win!

(joke, if you could not tell.)

well...you really trimmed down the mod.......

i think its too thin for me...

i suggest for start, use it as a mod mod, and when you release it, i will take from it some of the things, like new unit structure and we will see what else.

personally, as i stated, i dont like having a latge mod, but...then again...i dont like a mini mod...

anyway , im eager to see what you come up with,

perhaps ill take you slim version and make a fuller version with added uus and all the stuff we have right no, this way the two version will have a more similar base.

:)

keep up the good work:)

I'm trying to not hate the idea of drastically fewer water resources ;-)
Hopefully you include something that will still allow cities to grow significantly.

It can't hurt to read this (http://forums.civfanatics.com/showthread.php?t=173061) again. This is from Kael, who knows a bit about modding:

Every new object has a cost, not just in what it takes to create, test and manage, but the player has to keep track of it as well. In general we should only add items because they offer a significant improvement to some aspect of the game, and not just to have more units, more resources, etc.

It sounds good to be able to offer a long list of new objects. That was much of the appeal of the very popular Civ3 Double your Pleasure (DyP) mod. But the success of DyP wasn’t because of all the new objects, but because each one had a distinct functional purpose. Adding buildings is easy, making them truly worthwhile is the hard part.

Is it needed? Would it be missed if it was taken out? Is it functionaly unique? If the answer to these is no, it should be considered for removal.

In other news, if I was doing this cutdown version, I'd get rid of the BG and Guild as playable civs. It feels wrong for both of these to have cities on Arrakis and be taking stuff by force.

I know the RM is one of the few UUs we have that has a proper special ability, but in my opinion it would be better if there were a limited number of these units that any faction can build in certain circumstances, or wandering barbarians that you can recruit in some way. In the books, the Emporer, the Atreides, the Fremen all have their Reverend Mothers (granted the Fremen versions are not proper BG).

That would make the mod capture Dune more for me. The Bene Gesserit having tanks, soldiers, etc, just bothers me.

In the books, the Emporer, the Atreides, the Fremen all have their Reverend Mothers (granted the Fremen versions are not proper BG).

Well, this was part of why I was arguing for the BG trade good to be "Truthsayer Advisors", so that factions on good terms with the BGs could get truthsayers from them.
And turn the "Truthsayer" city specialist back into a priest (and the Ghola specialist into a Noble).

I think its easy to imagine that the BG faction represents some generic house "favored" by the Bgs, who they choose to use as their puppets.

I'd support your suggestion.

It could also be interesting to play with making them a religion if we want to go down the making religions different route. Along the lines of the FFH2 religions that change the game quite dramatically. You make some sort of Kwisatz Haderach victory.

hey guys,

im thinking about this mod mod all the time,

and im very convinced about making the changes in the units and in the factions.

im thinking of going with your way:

- i will try to create a new unit set and each civ will have its unit brand,
for example - the fremen will mostly have access to infantry types and some rover vehicles.
th atreides will be based mostly on thoptes fire power along with some ground medium powered tanks - like the sonic tank.
harkonnen - heavy tanks.

i will trim down the unit classes, so every civ you play you will have to relly on different unit types to play with.

perhaps ill devide this into 4 unit trees or something like this so lets say every 2-3 civs will have the same unit structure, along with minor differences.
im thinking of using the unique tech tree for every one of those civs, this will allow me to trim down the tech tree as you guys want, and civs will be able to swap these techs among them, but the tech tree it self will be thiner.

i would love to hear your thought about this,
i now await to see davids work before i start.

hope you wont abandon the main version for now...:)

I am glad we are thinking in the same direction. I have just finished painfully refolding the entire tech tree ("pain" seems to be the word for this weekend :-(). Let me build some summary tables and tweak it a little, then upload in the next 12 hours.

I will call this an "unofficial 1.4 release". It gets a .4 instead of .3 because it will include a new fpk; but it is unofficial, and pretty much unplaytested, so I will only put it into the patch thread. We should not put it into the main thread until it is more playtested.

Well, I am getting a CTD in every game, so it is not ready for release. However, here are two spreadsheets I have made.

The first one compares the "dune wars reduced" units against vanilla. The sheet has two lists, one for vanilla and one for DWR. Each list is sorted by the tech level (x position in tech tree) where the unit appears. This shows that vanilla has slightly more units than DWR, but the strengths are basically comparable. The main difference is in the number of ocean units available; DWR does not need a very rich set.

The second one is automatically generated with a script from the XML; it shows the important points of each unit. You may want to hide some columns. The "Notes" column shows my own summary of what the civilopedia help would look like. You can use this to get an overview of the purpose of each unitcombat.

If you have time/interest, feedback on this list would be helpful. It is hard to tell much without the actual mod files, and I will release that as soon as it is working OK.

Ah yes, the old "UNITAI_ASSAULT_SEA on non-cargo unit" crash. It seems OK now, so I will release it. I have achieved the goals in the first post in the thread: I removed all the UU and UB, and re-arranged the tech tree.

The tech tree is by no means "perfect". On a scale of 1-10, where 1 is completely random as if done with a random number generator, and 10 is perfectly tuned, I think I have moved it up from a 3 to a 5.

I think the unitcombats and units are now fairly well laid out; see the spreadsheets in the previous post to see the details and how it compares to vanilla.

Please try this out and give me some feedback. The next step is to do a similar analysis of buildings, and trim them down also. Then we can *add* unique mechanics for each faction. The Harkonnen, Ordos and Bene Gesserit have some kind of unique mechanic, as described in the Dune Wars Concept tab in the civilopedia.

At this point, the "landing stage" mechanic is removed. All the unique bonuses are still there and unrestricted. So, for example, any player can get Sardaukar Cooperation by building a Contract. In particular Thinking Machines are helpful to get the Ixian units. I will make the Offworld Trade tech give either (a) your unique bonus if you have one, or (b) a picklist of the unplayed, unbuilt unique bonuses. Then each time you build a contract building, you can pick another one.

You can download it from this link (http://jendaveallen.com/fury-road/dune-reduced-1-4.zip) (56 MB). Note: this is a full release, and the mod name is "dune reduced". So you can install it adjacent to your "dune wars" mod. This is version 1.4.

hey david, good work buddy,

i know it was painful to do.

i cant say i like everything in here, but i sure do glad you did this,

i will try to make the full version according to this, after you refine this a bit, i think we can have 2 version for players,
like rise of man have mega pack and regular pack.

i will re built the dw to give it much more meaning, and less a mess, as i said, im gonna implement the unique tech tree modcomp, and i have a plan laid out.

great work dude.

Good work david, I think what is most needed is some solid playtesting before we make further refinements.

Quick comments from the spreadsheets; having thoptors and suspensors require the same strategic resource is a bad idea. Its bad enough not being able to get suspensors as naval units because you lack crystal anywhere near you, but when you can't even

I also dislike how the vehicles are still all 1 move. 1 move units really limits the strategic depth of warfare without transports in a mod with no roads; it makes effective fighting *all* about exploiting transport use, which the AI doesn't understand how to do. There are many 2 move infantry - these are faster than vehicles?
I see you thought the rover line was too similar to thopters?

It feels like scorpions have the same role as melee infantry; slow moving city attack. This was why I tried to make them into field-superiority fighters.
I'd also let most infantry units move onto desert wastes, at least within your own cultural borders.

Heavy carryall is strength 40???!? Transports should still be vulnerable, otherwise you aren't penalized for carting your army around in them even on land.

Will post more comments when I get a chance to playtest, its hard to tell much from just looking at the excel sheet.

Started playing.

AH01. Several xml errors on loading the mod.
AH02. Tech tree would obviously need to be simplified too; particularly in the late game. And religions reworked/simplified/cut (there should be fewer religions total).
AH03. All contracts available with no tech requirements.
AH04. Caladaanian wine appears to have no effect.
AH05. Windtraps still buildable outside cultural borders.
AH06. Workers can't build dew collectors on appropriate resources, even with the tech.
AH07. Contracts are too cheap. A luxury good that gives +2 happy in all cities the early game for little resource cost?
AH08. Should be limited to 1 contract per city to make it more difficult to just take them all, and contracts should be a world wonder; if 1 player gets the contract for X, they then get the monopoly on it to trade (I don't remember if this is currently true or not, just quit the game and can't be bothered loading it again).
I'd also really really prefer faction specific contracts (like sardaukar cooperation) to be only buildable by the appropriate faction.

Strategic Resources

I counted up the number of units requiring Strategic Resources and compared it to vanilla using the first sheet.

In vanilla, there are four SR: horse, copper/iron (counting them together for simplicity), oil, uranium. 40% of the units require no SR, 40% require one SR, and 20% require two SR. Furthermore there is a nice crossover at tech 10, we switch over from horse/copper/iron to oil/uranium.

In DWR, there are five SR: crystal, nitrates, iron, diamonds, stravidium. For right now I have ignored the effect of Unique Resources. 20% of the units require no SR, 60% require one, 20% require two. Except for stravidium there is no nice crossover.

So I agree the distribution of SR requirements needs some tuning. I like Deliverator's suggestion of nitrates for explosives, crystal for suspensors, diamonds for lasers, and stravidium for heavy armor. But there should be fewer units with the requirement, and a more distinct crossover at tech 10.

Unit feedback

The three infantry who have move 2 are all desert fighters, including the Fedaykin. The carryalls are defensive only, but I can decrease the strength of the heavy one. There were only two roller units left, not enough for a whole class, and I think thopters are more "Dunish" than rollers.

Good suggestion to differentiate the scorpions. I will bump up all the scorpions to move 2 and remove the city attack bonus.

I believe that the AI does use transport correctly, as long as we use the exact implementation we have -- the transports are DOMAIN_SEA with bCanMoveAllTerrain and our customized sdk changes. So the AI should use them as well as it uses ocean transport in a vanilla archipelago game. Hopefully that is good enough for now.

Started playing.

AH01. Several xml errors on loading the mod.

Thank you for using numbering! Please let me know the details of the errors; I do not get any errors upon loading, xml or otherwise.

AH03. All contracts available with no tech requirements.
AH07. Contracts are too cheap. A luxury good that gives +2 happy in all cities the early game for little resource cost?
AH08. Should be limited to 1 contract per city to make it more difficult to just take them all, and contracts should be a world wonder

Yes, the contract system is not yet in place. I pointed that out in this thread 5 posts back. See the offworld trade thread for my current proposal.

AH04. Caladaanian wine appears to have no effect.
AH05. Windtraps still buildable outside cultural borders.
AH06. Workers can't build dew collectors on appropriate resources, even with the tech.

I am surprised by AH06, but I agree AH04 and AH05 are bugs.

AH01
XML Load Error:
Failed Loading XML file xml\text\dunewarstext.xml [.\FXml.cpp:133]
Error parsing XML File
File: xml\text\dunewarstext.xml
Reason: End tax 'English' does not match the start tag 'Text'
Line: 9151, 3
Source: </English>


Load XMl call failed for xml\text\dunewarstext.xml
Current XML file is:
xml\text\jimprovementlimit_actions_civ4gametextinf os.xml

Save attached if you want to verify AH06.

AH09
I strongly suggest having some of the lower level strategic resource requirements be 'builds 50% faster with X' (and double hammer costs) rather than "requires X".
This can be particularly true for units with 2 resource requirements: builds 25% faster with X, builds 25% faster with Y.

Its fine for high end specialist units to require resources, but not the early game so much.

If you don't have a crystal resource, it can be much more expensive to build that suspensor transport, but you shouldn't be locked out of naval units.

AH10 I think desert buggy type things (quads, trikes, various wheeled vehicles) are very Dunish.

AH11a
The problem with the ATV transports and 1 move units is this; as a human player, I can load up a strike force on one turn and move the transport, and then on the next turn move my transport right next to the enemy force and unload them, and then the units can attack that turn. The AI doesnt' know how to do this.

It makes my army massively more potent than the enemies; basically with a bit of micro I can make all my units have 4-5 movement points to the enemies 1. I can also unload an infantry unit, attack with it, then load it back into the transport and move the transport away.

The problem is amplified by the lack of roads; in vanilla, even 1-move units can eventually move 3-4 tiles within friendly territory, which gives a big advantage to the defender. As it is, the AI is pretty terrible at defending its territory, because when I threaten one of its cities, it is way too slow to be able to bring extra units in to reinforce, and they also tend to trickle in 1 by 1 because of slow movement so I can easily pick them off.
The only AI threat are hovers.

So the ways to mitigate or fix this are:
a) Have more 2 move units, or units with double moves in terrain type X (there is a cool APC promotion in Planetfall for infantry which gives double moves in flat terrain), so the movement advantage from exploiting transports is less significant.
b) Have unloading a transport remove all movement points from the units unloaded.
c) Put roads back at a suitably advanced tech. Even planetfall (which has no roads) eventually has magtubes, and gives infantry movement bonuses next to rivers or on coastlines.

I guess my point is, combat doesn't work terribly well in the mod atm, because the combat AI isn't good at thinking in the environment with non-standard mechanics (no own-territory movement advantage, very limited movement without transports).

I am surprised by AH06, but I agree it is a bug. In fact it is a major bug affecting the amount of water you can generate. I carefully renamed all the techs and units, causing keldath some grief, but I never renamed improvements. So I deleted the worker "build camp" order after deleting hawks and hares. But the "build camp" order is actually for dew collectors.

Are you comfortable to edit xml files? Please edit assets/xml/units/civ4unitinfos.xml and search for BUILD_WINDTRAP. It appears in two places, once for the worker unit and once for the slave unit. In each place, add the build camp order (four lines) as shown:

<Build>
<BuildType>BUILD_WINDTRAP</BuildType>
<bBuild>1</bBuild>
</Build>

<Build>
<BuildType>BUILD_CAMP</BuildType>
<bBuild>1</bBuild>
</Build>

I strongly suggest having some of the lower level strategic resource requirements be 'builds 50% faster with X'

I think there are two solutions; (1) more units which don't need any SR, and (2) higher map density of the remaining SR. For example, I can remove the Iron Ore requirement (melee units) and ensure that crystal appears in 100% of the starting player BFCs.

The problem with the ATV transports and 1 move units is this [...]

Thanks for giving the details. I agree that the AI should also be able to do what you describe, and I am disappointed it cannot. How do the equivalent things work in Planetfall with the dropship? We have shared this code from Maniac; maybe he found a solution or we missed sharing part of his code. Improving this will require SDK changes.

Also, does the airlift ability on the starport help? Can we do more with that?

AH01
XML Load Error:
Failed Loading XML file xml\text\dunewarstext.xml [.\FXml.cpp:133]
Error parsing XML File
File: xml\text\dunewarstext.xml
Reason: End tax 'English' does not match the start tag 'Text'
Line: 9151, 3
Source: </English>

Bad developer, no biscuit. I put in the tech quotes from Sword Of Justice and "assumed" that my script would clone all the languages correctly. Please replace assets/xml/text/DuneWarsText.xml with the attached.

Looks like I will be putting out a 1.4.1 today with a number of small fixes. Thank you for your patience in finding/reporting all these.

I think there are two solutions; (1) more units which don't need any SR, and (2) higher map density of the remaining SR. For example, I can remove the Iron Ore requirement (melee units) and ensure that crystal appears in 100% of the starting player BFCs.

Yes, these would help too. I guess I just never really like the implementation (even in vanilla) of the all-or-nothing nature of strategic resources - hence my prefernce for builds-faster-with-X. In vanilla at least these change over time; copper and horses are great early game, but much less important later, when oil becomes crucial.
Whereas here you *always* need crystals.

Thanks for giving the details.

Another trick; load up a big move transport with units. Move onto enemy tile; unload first unit, pillage, load it back up. Move transport onto second tile, unload second unit, pillage, load it back up. etc.

Spaceports definitely help somewhat, but not enough, even for city defense. In vanilla and many mods you really do have to hammer down the defensive fortifications before attacking, but in this mod the city attack units mostly ignore the city defenses entirely, so its pretty easy to blitz cities in a single turn or two, so they can only airlift one more unit in.
Spaceports also don't help with protecting against mass pillage.

I don't *think* Maniac got Dropship AI to be amazingly intelligent (haven't played PFall much for a while - I started playing this cool Dune mod), but this is much less important in PFall than here since:
a) attacking enemy territory is much more difficult because of the bunker improvements that can bombard in a 2-tile radius, and the free bunkers in city when you build city walls
b) several units (armor, hovertanks, locusts, etc.) that are 3 moves or more, or paratroopers, or get double moves in fungus
c) much more concentrated starting point (all the civs start pretty close togther, so its a much shorter walk to get to an enemy to fight a war with them)
d) faster movement along rivers and coastlines (at least in friendly territory).

But better AI isn't even the answer; its pretty lame if all the combat tactics revolve around how to abuse transports.
There's nothing about the Dune universe that particularly screams "transport units" as the central strategic asset. Well, interplanetary transports, maybe.

Are you comfortable to edit xml files?
You ask me of all people this? :-)

I'll wait for the patch.

Are you comfortable to edit xml files?

You ask me of all people this? :-) I'll wait for the patch.

I can easily accept that you don't want to get into making your own changes and experimenting. But, you obviously type email fine. It cannot be so hard to paste four lines into an xml file. I am afraid you are about to complain about how hard it is to find water because you cannot build dew collectors, and I am hoping you could make this change to avoid running into this problem. I have already made a dozen other changes in unitinfos. So I cannot conveniently create and test a file with just this one change.

I think Ahriman feels about XML editing the way you feel about SDK. :)

I think Ahriman feels about XML editing the way you feel about SDK. :)

I see your :-) but Notepad does not take days of setup and monkeying with makefiles to get it working.

I don't have an xml editor installed. I realize its not that hard, but its a personal commitment device to prevent me from spending time modding that I don't have. Sorry for the inconvenience....

I think I'm smart enough to realize that water yields without dew collectors are obviously less, and not to start complaining about that.

so...nobody cares of the full version no more? :(

@Ahriman: I think the work you are putting into playtesting and feedback is enormously valuable. Modding is certainly addictive, so I understand your position.

@david: With regards to the SDK, I'm fine that you don't want to touch it. I may try myself at some point, if I get interested enough. Apparently, if you use CodeBlocks then you don't need a makefile, but the setup still looks pretty complicated.

I don't have an xml editor installed.

You do know that XML is plain text, right? I use a plain text editor. You do not even need to worry about indenting or white space or anything. (Python is trickier from that standpoint.)

I think I'm smart enough to realize that water yields without dew collectors are obviously less, and not to start complaining about that.

Let me rephrase. There is no question about smart, you have given some of the best playtest feedback I have ever gotten. But the key playtest question is, whether one groundwater type is enough. Without having dew collectors, you cannot evaluate this completely. So fixing dew collectors is important, to get feedback on groundwater.

so...nobody cares of the full version no more? :(

I think there has been this philosophical difference between us for a while. I'll try to explain my view on it.

Kael's FFH2 will never be surpassed in its popularity, I think it's fair to say. I posted above this quote from Kael's philosophy on The Danger of More:

Every new object has a cost, not just in what it takes to create, test and manage, but the player has to keep track of it as well. In general we should only add items because they offer a significant improvement to some aspect of the game, and not just to have more units, more resources, etc.

I think so far this mod has fallen into the Danger of More trap. There are many things that have been adding 'just to have more' .

This is not a criticism of you and the work you've put it, but I think these quotes from yourself show that you do not (yet) share this viewpoint.

i do not wish to trim the mod more...

see planetfall, theres much more stuff there....i dont see any problems with more stuff,

less stuff will be boring.

most players prefer bigger mods - see the amount of dl of ech mod, youll see that a mod with tons of stuff in it - gets more dls in total

I would like to persuade you that having more is not what makes a mod popular or fun to play. Lord Tirian, I think expressed this really well:

I feel a bit the same, one of the reasons why I haven't gone into this mod with full enthusiasm (except for Del's great art stuff): BtS works, because everything fits the theme of different epochs (ancient, medieval etc.), in Dune Wars, a lot is a bit like vanilla with a different paintjob, but only one theme - Dune. Meaning it feels like a lot more, because there's no larger organising principle - by the way, I think the resources are okay, the buildings and units are the problem - they need to be slimmed down, a lot of units feel like "unit before, but with more power" - Final Frontier also suffered from this for me. In Civ4 you'd never think of confusing a club-wielding cavemen with a swordsmen - flavour, strategic resources and small bonuses all play together and make it feel like more than "unit with some extra stuff". Ditto buildings. But I can't really put my finger onto it - because there is just so much material.

Note: I'm *not* a fan of the mods that just add a lot more stuff and options to the game - I prefer the sleeker, more themed and focussed ones. That's why I like FfH2, Planetfall and Legends of Revolution - they don't just grab as much stuff as possible, they have strong themes and only have things that work with that (and FfH2 is probably the most polished, most beautiful way of doing that - they have a lot of stuff, but only because every Civ is its own theme - meaning if you play, it's rather slim, as you only play one Civ/theme at once). And vanilla Civ4 works - because it's whole theme is "playing six millennia of world history". Dune Wars isn't doing that, its theme is - in a nutshell (deep apologies to all fans of the book, I know that I'm vastly oversimplifying it for the sake of the rhetoric) - "drug-addicted nobles battle on a desert planet for more drugs".

Not that the mods with lots of things are bad, they're just not my taste - for me a mod needs to be as complex as it needs to be to create its specific flavour - and no more!

I know the aim of modding has to be 'make the mod that you want to play - if others like it then that's a bonus'. I'm a firm believer in that. If you want to play something that has more of everything then that is OK. However, you have to recognise that most of the people who've fed back to us want something different.

I'd fully expect this modmod to evolve into something that has as much diversity and strategic depth as Planetfall, say, but I'd rather take it steadily and do it right.

Without having dew collectors, you cannot evaluate this completely.

Agreed. Apologies for snark.

On the above: I agree that often less can be more; for a great example of this, check the Fall Further modmod for FFH. It started as an awesome mod adding a few more factions, but has since become bloated with features and (IMO) gameplay has seriously suffered because of it; there are so many extra barbarian things that all the other AI factions get crushed (not I am a few months out of date on this).

I am undecided about which is the better approach, to start from the full Dune mod and trim back, or to go to a limited mod and build up.

From the little time I spent on it, even the "reduced" mod has many issues; religions still feel bloated to me (I think there are too many, making founding a religion less special, and they feel too vanilla as well which detracts from the Dune feel) and it looks like the entire tech tree was still there.

I think the most important things from the main mod that needed to be changed were:
a) Tech tree trimmed, particularly at the upper end
b) Buildings reduced and rationalized, particularly at the upper end
c) Units rationalized and consdensed, and less wild jumps in strength between layers. (30-50% strength increases between tiers in general)

FFH is great, but sometimes does the simplification a bit too much; melee, recon, mounted, archer, mage, priest, and the combat system got a bit too boring because all you really ended up was spamming whatever tech line you produced.
No use for combined arms, and combat pretty limited to building big stacks and going stomping.
I got a bit bored of the mod because many of the factions weren't quite different enough, and still played pretty much the same.

I also find Planetfall warfare a bit boring; most of the fun there for me is in economy building, there aren't enough different units for me in Planetfall, too many 1-move infantry units that all have basically the same combat role.

These are why my designs for the Warhammer mod (if we ever get the programmers to actualyl implement them) are mostly about intense faction differentiation and a combined arms combat system that emphasizes the difference between core and (national limit) elites.

Also note that FFH was very concise in some ways, but still very much more developed than vanilla in others; all the different religions that played quite differently, and all the different magic mana types.

Thanks for the feedback. My opinion is similar to yours; I think the most important remaining priorities are:

1. Trim buildings
2. Add unique abilities to remaining civs (including offworld trade)
3. Trim techs

I am hoping that unit strength is solved, by comparing the vanilla units against the DWR ones as shown in my spreadsheet. The strength jumps are similar to vanilla now. Of course we can tweak it but I feel that getting rid of all the UU allowed me to focus much better on the roles of the remaining units. I was trying to think of the right wise man's saying, something about not being able to find the forest because it had too many trees.

I want to take incremental steps on 1,3 because one of the common complaints about my other mod, Fury Road, is that it is *too* small. Also I am not much of an economy builder when I play, I like to get a medium size economy then build the rest by conquest. So I tend to under-represent the builder strategies.

Based on my recent unit/tech experience this weekend, trimming the buildings will be painful also. So I am going to do a little more of what I consider the fun stuff, in civ unique abilities.

As an interested party who has been lurking and following this mod with interest in recent weeks or months, I too fall into the camp of enjoying mods that have polished gameplay and controlled themes, rather than simply adding new content for it's own sake.

There's no "right or wrong" in that. It's fun to see new custom units and buildings added to Civ4 for their own sake. And making a mod like that is certainly a worthy achievement!

However, for me personally, I look for strategic gameplay rather than bulk content. LoR is one of my favourite Civ4 mods for this reason. As alluded to already, I find it too hard to keep track of multiple new units and buildings which are added in a "shotgun", scattered way. After a while, I lose interest and give up. To give some adhoc feedback, I find Dune Wars like that at the moment, though it's very exciting to see the awesome graphics and custom content take shape for a fictional world that I like very much!

I prefer new units to have their stats worked on and refined in comparison with other units so there's a solid strategic gameplay for each unit.

Of course, this mod is started by Keldath and his lead in the project and opinions should be given due respect. I am only adding my opinion as an interested party.

I will continue adding some tech quotes in small batches in coming days and weeks as a small contributor. I enjoy doing that, but have limited time for an additional modding project like this.

Cheers,
Sword

AH16
Another thing I should add; the civics need a redesign.

Try and make them more interesting, more in-theme, more strategic and get rid of some of the weirder ones (Honored Matres makes *no* sense as a civic in a present-day-Dune-era mod set roughly in the time of Dune and the near-past prequels - it takes 5000 years for them to show up, nor do its bonuses).
What is "Conservative movement" anyway - and why are you jealous if other civs have one?
Why do imperial civics give favor solar farms?
Why no civics that reduce city maintenance?
Why +3 beakers per specialist in a mod that already has lower tile yields from non-bonuses (why work a cottage tile for ages when you could get massively higher income as a scientist or trader with the civic)?
Why are some civics so late in the tech-tree?

If feels like they were mostly cloned from vanilla civ and renamed without a lot of design thought.

Offworld trade
* Added "offworld trade" concept to dune-o-pedia and added a hint
* Each building gives three units of its bonus (some were 4,5,6; Caladanian Wine was missing)
* Change slig to 2 health, opafire and wine to 2 happy
* Added Fremen Water Debt, 3 units provided by Fremen Palace, required for Desert Raider and Worm Rider
* Added picklist when Trade Port building is built; you can choose any of the contracts, unless it has been chosen already or the owning civ is in the game. We had discussed automatically giving your civ's unique resource; but most of the civs don't have a unique one. So what do they get? If they get a pick, why shouldn't the civs with unique resources get a pick?
Terraforming victory
* Bug fix: terraforming was taking place much too quickly; now it occurs slower.
* Terraforming only appears if there is "some" improvement in the square, and disappears if there is no improvement
* Added Anchor grass improvement which is inexpensive and not very useful, but it will trigger a terraforming improvement.
* Remove spice within *2* squares of Reservoir of Liet
* AIs following Spice Paradise get -2 reaction per Reservoir of Liet; as you build more Reservoirs, they will hate you more and more.
Minor changes
* Fixed missing "English" tag in DuneWarsText.xml
* AH05. Windtraps buildable outside cultural borders
* AH06. Accidentally removed "build dew collector" order
* Scorpions: new role of land defense: move 2; -25 city attack/defense
* Removed iron ore requirement from all units

Short term plans
* Add Atreides recruiting/leader abilities from the "making Fremen different" thread
* Add Fremen double move ability from the "worm rider mechanics" thread
* Create a spreadsheet listing all building abilities, collect opinions on weeding them out
* Review, tweak strategic resource requirements

Ha! I said I would release it "today" and it is 11:58pm local time.

Installed patch.

AH12
After creating a game and at the start of many turns I get python exception:

File "CvEventManager", line 30, in onEvent
File "BugEventManager", line 322, in handleEvent
File "BugEventManager", line 327, in _dispatchEvent
File "BugEventManager", line 339, in _handledefaultEvent
File 'DuneWars', line 149 in onEndGameTurn
File 'DuneWars', line 1089 in StatPrint
IOError: [Errno13]: Permission denied: 'c:\\stats.csv'

AH13
Water does feel too scarce; it used to be you could usually get 3-4 water sources for a city (appropriately spaces hills, groundwater or water plant), and use most of your land in city fat crosses. Now, it feels like you can usually only get 2-3 water sources, and even then you have to leave lots of land empty.

Check this save for eg.

AH14
The AI is also worse at placing cities because it evaluates the higher tile yields (and the strategic resource nature) of spice tiles when suggesting city placement spots.
This is exacerbated by the general lower quality of terrain; you have to place your city just right to get a decent water income.

Also, hills/windtraps are highly variable in value depending on their placement. Eg: 3 hills in a line allow 2 windtraps, but 3 hills in an L allow only 1 windtrap.
But the civ start position placing algorithm looks only for areas with higher water/food yield, so it is indifferent between groundwater or hill tiles in any placement, even when these will have radically different water yields.

AH15
Promotions need to be redone, so there are shock/cover etc type promotions matching the various unit classes.

After creating a game and at the start of many turns I get python exception: IOError: [Errno13]: Permission denied: 'c:\\stats.csv'

Instead of describing the four character change and going through the whole debate about plain text editors again, here is the fix to assets/python/dunewars.py. There is a routine which prints statistics every 10 turns, which is causing the problem. Do you keep your c:\\ directory write-protected? That is where the file gets written. I try to remember to turn off this routine each time before I release, but I sometimes forget.

The AI is also worse at placing cities

Good point, this will be a hard change. The problem of *initial* starting location may be solvable by cephalo since he is working on the starting positions in his mapscript. The problem of *later* city location will require changing the insides of the AI. Perhaps koma13 can do this when he returns.

Promotions need to be redone

Agreed, I will put that on the list after civics.

EDIT: missed one:
Water does feel too scarce

If it feels "less" than the previous, I am fine with that. Do you find that it limits your city growth excessively? As we have discussed, I feel that the early game was too water-rich, failing to capture the feeling that water is limiting your growth.

hi,

i wanna say im not happy with naming this modmod as 1.4.

i want 1.4 to still have the current structure, until i rebuild the unit tree with similarities to davids reduced.

i know you guys wanna have a trimed trimed version of the mod,
but i think your going too far with this for me, i always thought a mod should add more contents, more richness to the gameplay, not to be very thin.

i like having uus and ubs and a larger verity of civs to play with, and my modding motto, was to divert the gameplay as much as possible, without pumping up the mod size, in order to reduce lag on later stages.


i feel like i somewhat loosing grip here, and dune wars is turning into dune reduced.

i very happy that there's a mod mod, don't get me wrong, im all for it, but it seems that your abandoning my main version.

i hope you guys understand me,
i will try to merge in davids work into the 1.3.8b patch with keeping most of my elements.

thanks for everything your doing here, and david keep up the great work your doing with this, hope youll still help the main version.



******

ive read deliverators post above only now,

well,
perhaps your right, i seem to be ina minority here.
so i have to accept what you guys want.

so, perhaps we can compromise?

all i want is to have :

- at least 2 uus for each civ

- 1 unique building

- i wish to have ecaz + fenring back.


- some unique power units.

on all the rest im willing to let go, i personally like a fuller tech tree, but i can accept what you guys think is better.

all i want is to have :
- at least 2 uus for each civ
- 1 unique building
- i wish to have ecaz + fenring back.
- some unique power units.


I agree with all of this. To be honest, I found it impossible to understand the relationships of all the units when there were 30+ UU in the game. So I trimmed out all the UU so that I could focus on the relationships of the base units. I think we need to agree that the base units have the right relationship, and then we can easily add a small number of UU.

For the buildings, I still find it impossible to understand the relationships, even having removed all the UB. One problem is that so many of the icons are identical. I am working to create a spreadsheet listing all the buildings, and then we can hopefully trim this down. Just like UU, once we have a good set of base buildings then we can add UB.

For the civs, I fell strongly that each civ should have a unique ability like the Harkonnen, BG and Ordos have today. That means there are six civs so far, where we are completely missing abilities. I would like to fill in the abilities for the other six civs and make sure they are differentiated and balanced. *Then* I am perfectly happy to add more civs, as long as we can find differentiated unique abilities for them also.

well glad we agree on something..:)

im happy with the bonus cutdown you did.

and yeah, your right that its hard to understand the unit and building relations.

ok then, i would be happy to make the uus after you think you have a stabelized unit class set.
i must say, that, i always liked to have 2 types of each unit class - meaning , like in the vanilla the modern armor is the last unit and the strongest, - i like if there where two modern tank types - 1 with 1 advantage and the second with another - this why - your army will be diverse.
just noted this, cause it can be fun - thats why i orininally created the burseg class.

im also in for making each civ have its own very unique gameplay and unit types.

as for the remaining civs, well i guess we cant find a book oriented abilities and we will have to improvise.


basically, what you doing here, is starting over the mod, from small, balance it, and then add some stuff like a bit more units and civs.


i accept your trimming work, since, trimming means better stability, simple and not complicated mod game play,
and most of all much more speed on late turns.

bottom, line, you guys convinced me that this is the right course,
so lets talk bussines, i want to join building this reduced - 1.4,
so just lay down you plan and tell me what you need/want to do, and ill join in, i have time, and it will speed up the mod, if we are going to name it v 1.4, then before releaseing the official build, i wish to have it balanced as much as we can, all civs have special abilities, and some units.

:)

Good point, this will be a hard change. The problem of *initial* starting location may be solvable by cephalo since he is working on the starting positions in his mapscript. The problem of *later* city location will require changing the insides of the AI. Perhaps koma13 can do this when he returns.


This is a strange problem. Since I have so far been using the default starting routines, I'm guessing there is something fundamentally different about how the AI is evaluating map plots. It may have something to do with the fact that there is no food on most plots. I think the related function in the SDK is CvPlot::getFoundValue or something like that. It may be finding something unexpected, and then giving up and returning zero or something.

Until this problem is nailed down, the AI will have trouble recognizing where to build cities. I think they usually build them on the little blue circles when you select a settler. It might be useful to select a settler and see where the blue circles pop up. If you don't see any, you'll want to find out why.

so just lay down you plan and tell me what you need/want to do, and ill join in, i have time, and it will speed up the mod

That is great. I hope to release a spreadsheet of the current buildings in the next few hours so we can have a lively discussion about that. But, two projects which could be separated out are a redesign of promotions, and a redesign of civics. Now that we have a small set of unitcombats, it would be interesting to redesign the promotions to go on top of that. Do you want to try that? Redesigning civics is also worthwhile but it may be a little harder.

on all the rest im willing to let go, i personally like a fuller tech tree, but i can accept what you guys think is better.Personally, I think that your compromise is more than acceptable - and I think there's a different approach to design:

In the original dune wars, there was a lots of stuff and development was adding, removing and changing stuff.

The idea of dune wars reduced is, as I see it, getting the bare stable minimum running - so we get a solid foundation that's not changed a lot any longer - and once that bit is up and running, we'll flesh out things and add UUs, UBs, extra mechanics and so forth slowly and in a tested and controlled fashion.

It would be a shame to see you being disappointed, keldath, as you started this - I hope you can have a little patience with davids base and then we can start to make it "click" for all.

Cheers, LT.

This is a strange problem. Since I have so far been using the default starting routines.

Hm. Do you think you will be able to spend some time on this and understand at least the initial city location part? It is a big problem for the mapscript that civs start so close to each other that one dies.

Nuts, I forgot to undo one key change in the offworld trade mechanism. To make local playtesting faster, I reduced the cost of the Trade Port from 80 to 8. So you will find it is ridiculously cheap.

We will eventually have more civs and a fuller tech tree in the future. I think that slowly and steadily adding stuff and checking how each new addition works in the game is important and the right way to do it. It is almost a complete redesign in effect, but it will be worth it in the long run I think.

Adding a lot of units all at once would just put us back in the situation we have been in, where we can't see the wood for the trees. We should try and make sure everything we add has a functional purpose and good flavour. It's better to grow the mod in this more steady and controlled way, playtesting each thing that is added.

I still think it will take more than just one unique ability per faction to make them play differently. It needs to be a combination of functional and flavourful things - all working together. I wouldn't say that the existing abilities for Harkonnen, Ordos and BG really make them that distinctive. The Civ Specific Tech Trees (http://forums.civfanatics.com/showthread.php?t=275046) could be interesting. I would have the majority of the tech tree the same for everyone, but one distinct channel for each civ. However, before we did this we need to have good ideas for the units, buildings, wonders, promotions that are going to be enabled by the civ specific tech tree channel. Also, the modcomp is not yet updated to BTS 3.19.

We could call this 1.4 a redesign/rebuild phase and then build up to an official 1.5 release. I think there's no rush, and if you do it right then people who try the mod are more likely to stick with it.

Lord Tirian,
im more then willing to be patient, and more over to work on this, casue im not disappointed by davids work....not at all, its just that.....i like units...:)


***
david,
yeah perhaps i can do the promotions, i can set for each unit class their own balanced promotions.

the civics, well..im not so good on those...i would trust me to make something good with it if i were you :)

***
ive gone through the tech tree and the units, here's my impressions:

the tech tree is too dense with units (cant believe im saying this...), what i mean is, that you need to have enough time to utelize al the units you have - look here, you have medium thoper, but you can barley build some and bang, two and the half techs later - you can build heavy thopters,
i think we need to extend the life spend of the various unit classes.
this can be done bya few means :
1. cut sown more the unit classes of each type a bit more
2. re position units to be further from one another
3. add some more techs between the unit tiers, jus to create a mechanism that a player will be able to play with unit classes a bit more before they get obselete.

- i think we can let go of either tactical bomb or icbm.

- some minor bugs need to be attended - theres a tech ontop of tech
- the uu for corinno isnt set right.

- perhaps some moving and re arranging the tech tree to have a bit more aesthetic tree , this could be nice.


i will do the promotions on the weekend.



*****
deliverator,

yeah i agree, taking it slow step by step is good.

the specifick tech tree is on my list, im gonna try and merge it on the weekend to the sdk, ive looked through the code a few days ago, and it seems to be an easy merge.
we can do great things with this.

i think that before we go with this as a 1.4, we need to finish its first phase, we need to optimize it and close all the bugs and such, think f it as a new mod, we shouldnt get a half baked mod.
so when we go up with 1.4 w e go p in a bang.
maybe we can keep it here for now and develop it more and more over time.

also, the current unique civ abilities - i think we need more stuff to differentiate between civs, if you ever played starcraft - think of zerg and terran - they are completely different... i wannna play with the fremen - knowing they are very different from another civ to another - its much more fun, dont you think?

the tech tree is too dense with units (cant believe im saying this...), what i mean is, that you need to have enough time to utelize al the units you have - look here, you have medium thoper, but you can barley build some and bang, two and the half techs later - you can build heavy thopters,

This is exactly what I mean by playtesting and tweaking. With all the UU in the way, we could never see this before. Please do compare the unit lifespans against vanilla before you make too many changes. The spreadsheet which I sent is very helpful for this; it shows the vanilla units against the DW units. Please note that there are fewer DWR units than vanilla, so it may be better to move around the techs, rather than deleting more units.

I think Ahrihman had a good suggestion for the scorpion units; they should be the mobile defense units to attack incoming assault stacks. So I took away their city attack bonus and made them move 2. We could take this unitclass a little further by adding one or two more units at the lower end of the tech tree, for example using some of the roller graphics which I deleted.

I don't plan to tweak units anymore, please go ahead. I am going to focus on buildings, and the unique abilities of the civs.

I still think it will take more than just one unique ability per faction to make them play differently. It needs to be a combination of functional and flavourful things - all working together. I wouldn't say that the existing abilities for Harkonnen, Ordos and BG really make them that distinctive.

I agree we are not done yet. I wish I could go faster. I hope we will get there.

ok great david,

ill see how i can move arround the units.

i know the units in the vanilla...i dont think they did such a good job :)

ahriram said something on compensating for lack of roads - maybe adding some move,ment promotions ?

I think the particular problem is lack of units which can defend cities. I think the scorpion units can grow into this. Also, he suggested that Planetfall has some defensive bombardment units, using ranged attack. Maybe one or two more units in the maula family, which are vulnerable outside cities but can bombard attackers?

Personally, I think you guys should eliminate all UU's and UB's, make sure the mod is fun, and then start discussing what UU's and UB's can be added without destroying the fun you created.

Otherwise, I think you'll end up chasing your tails trying to find the fun through all this complexity. I love complexity in the games I play, but until you have found the fun, complexity is really standing in the way of your development process.

I was serious in my previous post. Atreides vs. Harkonnen, make it fun. Then start adding your 'wouldn't it be fun if..'s back in until things start to get ugly. Then stop!

I think starting with *two* civs is a little small. But I agree with you in spirit.

If it feels "less" than the previous, I am fine with that. Do you find that it limits your city growth excessively?

Yes, its hard to get cities above size 8-10.


i feel like i somewhat loosing grip here, and dune wars is turning into dune reduced.


I don't think we're abandoning your mod, I think we're toying with some stuff and a different design method. I don't think that any of us intend for factions to not have UUs, but its easier to get the core units design working better without the UUs there, and then add them back in.

I think the point of this modmod isn't just to make the mod small, but to cut out a lot of the excess stuff and then build back in some of the stuff that really worked.

Its not that there shouldn't be multiple UUs and UBs for factions - there definitely should be, faction differentiation is key - but these can be built in once the general unit roster and tech placement is tweaked.

I think the particular problem is lack of units which can defend cities. I think the scorpion units can grow into this. Also, he suggested that Planetfall has some defensive bombardment units, using ranged attack. Maybe one or two more units in the maula family, which are vulnerable outside cities but can bombard attackers?

Scorpion units are tanks; they should not be good city defenders. Instead there should be a class of *decent* city defender units, that stay decent at the high end.

I don't think long-range bombardment makes sense fluff-wise in the Dune universe.
a) Too easy to block with shields
b) Dune is about up-close-and-dirty melee, not huge long-range artillery bombardemnt.
Remember that the artillery that the Harkonnen use successfully in Dune did so because they were a complete surprise. No-one used artillery units anymore in normal warfare, they were deemed completely obsolete.
There needs to be another mechanic, probably multiple move units.

AH17
Why not make all infantry 2 moves, scorpions 3 moves, thoptors 4 moves, suspensors 4-5 moves?
And try and implement something so that pillaging takes away all remaining movement points to prevent massive pillaging.

cephalo,

yeah your right, theres too much units on v 1.3,

david did a good work in the cuttdown, we can optimize the cuirrent unit classes and the tech tree, and then only to set the uus.

a mod for 2 civs.....well....thats *thin*.......makes me feel like playing some dine 2000 :)




****
Ahriman. its ok, ive thought of this modmod a lot, and i decided that it is good to start over from a strong basis with really optimized unit classes and tech tree before placing uus,
the uus on the full version, mostly , have no meaning to the civs, this way we could all choose together what will be a fit unit to each civ,carefully choose its strengths and abilities.

you could say i opened my eyes a bit.
ive looked at other mods and most mods that have a strong theme, aren't just a jumble of things thrown together to form a mod.
so it its very important to start over, make the mod really feel dunish, and most important make it simple to understand and to be fun to play with.

its just that im soooooo eager to get to a version that all we will have to do is think of how more can we enrich the mod,
i guess i want v 1.8 to be ready sooner heheh :)

Yes, its hard to get cities above size 8-10.

OK, I will try to measure and improve something here.

Scorpion units are tanks; they should not be good city defenders. Instead there should be a class of *decent* city defender units, that stay decent at the high end.

I didn't mean "sit in a city and take it", I meant "go out and hit the attackers before they get close", like vanilla knights (move 2, no defensive bonus). Does this seem like a reasonable role?

Why not make all infantry 2 moves, scorpions 3 moves, thoptors 4 moves, suspensors 4-5 moves?

What is the advantage of changing infantry to 2 and scorpions to 3?

why not make all infantry 2 moves, scorpions 3 moves, thoptors 4 moves, suspensors 4-5 moves?

i support this - but with infantry moves 1 - and there can be special promotions for them that gives more movement.

I didn't mean "sit in a city and take it", I meant "go out and hit the attackers before they get close", like vanilla knights (move 2, no defensive bonus). Does this seem like a reasonable role?

Yes, sounds fine. Also good all-round high strength units - still ok in city attack or stack defense.

What is the advantage of changing infantry to 2 and scorpions to 3?

AH17
Generally higher mobility and better AI ability to defend its own territory, and mitigate for AI inability to exploit transports as I explained earlier.
Remember than normally even 1-move infantry can move several tiles in your own terrain. So rushing in with chariots to pillage is dangerous because even a 1 move spearman can still move 2 tiles to attack your chariot.
Whereas here with all the 1 move stuff, you can easily pillage everything not adjacent to a city without the AT trooper or missile trooper being able to stop you.
Plus if you invade the AI, it will take them forever to bring their army in to reinforce the area you're attacking.
I don't think that bombardment bunkers are right for Dune as a defensive advantage, but more mobility might help.
If you add these with promotions it might work, but the AI has a bad tendency to only move its units as fast as the slowest unit in a stack, so this might not help much unless it selects the promotion on every unit.
What would be ideal would be if you could get a real substitute for roads that fulfill their same purpose; to give defenders a movement advantage during wartime.

AH18
What is the point of anchor grass? It is more expensive to build than a cottage or mine and yet appears to do nothing.

Does it give a terraforming chance separate from catchbasin/reservoir? That would be cool.

What would be ideal would be if you could get a real substitute for roads that fulfill their same purpose; to give defenders a movement advantage during wartime.

Well, one possible substitute for roads is ... roads. I strongly object to putting roads across deep desert, but I don't have any strong objection to putting them back on "dry land". But if the AI has to bring reinforcements from another "island", then this is the same problem that would occur in a vanilla archipelago run, and the AI is supposed to use transports.

What is the point of anchor grass? It is more expensive to build than a cottage or mine and yet appears to do nothing. Does it give a terraforming chance separate from catchbasin/reservoir? That would be cool.

The intention of anchor grass is to provide a cheap improvement, since catchbasin/reservoirs will upgrade the terrain only if the plot has some kind of improvement. If it takes longer to build than the others you mention, this is a bug.

Well, one possible substitute for roads is ... roads.

AH18
Putting roads back would definitely help. Yes, it won't get them from other islands, but thats fine; you can still get help from the same archipelago, and infantry can still manage to move 2-3 tiles around their own cities.
Absolutely, no roads in desert wastes/deep desert tiles, and you could easily say no roads in hills or peaks or dunes, so they're flatland only.
That would also help the visual aspect; you won't have roads on every tile, and dunes on land will still act as a real barrier.

If it takes longer to build than the others you mention, this is a bug.

AH17
Currently yes, it took 5-worker turns for me when cottages and mines were 4 and
But that alone isn't really much value even if it only takes 1 turn; the catchbasin/reservoir only terraform the tiles in 1 ring/2 rings around your city, and by the time a city is big enough to be building those buildings, you will already have improvements on all the relevant tiles.
Doing the terraforming even without the reservoirs built
But I suspect this would be very intensive on system resources - having to check every tile every turn to see if it has an anchor grass improvement, then doing the random terraform check.
Another alternative; maybe have it speed the transformation that already happens?
You already have to do tile checks of tiles next to a reservoir, right?
So why not:
If (city has catchbasin/reservoir), check (tiles in 1/2 radius).
If (improvement present, != anchor grass) then (2% chance of terrain change).
If (improvement present, == anchor grass) then (20% chance of terraform change).

So you can use the anchor grass to speed up the terraforming process (but without any current tile yield), and then build over the anchor grass improvement with something else.

This would be particularly useful for "bad" tiles like dunes or badlands or rugged; that should have several upgrades needed.
Dunes -> arid -> plains -> grassland.
Rugged -> Badlands -> rock -> arid -> plains -> grassland.
At 2% chance, it would take average 250 turns to turn rugged into grassland, but with anchor grass on it would take an average of 25 turns.

re: water yields

OK, I will try to measure and improve something here.

AH13
+% water buildings can also help here. If I can get 3 water from city tile + 6 water from well + 4 water from windtrap + 3 water from dew collector = 16 water that supports population 8. (this is a very common yield).
Later game when I get the yields up to 8 from the groundwater, 5 from the windtrap and maybe 4 from the dew collector (is that in yet?) will have 20 water for pop 10, which will go up to 23 water with the +15%.

AH19
Suspensors still seem to have strength too high; you can't have a strength 8 3-4 move gunship that can move anywhere where everything else is strength 6-8 with 1 move. Suspensors should be weaker than normal infantry of similar tech-tier on land.

I am not sure offhand if +water% buildings are possible. I do not think there are any +food% buildings in vanilla. I will have to check. If it is possible, I agree with your suggestion.

I had taken roads out a long time ago, let me try putting them back in specifically to solve the problem of defensive reaction time. When koma13 comes back, he will say "I told you so", which is true. I wanted to experiment with no roads at all to make it different from vanilla, but maybe it is a failed experiment.

I will decrease the build time of anchor grass. I like the idea of having anchor grass be more effective at upgrading bad terrain like rugged. It may not be easy to implement, however; I will have to check.

We can certainly tune the strength of suspensor units.

One of the advantages of numbering these comments is that once they all get strewn around different threads, some of them can get overlooked. If they are all numbered, and I can look to see that I have fixed AH01...AH07 and AH09...AH20, I will realize that AH08 has been overlooked and go hunt for it.

I am not sure offhand if +water% buildings are possible.

I know they exist in other mods. The Rise of Mankind mod has a ton of them.
In Warhammer, we have -x% food buildings; the High Elves have a racial building in all their cities that gives +5 health but-10% food, so they grow much more slowly (as penalty for getting superior military units).

I'll try to edit numbers in where appropriate if that helps.

Here is patch 1.4.2. You can install it over either 1.4 (release note) (http://forums.civfanatics.com/showpost.php?p=8327057&postcount=21) or 1.4.1 (release note) (http://forums.civfanatics.com/showpost.php?p=8330822&postcount=47).

Civilization abilities
* Fremen foot units (settler, soldier, worker, melee units) and water debt units now get desert double move promotion, Sand Rider.
* Unit for House Atreides, Atreides Heir. Gives "Inspiration" promotion (+25% combat value) to all units in stack. National unit, limit 2.
* Each Atreides city may automatically generate a drafted unit, percent chance is (5 * population).

Minor changes
* Add roads, to improve defensive movement
* Removed crystal bonus requirement from all hornet and carryall units
* Removed nitrate requirement from most higher level units
* "Normalize" resource placement for crystal and nitrate; every player should have one now.
* Corrected cost of trade port to 100
* Decreased combat strength of suspensor and heavy carryall
* Decreased build time of anchor grass
* Added about eight new buttons in the tech tree
* Added xml help for some units

You can get it from this link (http://jendaveallen.com/fury-road/dune-reduced-patch-1-4-2.zip) (400 KB).

Next I will study the buildings, and update them probably Friday night. I need some specific ideas on unique abilities for the other civs: Corrino, Spacer, Ix, and Tleilaxu. I gave up on the paradrop and satellite ideas for Spacer, and we never got anything conclusive on Tleilax in its thread.

I am not sure offhand if +water% buildings are possible.

I'm pretty sure that buildings can add a percentage modifier to any yield.

hey,

david,
good job,

but roads? you surrendered? i thought you guys didnt want roads....its a ore unique aspect we have in dune.
maybe we can use route resriction for some units, or i dunno, maybe we can replace roads with somekind of movement bonuses like promotions.
but, roads are always fun :)

very cool atreides abilities!


very good idea on the space guild, maybe they can have an ability to see the entire map using satellites from game start or some kind of a unique sattelite unit - that can attack from long range or even do espionage missions from far.
there's a really nice art of a sattlelite in planetfal.
also, paratroop ability is nice.

for tleilax, we can do something with gholas, and cloning abilities - maybe some python code that will make that if they loose a unit - theres a % chance that it will be resurrected withing the nearest city - like idaho was replicated.


also,
note that theres a buf in one tech - that there are two techs on the same spot,
ill fix this with my promotion system that ill do on Friday.


I'm pretty sure that buildings can add a percentage modifier to any yield.

can be done.


:)


***
Atreides Heir - is availble for everyone -its not unique.

AH11a
The problem with the ATV transports and 1 move units is this; as a human player, I can load up a strike force on one turn and move the transport, and then on the next turn move my transport right next to the enemy force and unload them, and then the units can attack that turn. The AI doesnt' know how to do this.

It makes my army massively more potent than the enemies; basically with a bit of micro I can make all my units have 4-5 movement points to the enemies 1. I can also unload an infantry unit, attack with it, then load it back into the transport and move the transport away.

I had a discussion with Maniac by PM about the dropships in Planetfall. His comment was that the dropships basically only have their fast movement over ocean, not over land. Over land they have a similar movement speed to other units, so they can easily be caught and killed. I have lowered the strength of suspensor units and also given more move 2 land units and roads.

Do you think that changing suspensor units to have move 2 or 3, and double movement on desert, would make this problem better? Perhaps the carryalls could keep their high movement everywhere but I could lower the strength even more. Then the risk of using transport nearby to other units becomes much higher.

I agree that we should try to fix the sdk behavior allowing unload/pillage/load/repeat, but that requires a lot more knowledge inside the sdk.

Do you think that changing suspensor units to have move 2 or 3, and double movement on desert, would make this problem better?

Yes that would help.

Haven't tested yet whether you implemented it this way, but I also really like my idea of roads not buildable on rugged, dunes, hills or peaks. This would help to still make terrain matter and still be an obstacle. So you can easily patrol and defend your flatlands civilised areas with cottages and the like, but the harsher terrain still feels different.

Also:
AH20. Falcon thopter (strength 6, three moves!) appears to have no tech requirement. This is particaulrly annoying because it obsoletes the scout thopter, so you can't build scout thopters and you need them for early inter-island transport. The thopter requirements feel out of whack too; the scout thopter should require exploration, the strength 4 thopter should require desert warfare (currently at exploration) and the strength 6 thopter should have something even higher (Imperialism?).
AH21. Trade port gives +1 trade routes in ALL cities. Should give +1 trade routes in just that city. Otherwise its insane, you easily have cities with 6-7 trade routes pretty early on.

AH22
The Atreides-free-unit-mechanic is broken; it gives WAY too many free units.
I would suggest something like the Demagog mechanic from FFH; you get the free unit when an enemy moves onto one of your cottage tiles.
Or allow Atreides to always draft a unit at the cost of 1 population in the city, and no unhappiness penalty. But I'm getting a free infantry every few turns in every city, would be very easy to swarm an opponent.

AH23
Is there any way to remove the "X has proven the world is round" bonus?
a) it doesn't make much sense (I don't think there was any doubt about the shape of the world) and
b) bonus movement on all thopters is pretty powerful, since they're amphibious.

hey guys,
im on final stages of testing the civ specific tech tree,
tomorrow ill know for sure id it works 100%,

this will allow us to have tech branches for each civ/group of civs - thus allowing unique promotions, units, bonuses, and every aspect linked with a tech.

im sure this can allow us to further develop diversity betwen civs, like fremen wont be able to learn...say aerial combat ..

hey guys,

i was very unconformable with the tech tree as published in dw reduced,
so i sat down and completely rebuilt the entire tree along with the units.

i had to add 7 techs to the tree, i know you guys are against it, but plz try this out before you say our favorite phrase of the week : "more is less".
its just 7 techs...

i did this for one purpose - make the unit tree more logical and each tier of units to have sufficient distance between them, so each and every class will have more "game time", meaning i think its better when you can play more time with units, before they get obsolete by netter ones...

i also tweaked the powers of most units to fit this.
also, i did not add any more units, just used the existing ones.
i think we need two more unit class on the end of the tech tree, cause we only have there - scorpion, thopter and muala - wee need shock trooper and a guardsman.

again, i really hope you approve this, and get it inside this modmod that i wanna have as 1.4 later on.

the units make much more since now compared to our old version (1.3).
deleting the units completely, was a very smart move david.


plz write me what you guys think:

Keldath:

Unit class buzzard thopter is incorrect.

The extra techs appear to be empty?

I added the units file to assets/xml/units and the tech file to assets/xml/technologies

hey ,

plz re download now,

ive re uploaded the files since i wanted to fix the upgrade tree as well.

the file: techsinfo.xml goes : assets/xml/technologies
the file unitinfo.xml goes : assets/xml/units

plz let me know what you think.

the empty techs are for future use, when we re positioning buildings, wonders, promotions.
i also pland of making a few unique techs for some civs - like riding the worm - to the fremen.


****

another thing,
the current unit classes, is very good, but,
i think theres too much relynse on infantry units, you guys removed rovers, and now - you got - 1 combat type that acts as defensive units - guardsman, i think, they should be later on the tech tree replaced with rover unit category,
so th rule that will apply along the tech tree :

1. infantry for city attack
2. defnsive rover for defending the cities - roveres in midgame for start game - infantry(guardsman).
3. heavy support vehicle for engaging units - scorpion
4. thopters - against infantry and scorpions - but week on power.
5, carryalls.
6. aa trooper
7. hornets

each tier needs to have this order of unit to make a balanced unit combat system in my opinion.

Let us call those files "1.4.3". I will work on "1.4.4" which revises all the buildings into your new tech tree.

really? this makes me so happy!

i was sure that youll wont like this!!!

thanks!

`you wont be dissappionted - i put much thought in the unit tiers.

I haven't looked into your new files yet, it will be another 8 hours probably. My building redesign is only on paper so far, which means I won't have to worry about any merging.

AH24
Roads are buildable on desert wastes (ie coast) tiles. Ooops. I really like banning roads from deep desert, desert waste, hills, peaks, rugged, and dunes tiles. So you can only build them on mesa/rock/badlands (and plains/grassland).

AH25
Also, there needs to be a way so that only ground units benefit from roads; suspensors and thopters should NOT benefit from road movement bonuses.

What!?? We have roads again? :eek: :lol:

Also, there needs to be a way so that only ground units benefit from roads; suspensors and thopters should NOT benefit from road movement bonuses.

This can be easily done by setting <bIgnoreTerrainCost> to 0 and <bFlatMovementCost> to 1.

I am getting a python exception in new 1.4.2 mod when opening the city screen:

Traceback (most recent call last):

File "CvScreensInterface", line 996, in forceScreenRedraw

File "CvMainInterface", line 3336, in redraw

File "CvMainInterface", line 6498, in updateCityScreen

File "Revolution", line 1050, in updateLocalRevIndices

File "Revolution", line 219, in loadInfo

AttributeError: 'module' object has no attribute 'sXMLNationalism'
ERR: Python function forceScreenRedraw failed, module CvScreensInterface


edit:

Revolution.py (219-221):

self.iNationalismTech = CvUtil.findInfoTypeNum(gc.getTechInfo,gc.getNumTec hInfos(), RevDefs.sXMLNationalism)
self.iLiberalismTech = CvUtil.findInfoTypeNum(gc.getTechInfo,gc.getNumTec hInfos(), RevDefs.sXMLLiberalism)
self.iSciMethodTech = CvUtil.findInfoTypeNum(gc.getTechInfo,gc.getNumTec hInfos(), RevDefs.sXMLSciMethod)

It tries to call sXMLNationalism from RevDefs.py. Someone (david?) changed RevDefs.py (61-64):
sXMLNationalism = 'TECH_NATIONALISM'
# Used by Rev, weight of religious effects decreases after each discovery
#sXMLLiberalism = 'TECH_LIBERALISM'
#sXMLSciMethod = 'TECH_SCIENTIFIC_METHOD'

We have to uncomment these lines again and change the tech names to the new ones. :yup:

What!?? We have roads again? :eek: :lol: This can be easily done by setting <bIgnoreTerrainCost> to 0 and <bFlatMovementCost> to 1.

Both you and Ahriman commented that roads were needed. When it was just one person, I still thought it was an interesting experiment, but when the same feedback comes from multiple people I thought it was time to give up and put them back.

One of the suggestions about making suspensors less subject to abuse of load/pillage/reload/move was to give them a lower base movement, and then give them double movement on ocean. If we set the two flags you specify, that will not work.

There is a mod which was created for Fury Road for exactly this purpose; it is called JRouteNative and it is found at this post (http://forums.civfanatics.com/showthread.php?p=7067741).

I still consider roads as experimental. Maybe we should take them back out. Maybe we should add JRouteNative so that suspensor/carryalls do not benefit. What do you think?

I am getting a python exception in new 1.4.2 mod when opening the city screen:

Please turn off Revolutions in your game options screen. This is a result of renaming all the techs. The best solution is to just remove revolutions. Let us all say it together: "More is not better". Another solution would be to edit revdefs.py and change the names of the techs there, to some other names which exist in the current game.

EDIT: it does not really matter, but I introduced the problem by renaming the techs, and keldath "solved" the problem by commenting out those lines in revdefs.py. At least now I have enhanced civcheck to check all the python files for strings that look like TECH_SOMETHING or UNIT_SOMETHING, which will help prevent me from introducing this type of error in the future.

Please turn off Revolutions in your game options screen.

Ok, that is a solution too. :)

Both you and Ahriman commented that roads were needed. When it was just one person, I still thought it was an interesting experiment, but when the same feedback comes from multiple people I thought it was time to give up and put them back.

Well, to tell the truth I am not that happy about having roads back in game...

One of the suggestions about making suspensors less subject to abuse of load/pillage/reload/move was to give them a lower base movement, and then give them double movement on ocean.
Wouldn't it be easier to change the load/unload behaviour? E.g we could only allow units to be loaded if they haven't moved that turn already.... something like this.

I completely agree that it is important to fix the sdk for all terrain transports so that this type of load/pillage/reload/move behavior is not possible. If you could try that out, it would be great.

The problem pointed by Ahriman about lack of roads was that it is difficult to counterattack pillagers and move defensive units from one city to a nearby one (on the same island). Your comment much earlier was about moving workers. Airlift may help for workers but not large numbers of troops. So we are trying to find a solution. We can try several things, in different combinations:

* Roads.
* Units which specialize in open field counterattacking; the scorpion units and perhaps some rollers could be added for this.
* Fix the base all terrain transport problem.
* Decrease the strength of suspensor and carryall units so that putting them anywhere near combat is risky
* Decrease the move points of suspensor units over land (eg, make them move 2 or 3 with double movement in ocean/coast).

Re: roads

AH26
My argument for including roads (on decent flatland tiles) is:
a) The AI is very easy to invade because with all the very slow movement units and the AI's inability to take advantage of transports for moving faster on the same continent, the AI simply cannot move its army around fast enough to respond. It can charge its thopters and suspensors toward the invader, but not its core infantry and mechanised troops.
b) Roads give the defender an a strategic advantage in warfare; they 1 move infantry can move 2-3 tiles. This is incredibly important when there are multiple move units like thopters than can easily pillage the AI's economy to death, and if they stay 1 tile away the missile troopers will be helpless to stop them.
Whereas in vanilla civ, spearmen can use roads to move multiple tiles and be much more effective at countering pillaging by chariots or horsearchers because they can influence a much larger area; you have to stay 2-3 tiles away to avoid their counterattack.
The strategic advantage given to the defender by superior movement mirrors human history (defender always has an advantage) and helps to mitigate the fact that the defender is usually outnumbered (both in history and in civ) since the attacker has the strategic initiative.
Also, given that city defenses are weak in this mod (city-attack units ignore them), faster defender movement can help counteract this.
b) Having to manually load and unload transports to efficiently move around units within your borders is NotFun micromanagement busywork.
c) there really isn't any particular reason why roads don't belong in the Dune universe on decent terrain. In the desert, sure, no roads. But on land, in the areas inhabited by humans? How can we argue that you can build a plantation and cottages, but can't build a road? In a world that has space-travel, I can't believe that humans don't have the technology to build roads.
d) Even in Planetfall which has no early game roads, there are eventually magtubes (roads). And Planetfall also has other mechanics to speed movement for infantry (faster movement along rivers and coastlines, APC promotion) and to give the defender an advantage (bunkers as terrain improvements and given free in cities with city walls type buildings).

I think roads will make DuneWars warfare much more fun.

hey koma13,
indeed ive commented out the lines...

i dont mind removing revolution if you guys think is doesn't fit dune. just say the word.

i vote no on roads also. i dunno, the mod seems more cool without them .
i now the route mod, we can use this, perhaps we can limit roads just for certain tiles?

***

edit: Ahriman got a point there....


****
off the issue,
i attemted to fix the white grid lines on the spice, i got it look better now :

AH26
To clarify:
I don't think roads need to be used for connecting resources. I like the instant connection, it has lots of pros.

But I think roads need to be there for improving movement rates. Without them, I find the military aspect of the mod to be very NotCool.

And you'll still get a good feel of different movement from different different terrain if you can't build roads on rugged, dunes, hills or peaks (or desert waste/deep desert).

But I think roads need to be there for improving movement rates. Without them, I find the military aspect of the mod to be very NotCool.

mmm....not fun.

what else flaws the combat in the mod?

what else flaws the combat in the mod?

Its hard to tell when the movement rate issue is so dominating.
It used to be the necessity of strategic resources for so many units (being without crystal was crippling) and the fact that hovers were better than any other units of their tech-tier, but you guys have improved those significantly.

AH27
Btw: can I also make a call for increasing groundwater spawn rate in the mapscripts and/or adding some +water buildings? Most of the map is unuseable for decent cities (which hurts the AI badly since it is so bad at city placement and tries to build cities dense enough to work every available tile) and even decent cities are hard to grow to a significant level.

Also:
AH28
Little maker seems very strange. It gives no tile yield bonus, and is a strategic resource that allows a single resource for a single faction. I'd cut it, its purpose is too narrow (and those while whales look weird).
Sandtrout should also give a tile yield bonus with the improvement.

Its hard to tell when the movement rate issue is so dominating.
It used to be the necessity of strategic resources for so many units (being without crystal was crippling) and the fact that hovers were better than any other units of their tech-tier, but you guys have improved those significantly.

Btw: can I also make a call for increasing groundwater spawn rate in the mapscripts and/or adding some +water buildings? Most of the map is unuseable for decent cities (which hurts the AI badly since it is so bad at city placement and tries to build cities dense enough to work every available tile) and even decent cities are hard to grow to a significant level.

Also:
Little maker seems very strange. It gives no tile yield bonus, and is a strategic resource that allows a single resource for a single faction. I'd cut it, its purpose is too narrow (and those while whales look weird).
Sandtrout should also give a tile yield bonus with the improvement.

(numbering ... issue loss ...)

In 1.4.2 there are roads. Do you still feel that movement is the crippling problem? Then roads did not help. We (hopefully koma) will work to fix the load/pillage/reload exploit. Specifically what else should we add?

I am adding some +water% buildings in 1.4.4 tomorrow. I can also bump up the groundwater rate. Do you feel that there are too many basic plant resources? There are six, with almost all the same in-game effect. If we bump up groundwater there will be slightly less of anything else, and percentage-wise, these six plant types are not adding much.

Sandtrout and little maker have been in since the initial "repaint". I agree they do not do much now, but I would like to leave them there for now until we can focus on adding a little more of the "spice lifecycle" to the game.

In 1.4.2 there are roads. Do you still feel that movement is the crippling problem? Then roads did not help.

The roads definitely help. I just haven't had time to play it enough yet. And in Keldath's modified version at least, roads are buildable on desert tiles, so they start getting weird.

It will be easier to evaluate once they are more limited.

Do you feel that there are too many basic plant resources?

No, I like these.

i attemted to fix the white grid lines on the spice, i got it look better now :

I should have said - I'm doing a fixed and polished version of the spice. I'll put it in the Art Thread tomorrow.

Deliverator.......took me 2 hours...oh well :)

Sorry. :blush: It is a pain to work with that spice.

The version I've got now is completely flicker free I'm pleased to say, and I've fixed a few other things with it.

no worries buddy, whats 2 hours in the hundreds of hours that we are swimming in civ huh?

:)

ive re uploaded the files since i wanted to fix the upgrade tree as well.
the file: techsinfo.xml goes : assets/xml/technologies
the file unitinfo.xml goes : assets/xml/units


I highly advise you use civcheck, or some other method, to avoid undefined names in your files. There are five undefined names in your techinfos file: TECH_DESERT_PLAMTATION, TECH_MIND_LOGIC, TECH_SADN_FARMS, TECH_WEIRDING_WAYY, TECH_WINDS_OF_ARRAKIS. Also I see you have added back many of the techs I deleted, even though they are empty.

I have most of the building rewrite done on paper. After I enter it and test it a little, I am going to do a *strong* pruning of the tech tree. It is way too complicated and too empty. I will try to balance out the total costs so that you cannot research everything in the tree too easily. But fair warning, it is about to get a lot smaller.

I think shrinking the tech tree is fine, but you should probably also increase tech beaker costs at the same time, to make sure that there really is enough time with each tier of units before they become obsolete.

On the whole roads issue-You could have a promotion only gained in cultural borders that gives a move boost(on the order of the homeland ffh promotion--call it familiar ground or something) to avoid having roads but still give the defender an advantage.

Edit: this would let you limit it to infantry and perhaps wheeled vehicles if wanted as well.

Edit2:VV I may not have been clear, I meant a free promotion(that doesn't take exp), that is automatically added when you are inside your own borders and automatically removed once you leave them.

Ahriman,

yeah, either make the cost of the techs higher to compensate for the shrinking.

i rather have the extra techs, with lower cost, i think its less boring - think about it,
what would you prefer when playing, learning a tech in a 100 turns, or learn 2 in 50 each?
i think is more interesting and less boring.

Kjara,
i agree with this, ive suggested promotions also for movement boost, can be done by special buildings that gives these promotions also instead of combat.

OK, I made a lot of progress tonight but I am not quite ready to release. 12 hours from now I am going offline for the weekend, I will try to put up my changes before then.

New building tree

Lots of changes. I deleted about 20 buildings. The total number of buildings is slightly less than vanilla. It turns out almost all of the wonders in DW were "repaints" of the original wonders, with a few random ones added. I removed most of the random ones unless they had a good concept. I reused a lot of the good names. I have not tried very hard with the building art yet. There are a lot of copies of courthouse and factory buildings, and a lot of copies of the spaceport button.

I have attached a spreadsheet which I found very helpful. The grey color lines are vanilla buildings, the other ones are DW buildings. They are grouped by tier, with page breaks. The first section is vanilla buildings tier 1-5, then DW buildings tier 1-5. Then 6-10, 11-15, 16-20. Then all the wonders, tiers 1-10 and then 11-20; the vanilla ones have the names of the "repainted" DW ones. At the end are the buildings popped by GP. This makes it as easy as possible to compare the vanilla buildings to the DW set.

One thing I notice is that vanilla has three bonuses that give "double production speed" usually of wonders: marble, stone, iron. DW has one, iron, except that stravidium slipped in there once. I'd like to get another resource like that. I was thinking of adding an unlimited offworld contract for marble, since Arrakis isn't likely to have any of that, and it's helpful for building all sorts of monuments. Maybe we could add stone as a resource, that shouldn't be hard to find.

Several of the buildings are underpowered, but I'm a little stuck how to give them more: spice refinery, market, and spaceport.

Any feedback is welcome.

Comments on "1.4.3"

Today keldath put up a modified units and techs files, which I have called "1.4.3" so we can keep in order. The unit tree seems mostly the same as 1.4.2, which is fine. I did not carefully check all the relative unit strengths. The upgrade tree seems a little odd. It is possible to upgrade to Ginaz Warrior, which definitely seems wrong. Several of the units are missing from the upgrade tree, notably the Bee Sting and suspensor gunship. It may be worthwhile to cross-check.

I am very frightened by the tech tree. Keldath has said he is very happy with it, so I am reluctant to change it. However, it is huge, and very empty. Granted I have made it a little emptier by removing 20 buildings. But still! It has 109 techs in it. By comparison, vanilla has 92, HOTK has 94, and FFH has 85. The FFH tech tree is shaped very differently, but it is clearly a popular mod and that indicates a large number of techs is not required. It may argue that a large number of techs is bad.

I would be in favor of cutting down the number of techs by at least 20. But I do not plan to touch it.

Comments on roads

I have done a little more research. Ahriman has pointed out that you can build roads on desert waste. Actually, a worker can build a road anywhere he can walk, and there are no xml or python hooks to control that. So a midgame worker can build roads on deep desert also. This is not good. Also, there is no way to remove fast movement for thopters and carryalls on roads, unless we include JRouteNative.

So I am leaning towards taking roads out again. In exchange, I propose:

* Add two roller units low in the tech tree, with a setup similar to the light scorp (move 2, + vs suspensor, - city atk)

* Decrease suspensor strength till they are painfully weak. I had not intended to have "cruiser" class units, the strength seems to have crept upwards.

* Add the flag "cannot pillage" to all thopters.

* I had thought about reducing suspensor movement by half, and then giving them double move on desert. But the two lowest suspensors only have move 2, so that does not quite seem right. So I guess we would leave those the same.

hey david,

tech tree - well if you removed 20 buildings...then we can vut down techs....
its just that i wanted to give a longer life span to the units.
there isnt a rule that states that we have to shape the mod just like hotk ot ffh or the rest.

the bee sting - i made a rocket trooper - missile trooper - be sting upgrade tree - hence they all aa troopers.


personally, i rather not skim the buildings, but...im going with the flow.

upgrade tree of units - i did my best to make everything consistent, i made the ginaz w to be upgraded to a moongoose)ive also made him as a defensive unit - cause i didnt want to make the lasgun units as defensive - this is probably wrong, but later on i think ill add a defensive unit instead of the ginaz, and the ginaz it self will be changed back to an attacker as should be), theres two upgrade trees for infantries - one - defensive troops, and second the attacking troops.
as for their strengths, i walked carefully on all of them.


*****
as for art:
i strongly suggest, that we keep a standard art type to the buildings - building art isnt that important, and the bigger the mod is, the more art it contains - the slower the game gets on late stages.
i know this from exp, and its my modding motto. theres no need to have tons of buildings art - its something we can pass cause it will reduce mod size.
buttons are ok to change, they weight nothing..


at this point i want to note, that im working on a modmod to this modmod ...
after we will release 1.4 of davids, ill release a modmod of my own, that just adds extra stuff,
hope no one is objecting, im just making something that i like a bit more,
it wont impair y work on davids mod, since im building mine ontop of this current.

anyway, david, good job,
i see what techs i can chop down.

*****david - the grayed parts of the excel sheet - are the buildings removed?

what would you prefer when playing, learning a tech in a 100 turns, or learn 2 in 50 each?
i think is more interesting and less boring.

I would rather play a mod where most of the techs actually make sense in being technological/organizational/philosophical (re)discoveries of Dune stuff in the Shaddam IV-era of Dune. Lots of the current techs really don't fit this. Why is Cycle of Dune a tech - the Cycle is the recreation of sand worms from sand trout? Why is Diaspora a tech - this takes place 3500 years later? Lots of similar things like this.

* * * * *

Building comments:
Why does the Monument need to become obsolete? I see no reason for this. Its particularly lame that the monument that gives it becomes obsolete before the monument itself does.
Why does the defense grid need to become obsolete? Its easier just to make lasgun troops ignore city walls. Its annoying because sometimes you want to be able to build citadels for the bonus trade route, but you can't because they required the defense grid which you can't build anymore.

I like having buildings that give +water, but +50% water during the first age (low-tech buildings) might be too much.
I don't understand why the weather scanner would increase water yield; my idea of a weather scanner and why it increased desert tile bonuses was that this was something that scanned for sandstorms and such out in the desert, and so people listening to their radio-equivalents would be able to avoid storms more easily, and so commerce would be more effective (less risk of dying in a sandstorm).
I also think that +water buildings can easily start with a lower bonus (15%) and then gain a higher one with a new tech.

Market seems fine to me; if you think its weak then reduce its hammer cost to say 120.

The Reservoir of Liet needs a higher tech requirement; push it into a later Age.

What is a space center? And how does it differ from a spaceport? And why does it give a beaker yield? We could just call it Observatory, since those do show up in the book.

Why does the Desert Dock only show up in the 3rd age? there are suspensor units from pretty early on. Can its description be changed so that it says Suspensor units, rather than Deep Desert units, which doesn't show up as a describer anywhere else?

Can the espionage buildings be spread out more across the ages? It seems strange to me that there is nothing, then the tribunal, then 3 buildings that all have massive espionage point yields.

Ecology research center seems very over-priced, it should give some other bonus or be much cheaper.

I don't understand why Frigate tranportation is a building, or why it gives health bonuses, or why it has synergy with Water Discipline civic.

Water refinery sounds good. I guess the idea here is that you can learn to get even more water content out of the vegetation that grows.
If the greenhouse building gives +15% water and a further +10% with a higher tech, and then this one gives +25%, for a total of +50%, and you tweak up the spawn rate of groundwater and maybe a few of the other water-producing bonuses, that will probably be sufficient. Put the weather scanner back to its old purpose.

Why is the airfield so late in the tech tree, when aerial units are avialable so much earlier?

Fusion plant. Change this so that it adds +25% hammers, rather than giving power, or make the factory give +25% hammers with power.

Merge bomb shelters with bunekrs, the buildings are too boring otherwise.

CHOAM commerce exchange underpowered. Have it give +1 free trader.

A late-game buiding that gives tile yield bonuses to cottages would be pretty good (a replacement for the Levee?), these become weak late-game compared to specialists. The top end is pretty empty anyway, maybe we can brainstorm some more useful ones.

I have no particular Wonder thoughts, except that the David Lynch museum breaks immersion and isn't that funny.

I would be in favor of cutting down the number of techs by at least 20. But I do not plan to touch it.


Strongly support tech-cutting, particularly at the very empty upper end of the tree.
Its important to have decent time between eras and unit tiers, but this can be achieved better with higher tech beaker costs than with inclusion of unfocused techs.
Every tech should be a clearly understandable improvement.
This is one of the great things about the vanilla tree; we know human history so it is easy to imagine what each tech development represents (we know what a compass is and why it matters for navigation, we understand the importance of gunpowder, etc.). Its more of a challenge to do this for a sci-fi mod, but this should be the goal, to make sure that every tech has a clearly useful purpose. No filler.

actually, a worker can build a road anywhere he can walk

THere is no way to control what type of terrains the road improvement can be built on? surely somewhere you can limit it. You can limit what terrain every other improvement type is built on. Why not allow roads to only be built on mesa, rock, badlands, plains and grassland tiles (and not on hills or peaks)?

So I am leaning towards taking roads out again. In exchange, I propose:

As long as infantry units (and the specialist AA/AT infantrY) are only 1 move in friendly borders, the core problem remains.

Ahriman,

good feedback,

well, ill wait on davids files and ill do some countdown in the tech tree, ill take out around 15, and raise the cost of others.

some of the tech names are just made up, i would be happy if you can assist with the tech names and the logical flow.

i made the ginaz w to be upgraded to a moongoose)ive also made him as a defensive unit - cause i didnt want to make the lasgun units as defensive - this is probably wrong, but later on i think ill add a defensive unit instead of the ginaz, and the ginaz it self will be changed back to an attacker as should be

Please recall that the Ginaz warrior is melee, and requires an offworld resource. I do not think it should be in the upgrade tree at all.

the grayed parts of the excel sheet - are the buildings removed?

As I wrote above, the grey sections are the vanilla buildings, for comparison.

THere is no way to control what type of terrains the road improvement can be built on? surely somewhere you can limit it. You can limit what terrain every other improvement type is built on. Why not allow roads to only be built on mesa, rock, badlands, plains and grassland tiles (and not on hills or peaks)?

I agree that would be a great idea. There are no hooks to do it, short of adding to the sdk. Maniac has confirmed this in this thread (http://forums.civfanatics.com/showthread.php?t=330958), but he has also indicated the sdk function CvPlot::canBuild which would need to be modified. This would be a koma project.

As long as infantry units (and the specialist AA/AT infantrY) are only 1 move in friendly borders, the core problem remains.

I like the idea of the automatic double move promotion inside cultural borders suggested by kjara above. This would have to be an sdk thing from the runtime performance standpoint. If we cannot restrict the terrain type for road or add this promotion, how about adding three roller units, one of which is a mobile SAM?

I have no particular Wonder thoughts, except that the David Lynch museum breaks immersion and isn't that funny.

Your mileage may vary. I think it is an amusing inside reference. But then, I like the two headed cows in Fury Road also.

I need to think a little more about your other building comments, but in general, some of the things you are commenting about are leftovers from vanilla and the "repainting". For example, monument and defense grid both become obsolete in vanilla. I guess we have to study obsoleteness more carefully; one of your earliest comments is that in the late game, there are too many building choices *because* nothing became obsolete.

Please recall that the Ginaz warrior is melee, and requires an offworld resource. I do not think it should be in the upgrade tree at all.

yeah you right, i forgot its a contracted unit.


i wanna offer -

can i add a rover class unit that will act as anti infantry support and later in the tech tree as city defenders?
3 units to add, what do you think?

Please recall that the Ginaz warrior is melee, and requires an offworld resource. I do not think it should be in the upgrade tree at all.

If it is eventually superseded by another melee unit, it should be able to upgrade to that. But nothing should be able to upgrade *to* it.

But then, I like the two headed cows in Fury Road also.

But two-headed cows could exist after a nuclear holocaust. David Lynch is never going to show up on Arrakis. The former is plausible (at least in a genre sense) and so doesn't break immersion, the latter isn't. But this is a minor point.

If we cannot restrict the terrain type for road or add this promotion, how about adding three roller units, one of which is a mobile SAM?


Maybe. But the AI will still get kneecapped in general by an inability to move its 1 move infantry around its territory at less than a crawl. As long as infantry are 1 move the AI is still pretty crippled.

is that in the late game, there are too many building choices *because* nothing became obsolete.

Well, you've cut a lot of late-game buildings already. There now aren't many there. And really cheap things like Monuments will have already been built long before.

can i add a rover class unit that will act as anti infantry support and later in the tech tree as city defenders?
3 units to add, what do you think?

I think you should add to the scorpion unitcombat, which is pretty small. I think what we are missing is an anti-air vehicle and an anti-infantry, low in the tree.

Also, now might be a good time to look at promotions.

I have updated with most of Ahriman's comments. I want to do 1-2 autoplays then I will upload. Regarding the Desert Dock, it is pretty powerful; it makes suspensors 50% cheaper (vanilla drydock). I think we should leave it where it is. I will have to study obsoleteness more, later. Regarding a building to give a tile bonus to cottages, let's include this in the civics rewrite instead of a building.

I recommend that keldath should trim the tech tree. Some suggestions:

1. As we have all agreed, the total beaker cost should remain similar to vanilla; it does not have to be exactly same, but just check the totals for say all tier 1-5 techs and see if it is similar, all tier 6-10 techs.

2. Since both of us have been moving techs around like crazy, please make sure the costs for each tech in a tier are similar. There are tiers which have both a 400 cost tech (bumped up from vanilla) and a 2000 cost tech (bumped down from vanilla). So it is important to normalize this.

3. In a "good" tech tree, you proceed along one line and the developments have related names. In our tree so far, an industry tech leads to something like "Malevolent Designs" which leads to an economic tech, or similar. Please try to make sure that the names along a given line indicate similar things.

hey,

I think you should add to the scorpion unitcombat, which is pretty small. I think what we are missing is an anti-air vehicle and an anti-infantry, low in the tree.

didnt got that - are you suggesting that i add scorpion units that will be something like i suggested - anti infantry rover type?

i can add 2 anti air units, we have the troopers as anti air - missile and bee sting, you think we should have a vehicle like that as well?

yeah we did went a little too much with all the techs.

once you get your new patch, ill trim down techs from all eras, ill get around 15 or so out, and i will go through all of their costs, to make sure the cost is just for all tiers.

as for the names, well, ill do my best.

as for promotions,
i indeed plan on doing the entire tree, but, im waiting for us to finalize the tech+unit classes, so ill be able to do promotions to all correctly.

hopefully ill make some progress during this week.

I want to get in a position to eliminate roads. To do that, we need more move-2 units low in the tech tree. I would prefer these to be vehicles, and I would prefer them to use the scorpion unitclass. These units will be fighting thopters, primarily, so an anti-air role is important. They may also be fighting infantry and suspensors.

"More units" is at best a partial solution; as long as the AI is building lots of 1-move infantry units then it will still tend to have very very slow movement for much of its army.

I think getting the limited terrain roads would be the best long-term solution, though I understand that will take a while to get coded.

ok then,
a bunch of rover scorpions should do the trick,
w can enhance movement via promotions, i think we can overcome roads.

Here is patch 1.4.4. Building rewrite, minimal other changes. This link (http://jendaveallen.com/fury-road/dune-reduced-patch-1-4-4.zip) (450K). Apply over 1.4, or 1.4.1, or 1.4.2, or keldath's two file "1.4.3". See you Monday!

I agree that would be a great idea. There are no hooks to do it, short of adding to the sdk. Maniac has confirmed this in this thread (http://forums.civfanatics.com/showthread.php?t=330958), but he has also indicated the sdk function CvPlot::canBuild which would need to be modified. This would be a koma project.

There is a canBuild callback for python that can block building something for whatever reason you want, like the plot's terrain. This should be able to block road building.

That is an interesting possibility. There are several callbacks, notably cannotMoveInto, which are called huge number of times. Doing this in python with cannotBuild may be possible, but may affect runtime. Doing it in the sdk would be better. There is also another possibility based on the suggestion of "double move inside home territory". I could do this in python, as long as the check was only done at the end of each turn. Then I check each unit in the game, if an appropriate unitcombat, give/take the promotion if they are/not in their own cultural border. This would have some small side effect, such as when you are on your border, you could move two plots out of your territory, when ideally you should only move one.

There is a canBuild callback for python that can block building something for whatever reason you want, like the plot's terrain. This should be able to block road building.

Oh yeah, woops.
Using that python function will slow the game down though.

Something I've had happen twice in 50 turns; I get a game freeze in between turns which I can end only by going to task manager and End-tasking civ.

I was unable to reproduce the crash in the same spot from going to autosaves and playing forward, so I haven't posted saves.

I noticed when loading autosaves that the game had somehow created a ~1.4 MB autosave during the crash (previus autosaves were ~200kb).

DV1: I get a free Kite Thopter at the start, should be a Scout Thopter surely.

Scout Thopter is the default unit for Unit Class Scout, and Kite Thopter is the default unit for Unit Class Thopter. Presumably something was changed so that a free Unit Class Thopter unit is placed instead of a Scout. Can we fix this?

Edit: I changed the Unit Class of the Scout Thopter to Thopter and the default unit of the Unit Class Thopter to Scout Thopter and that works. Whether this is the proper fix I'm not sure...

Deliverator,
ill fix it. no worries.

Ahriman, very weird - can you attach a save?
can anyone else confirm this?

Something I've had happen twice in 50 turns; I get a game freeze in between turns which I can end only by going to task manager and End-tasking civ.

Did this happen with 1.4.2/1.4.3, or only 1.4.4? I autplayed a half dozen games and I did get one crash, but I also could not reproduce that. I assume you have python logging on, and I assume you would have posted if PythonErr.log had any text in it?

I don't know if this is an issue, but I don't see connected resources in the right hand panel of the city screen. Wrong user expectation? BUG thing? New City Screen thing?

hi,
david,
youll be proud of me,

i trimmed around 15 techs. the tech tree still looks good with a good flow.

ill upload it with deliverator new arts soon.

Did this happen with 1.4.2/1.4.3, or only 1.4.4?

I didn't have this problem before 1.4 that I can recall.
I have python tracking on, I didnt' get any python errors. I didn't think to check the log file separately.
I can post a save before if it happens again even if I'm unable to reproduce it from that save if you like.
I don't know if this is an issue, but I don't see connected resources in the right hand panel of the city screen. Wrong user expectation? BUG thing? New City Screen thing?

I can't replicate this, city screen works fine for me. Dumb suggestion, but are you sure you have the Desert Trade tech researched? You don't get resources even with the improvement built on them until desert trade.

OK GUYS,

i edited the tech tree, again total rework,

the tech number is 13-15 lower, cant remember exactly,

i re did most of the preqeq for all techs, moved around,

i think its very optiomized now,

i didnt do the tech cost...i sat on this a few hours and got tired.


my next update will be to add the new art by deliverator, and place in 2-3 more unit:
scorpion combat, rover units that will act as anti infantry and with defensive capability.

i think we are getting close to finish the tech tree and the unit class tree,
i really want to get this over with so we can all continue on working on other stuff like uus, promotions, civics and more.

i would like if everyone can say their opinions on the tech and units so we will know theres an agreement on the current trees.


***********************
youll get some errors o the missing techs, dont worry i fixed and replaced the missing tags, ill upload the full patch in a day.
make sure to back up your old tech file, this is just so youll have impressions.
************************

yours truly, keldath.

I can't replicate this, city screen works fine for me. Dumb suggestion, but are you sure you have the Desert Trade tech researched? You don't get resources even with the improvement built on them until desert trade.

Had Desert Trade and connected goods - was able to see them in diplomacy. The right hand panel of the city screen seems to be permanently blank. Also, noticed that hovering over the happy face at the top doesn't give me a breakdown of happiness.

Well, seeing as I'm the only person to report the lines on the new city screen it doesn't suprise me that it isn't working properly for me. I'll have to figure out how to revert to the boring old blue one, now that the new one is Pak'ed in.

AH29
Reduce the promotions requirements for thumpers to combat or drill 1. Its too annoying to have to wait to get a 3rd level unit to get this.
Unless the intention was for this to be inaccessible, since the AI is never going to be able to intelligently use thumpers to distract worms from its spice operations.

Ahriman,

dont worry about the proms, im gonna do a complete redo of them, so at the mean time, no feed is needed.

The right hand panel of the city screen seems to be permanently blank.

Works fine for me, including the trade goods.

hey guys,, ill realese tommorow a patch with the art by deliverator,

im also gonna add 2-3 units of rovers, and do the units preqeq for bonuses,

doesn anyone have a suggestion on which unit should need which bonus?

also - the thopter new art - i wanna make it unique for the atreides - what will be its name?

dont worry about the proms

Also, thumper promotion is useless as long as infantry cannot walk on desert wastes tiles.

do the units preqeq for bonuses

We've already gone through and done this for Crystal, Nitrates, Diamonds, Stravidium and Uranium. (The decision seems to be not to use Iron Ore as a strategic tech right now.) It may need tweaking, but it doesn't need a complete overhaul IMO.

The rationale was:
Crystal -> Suspensors, Flying
Diamonds -> Lasgun Weaponry
Nitrates -> High-explosive shells, bombs, missiles, etc
Stravidium -> Plasteel - late heavy armour
Uranium -> atomic propulsion, power and weaponry

Don't make the Thopter the Atreides UU only. You should use it for Scout or Falcon Thopter - the nice team colour effect will be wasted if only they can build it. I do want them to have a Hawk Thopter UU so you could use the same model for now - the colour will be different anyway. We'll have a full fleet of thopters eventually, but we might as well give the one we have maximum exposure.

AH29
Reduce the promotions requirements for thumpers to combat or drill 1. Its too annoying to have to wait to get a 3rd level unit to get this.
Unless the intention was for this to be inaccessible, since the AI is never going to be able to intelligently use thumpers to distract worms from its spice operations.

Ah-ha! Feedback on the thumper! I put it in a long time back and I was not even sure anybody had noticed it. I agree the AI will never use it with the current implementation. There was a suggestion to merge this somehow into Fremen units, so that (a) they would never be attacked by worms, and (b) when used defensively, they would still attract worms, but the worm would vanish harmlessly. Can you think of a good way to merge the capability into base unit activities without requiring a separate unit?

AH30
Sand trout are worthless; no tile yield bonus from the desert compound and no health bonus.

AH31
The jump in unit strength from guardsmen (5) elite bladesmen (8) and similar tier units (suspensor gunship 5, hawk thopter 5) to shock troopers (15) and light scorpions (13) is way too big. This needs smoothing.
In vanilla, moving up a tier is typically a 25-60% strength increase; eg swordsmen (6) to macemen (8), horse archers (6) to knights (10) to curaissers to cavalry, but here you have 100%+ strength increases sometimes.

The difference between some of the melee and the city defenders is too big too; in vanilla macemen (8) are similar tier to longbowmen and crossbowmen (6). Here you have elite bladesmen (8, immune to city walls) vs guardsmen (5).

I'd also add some mechanized units earlier on; no reason for a light scorpion to not be a second stage unit rather than third.

Don't make the Thopter the Atreides UU only. You should use it for Scout or Falcon Thopter - the nice team colour effect will be wasted if only they can build it. I do want them to have a Hawk Thopter UU so you could use the same model for now - the colour will be different anyway. We'll have a full fleet of thopters eventually, but we might as well give the one we have maximum exposure.

agreed, not use of making a great model as a uu for now..your right it will go to waste.

ok. for now i wont touch the bonus preqeq.


I'd also add some mechanized units earlier on; no reason for a light scorpion to not be a second stage unit rather than third.

as said, im gonna add 2-3 rover units that will share scorpion combat name, but will act as early units to support fire, mid game supportn and late as city defense.


AH31
The jump in unit strength from guardsmen (5) elite bladesmen (8) and similar tier units (suspensor gunship 5, hawk thopter 5) to shock troopers (15) and light scorpions (13) is way too big. This needs smoothing. The difference between some of the melee and the city defenders is too big too; in vanilla macemen (8) are similar tier to longbowmen and crossbowmen (6). Here you have elite bladesmen (8, immune to city walls) vs guardsmen (5).

good feed, what do you suggest?

I don't know what's up with the city screen and me. I've got a completely clean install of BTS on a completely different machine, tried dune reduced 1.4.1 and 1.4.4, tried different resolutions... All the time it looks like this:

http://forums.civfanatics.com/attachment.php?attachmentid=224069&stc=1&d=1249858262

Note the scorecard over the bottom right. There are various other things missing if you compare with Ahriman's screenshot above - like the culture bar. I've got this with two completely different PC setups - someone else out there must have the same.

Also, I'm getting sporadic CTDs when I run autoplays on Archipelago, so it's not the Arrakis mapscript.

Is the difference in the city screen causing you some problem, or is it just something you are curious about? I am pretty sure the answer lies in the BUG option screen. Use ctrl-alt-O and go to the city tab. My screen looks like Ahriman's. Any chance you have turned off the great person bar option?

Yes, it is causing me a problem because I can't see connected resources, culture bar, etc. I have exactly the same BUG options selected. I haven't changed from the default - it's a completely clean install of BTS and the mod.

Sorry for asking the obvious, but are you logging python exceptions, and do you have any in your logfile? The crashing savegames you posted in the arrakis thread also appear to generate python errors before crashing (at least they do for me), so that is why I want to double-check this point.

Hadn't switched it on. You are correct - it's a python exception. I've attached a screenshot - I presume you can make these exceptions go out to a log file somehow.

AH29 Thumpers
Can you think of a good way to merge the capability into base unit activities without requiring a separate unit?

Well it can work fine for a human player willing to micromanage with the current implementation if you let infantry move on desert tiles, (or even if not if
I'm in favor of letting infantry units move on desert waste within your cultural borders anyway.

But I'm not sure its a great idea for a mechanic where a human player can mine spice without worm interference but the AI cannot.

Also, in the current build all the worms get killed off as soon as players start getting falcon thopters (the strength 10 guys).

AH31 Unit strength.
good feed, what do you suggest?

Well, in general I'd just say to make sure that each superior tech in a unit line gives no less than 25% bonus and never more than 60% bonus, and aim for ~40% bonuses each time.
So soldier (2) goes to infantry (3) goes to guardsman I (5) goes to guardsman II (8) goes to guardsman III (11) goes to guardsman IV (16).
bladesman (6) goes to elite (8) goes to shock troop I (12) goes to shock troop 2 (18)
etc.

I can give more detailed suggestions in a few days when I have the time, and once I get a chance to look at your modified tech tree.
I haven't looked at yours yet, but tech names to me that just don't seem to make sense are:
Thumpering (merge this with sandworms)
Way of the wise (weird name; make this Cultural Enterprises or somethnig. What is Bakka anyway?)
Cycle of Arrakis (this makes little sense as a tech, and seems unrelated to getting trade routes and marketplaces).
Knowledge engine (what is this supposed to be? How about "Advanced academies")
Diaspora (the disaspora/Scattering happens 3500 years later, after Leto II dies)
Pathfinding (how is this different from desert skills)
Way of the desert (what does this have to do with observatories - which used to be space ports?)
Sovereign system (what is this supposed to be? Some form of Imperialism?)
Breeding program (why is this a tech - only the BGs have a breeding program and they've been doing it for millenia - and what does it have to do with prison camps? Rename it "Internal security" or something)
Monopolism (empty without the corporations - and why should monastaries become obsolete? Its not like Dune has an Enlightenment period like Earth when science takes over)
Mentat healing (mentats don't heal any differently. Cut the suk school tech and rename this one suk school)
Handling machine (what is this?)
Malevolent designs (what is this for? Too FFH anyway)
Ampoliros (isn't this some old legend?
Weirding way/weirding module: why are these 2 separate techs?
Static separator (what is this?)
Probes (this can stay as a tech, but it should be related to espionage points, not anti-air troopers)
Tachyon net (what is this?)
Judge of the Change (why is this a tech? this is the guy responsible for overseeing the handover of a fief and making sure rules are observed)
Baraka (what is this?)
Krazilec (what is this?)
Plasteel, sand allowys, plas-steel armor, plazfibres (why are these separate techs?)
Axolotl tanks (Should come waaay earlier, and should be BTl only and allow their own tech)
Folding space (the Guild can already do this as soon as you have off-world trade, doesn't really make sense as an on-Dune tech.)
Krimskell fibre (what is this, why is this a super-late game tech, what does it have to do with fallout removal?)

The early game and early-midgame of this mod are good; the late-game is weird.
A lot of this stuff is really illogical, IMO you need to rip it out and then build in some more logical stuff.

Examples:

For some midgame stuff, how about:
Personal shields tech (required for shock troops)

Large-scale shielding tech.
Allows House Shield building, gives +100% defensive strength, ignored by lasguns and melee.


In terms of some new late-game stuff, how about:
Artificial spice tech.
Allows Project Amal Wonder, provides +8 spice resource.

No-field tech.
Allows no-room building (gives espionage points)
Allows no-ship (invisible thopter unit with a low national limit)



Also:
AH32
The gap between suspensors 1 (strength 2, strength 5) and supensors 2 (strength 12) is way too large; there are far too many techs in between the two and the jump is too big; trying to launch amphibious invasions is impossible if your enemy has the strength 12 suspensors and you're still on strength 5.

Its even worse that you still have low-strength suspensor escorts for ages because the AI isn't smart enough to unload its army when it gets over land; it waits until it actually attacks. So on several occassions I had the AI show up with a (quite decent) invasion force on their transports next to my city, and the units on the city were able to attack and kill the transports and their thopter/suspensor escort without the units inside being unloaded (I reloaded autosave and let them attack to confirm that there was in fact an army inside).

My recommendation would be to introduce another level of escorts in the middle there.

Any chance of the suspensors getting double-moves over desert wastes and deep desert? It takes way too long to get anywhere at 2 moves.
Or at least bump them to 3 moves.

AH33
Worm-rider (and probably Fremen infantry) can't enter desert waste or deep desert tiles, so the whole sandrider promotion is useless.
Ideally IMO all infantry should be able to enter desert waste and deep desert tiles.

More on techs:
A lot of the upgrade paths are illogical too.

Why should Breeding Program (BG eugenics) lead to Faufrelaches, a societal norm of caste systems?
Why should Fanaticism lead to Landsraad (the interplanetary Parliament)?
Why do Chemical Explosives lead to Knowledge Engine, a tech that allows universities?

Techs need to have a logical flow.

OK GUYS, i edited the tech tree, again total rework,

This is definitely better. But still, when I look at it, I immediately find some things which look weird/illogical. So I think it needs a little more tuning.

* Thumpering only gives improved sight range, very thin
* Ablative shielding has 3 AND prereqs, too many to display neatly
* Sovereign Systems is empty
* Monopolism is practically empty, it only obsoletes something
* Nullentropy only allows blitz, which does not seem very logical
* There are still some places where the style of the tech changes direction: heat shields (technology) leads to Weirding Way (philosophy); Monopolism (economical) leads to bioenergy (biological); Fission (technology) leads to Judge of Change (philosophical) leads to Gene manipulations (biological).
* Many techs have AND prereqs with no reason, in particular you sometimes have an AND tech which is anyway below it in the tech tree. For example, Weirding Module has an AND prereq of Ampoliros; but there is no way to get Weirding Module without already having Ampoliros.
* Crystal Materials and Sand Metals only reveal; this is very thin
* A lot of the techs could be pushed to the left on the screen. This is tedious; but for example, look along the line sand metal -> solid fuel -> ablative shielding. You would think that ablative shielding is the same tech tier as Way Of Liet; but it has many fewer actual prereqs. Whenever a tech has space to shift it left on the screen, you should do that. If possible, you should do this *before* adjusting the tech costs.

(EDIT missed typing in some of my notes, added below)

* Plasteel is empty
* Distrans (a communications term) allows the renamed Wall Street wonder, and leads to Weirding Module, none of which fits together

Hadn't switched it on. You are correct - it's a python exception. I've attached a screenshot - I presume you can make these exceptions go out to a log file somehow.

Sorry, I thought you knew this. When you have python logging turned on, look into file My Documents/My Games/Beyond The Sword/Logs/PythonErr.log. This is where all python errors get logged. When you get a crash, please look to see if this file is empty *before starting another game*. This will often give crucial clues about what caused the crash.

EDIT: regarding the specific python exception, *please turn off the four revolutions related options in your game options screen.*

hi, havnt had much time to read all the posts,

but ill say this the tech oreqeqs aaarnt 100% logical since again, i needed to link techs so the life span of most units will be longer,

try to look at the tech tree witout logic, and youll see what i mean, i would prefer if you guys just rename the techs to make since rather then movinh them around again...

I think the tech tree needs a more serious redesign rather than just some minor renamings, I'd suggest a detailed consideration of posts 154-156.

I know its a lot of work, but its a big part of the mod.

You should be able to describe what kind of innovation a particular tech yields in a short, 1-sentence description, that ideally should be hinted at from its name, even to people who aren't Dune experts.
Eg1: The Water conservation tech represents the basic ability to use water efficiently, and so allows construction of the dew collectors and windtrap improvements.
It is a pre-requisite for techs that allow further improvements in water management.

Eg2:
Defense tactics represents improved defensive military doctrine, hence it allows construction of improved defensive infantry (Infantry) and improved city defenses (Defense grid, advanced defense grid).
It is a pre-requisite for further military doctrine improvements.

These are all well designed techs.

For the techs I listed in post 154, I don't think any such simple explanation exists.

Try writing such a sentence for Diaspora, or Judge of the Change, or many of the other techs in the list.

hey.

well...i thank you ahriman for the feed again,

i can do renaming easily,
some of the tech names you ask of, are infact just some terms i found on wikipedia .

so i dont know what a proper logical tree is needed, the structure it self, i think is pretty good, ,
i would appriciate if any of you can just build a proper tech tree, even on excel, and ill do the xml it self, along with positioning the units and techs.

dont worry about empty techs, they will be filled later on.

i really wanna finish with the tech tree work, its a draw back that we must conclude.
plz help in this matter.

:)

Further comments in post 159 (edit was ninja'ed).

ok...
well i get it that you cant describe each tech and its purpose.

but,
where in dune universe you can find 90 techs that you can actually give meaning to?
its hard enough adapting dune into civ4.

as i stated on my very first post, some alteration and fiction additions will be made to the game, and logic wont be there sometimes.

in my opinion, theres way too much demand on realism here on the mod from the time i started it.

i agree that some renaming is needed,
but to tell the truth,
ive grown tired of changing and changing every version that we release...ive edited the tech tree so many times over the versions it seems it never ends.

we need to lock down this part of the mod already, along with unit classes.

ahriram, i would appreciate if you can help me "locking" the tech tree, if you can go over the tree, see what tech needs which preqeq and renaming, so i can go over the tree once and for all, so everyone will be happy with it, so me and the rest, can move on building v 1.4.

really hope you can help, as i said, i dont know dune enough to the details so i can know what logical or not on the tree.

thanks for all the stuff your writing.

"More units" is at best a partial solution; as long as the AI is building lots of 1-move infantry units then it will still tend to have very very slow movement for much of its army.

I think getting the limited terrain roads would be the best long-term solution, though I understand that will take a while to get coded.

I tried a few things. I got limited terrain roads to work in python but it slows the game down by about 20%, so that is probably not useful. I added a "Home Ground" promotion as suggested earlier. This seems to be working. It gives +1 movement to any unit of guardsman unitclass which starts the turn inside its own cultural borders.

So in "my" next release I will add this, and take away roads again.

It gives +1 movement to any unit of guardsman unitclass which starts the turn inside its own cultural borders.

Ok, this sounds like it should be quite helpful. With this, I would eliminate having 2-move AT/AA units, just leave infantry as those specialists. But I would add some kind of tier1 mechanized unit like a Quad, it takes way too long to get to the "light scorpion" as first mechanized unit in the current setup.

I'd also make sure that mechanized units also get the promotion, so that infantry go to 2 moves and scorpions/vehicles go to three moves within friendly territory. Why build a (lower strength) scorpion if it doesn't have a mobility advantage?

We should have Trikes or Quads anyway as a nod to Dune 2.

We should have Trikes or Quads anyway as a nod to Dune 2.

Agreed. I like the idea of a Trike as an extra fast or bonus withdraw chance Ordos Quad UU.

I'd also like to see Sonic Tanks as an Atreides medium scorpion UU, and Devastators as a Harkonnen Heavy scorpion UU (should be the highest strength unit in the game, but only 1 move).

On that thought.... the only Dune game I ever actually played was Dune2 (when it first came out, man I feel old). Was there anythnig in Dune2000 or the other Dune game that came later that we should consider making references to?

This discussion of UU is a good idea, I just hope keldath does not get too excited and start adding them into 1.4.6 :-)

Shall we have a separate thread to store up these ideas?

davidlallen...you know me too well hehehe.

yeah make a new thread.

most of the names you mentioned above i made for 1.3 as you know.

lets start with at least 1 for each civ, and this one - needs to be a very good unit to last :)

Hello Dune Wars creators,

I'm having an issue with Dune Wars Reduced; I get a crash every game, generally within the first ~100 turns, which is reproducible - that is to say, it happens every time at the same turn no matter what previous save I try loading. So I might start one game, get to year 10237 and that game crashes on year 10237 every time with any save; the next game I start it might not crash until year 10245, but that particular game will crash every time at 10245. Needless to say this ruins the mod for me, as while the occasional bug or crash doesn't bother me, this prevents me from ever finishing a game.

-I'm running BTS 3.19
-I've tried Dune Wars Reduced 1.4 and 1.4.4, I get the same crash issue either way.
-I can run Dune Wars 1.3, 1.3.8, and other mods (ex., FFH2, FF, etc) no problem, finishing games without ever getting a similar crash.
-I've tried reinstalling Dune Wars 1.4, then starting some new games, then reinstalling the 1.4.4 patch and trying some new games, every single Dune Wars Reduced game reliably crashes within the first 100ish turns.
-I run custom games with as much of the "optional" stuff turned off that I can, such as the Revolutions mod options, since I've heard that can cause problems.
-The crash always occurs after hitting "end turn".

Attached is a sample autosave, the crash occurs two turns after the save (I tried manually saving on the next turn, just one button push away from the crash, but that save instantly crashes when I try to load it).

I also attached a .txt copy of my PythonErr2.log file, I'm not sure what it means or if it's helpful, but I figure that couldn't hurt.

It has not been clearly communicated, but to get around this you need to start a game via the Custom Game option and uncheck all the Revolutions game options (Barbarian Civ, etc) before you start the game. Playing with these options on causes the crash. If you turn them off, you should be able to play a full game. :)

This has come about because of the extensive overhaul of the mod we have been undertaking through this modmod. We are planning to either fix this, or remove these components.

@ Deliverator, could you add information about the several standard installation problems to the first post in your installation thread? I have just PM'd one of the moderators to sticky the thread.

Also, in 1.4.7, I have locally edited the game options screen so that these options are invisible, and off by default.

Anathema hi,

and welcome,

what map script are you using?


@ Deliverator, could you add information about the several standard installation problems to the first post in your installation thread? I have just PM'd one of the moderators to sticky the thread.


Also, in 1.4.7, I have locally edited the game options screen so that these options are invisible, and off by default.

good one david, ive been planing to do this my self later on.

It has not been clearly communicated, but to get around this you need to start a game via the Custom Game option and uncheck all the Revolutions game options (Barbarian Civ, etc) before you start the game. Playing with these options on causes the crash. If you turn them off, you should be able to play a full game. :)

This has come about because of the extensive overhaul of the mod we have been undertaking through this modmod. We are planning to either fix this, or remove these components.

Yeah, I have unchecked those options, tried to make that clear above.

I'm running Archipelago, keldath.

I downloaded your save file and ran with python logging turned on. I can reproduce the crash. There is no python log entry. It is possible there was a python log entry several turns previous. The file PythonErr2.log is not as useful as PythonErr.log, but this file will only be generated if you edit your CivilizationIV.ini file to set these options:

LoggingEnabled = 1
MessageLog = 1

This file is in My Documents/My Games/Beyond The Sword. Search for the options, which will have value "0" in your file, and change them to "1". Also, I usually recommend setting HidePythonExceptions to 0, so that if there is a python problem, at least you will know about it due to a popup.

Once you make these 2 or 3 changes, please start a new game, verify that you do not have the four Revolutions related options turned on by accident, and then play till the crash. The autosave file is helpful but I am particularly interested in the PythonErr.log file. If you do enable python exceptions and you see one, the same information will appear in PythonErr.log, so there is no need to separately screenshot or write down the on-screen exception text.

Well, this is odd. I made those changes to the CivilizationIV.ini file you suggested David, and tried a new game, same options/map/etc as before, making sure the revolutions options are unchecked as always. Now this game has crashed a couple times (no error popups, and nothing in the PythonErr.log file) - but this time the crashes are not reproducible. So I just load up my last autosave and I'm able to keep playing another 50-100 turns before I get a crash, which is irritating but playable at least. Anyway thanks for the help, I'm enjoying the modmod and it looks like I'll finally be able to finish a game (one way or another).

Well, this is odd. I made those changes to the CivilizationIV.ini file you suggested David, and tried a new game, same options/map/etc as before, making sure the revolutions options are unchecked as always. Now this game has crashed a couple times (no error popups, and nothing in the PythonErr.log file) - but this time the crashes are not reproducible. So I just load up my last autosave and I'm able to keep playing another 50-100 turns before I get a crash, which is irritating but playable at least. Anyway thanks for the help, I'm enjoying the modmod and it looks like I'll finally be able to finish a game (one way or another).

Thanks for the additional details. This kind of random crashing is not acceptable. I am not sure how to track it down, but we need to try something. The number of changes between 1.3.x and 1.4 is pretty huge, but it mostly has to do with units/buildings being removed.

I do not have this problem with crashes on my machine. Are you willing to try a few experiments where I give you instructions on editing one of your local python files to see if we can track it down further?

Thanks for the additional details. This kind of random crashing is not acceptable. I am not sure how to track it down, but we need to try something. The number of changes between 1.3.x and 1.4 is pretty huge, but it mostly has to do with units/buildings being removed.

I do not have this problem with crashes on my machine. Are you willing to try a few experiments where I give you instructions on editing one of your local python files to see if we can track it down further?

Sure, anything I can do to help. Although - I take back what I said in my last post, now I've got another reproducible crash. I was able to finish the game I mentioned before, crashing two or three times during it, and being able to continue each time after loading an autosave. No idea why I was actually able to finish that one game, but the next game - with the same options basically, same map type - gave me a reproducible crash very early. I've attached the save file, it crashes exactly two turns after that save (I can't save one turn before the crash or it instantly crashes upon trying to load the save, just like before). Unfortunately there was no error popup and my PythonErr.log file is empty.

Edit: Interestingly enough, if I go back to the "initial" autosave and replay that same game from the start (the game that the autosave below is from), I don't get a crash. I purposely played a little differently, so the game has not turned out exactly like before, and I'm ~150 turns into it so far with no problems. I'm no modder, but it seems like if I can play the exact same game start twice and get a reproducible crash one time and no problems the next time, it can't be anything in the initial game options/map script/etc, must be something that happens during the game?

Thank you for your patience. I have found the problem and here is a temporary solution. The Atreides have a special ability like drafting, where free units appear in their cities automatically. There is mixed reaction to this ability even existing. However, in both your save games, this is causing the crash. I would have expected a python alert to come when there is a python problem.

Please use your plain text editor to edit file .../dune reduced/assets/python/dunewars.py. Search for the line "self.AtreidesDraft()" and delete it. That is all you need to do.

I will try to find specifically what about this function is causing the problem. But, by successively deleting lines out of this file, I was able to make the crash stop happening.

That's odd, I tried playing Atreides before, and the automatic draft seemed to work - but perhaps I was playing 1.3 at the time and not Dune Reduced. Anyway thanks for the help, I changed dunwars.py as you suggested and my old saves no longer crash, a temporary fix is much better than crashing.. although I did like the Atreides draft mechanic, I look forward to a future version of the Dune Reduced where it can work without causing problems.

Yeah, I have unchecked those options, tried to make that clear above.

Sorry, I should have read more carefully. Apologies.

That's odd, I tried playing Atreides before, and the automatic draft seemed to work - but perhaps I was playing 1.3 at the time and not Dune Reduced. Anyway thanks for the help, I changed dunwars.py as you suggested and my old saves no longer crash, a temporary fix is much better than crashing.. although I did like the Atreides draft mechanic, I look forward to a future version of the Dune Reduced where it can work without causing problems.

I was overlooking the case where there is no draftable unit. I am not sure how that could happen, exactly, but it seems to happen sometimes in the early game. So I have modified the code to check for this condition and skip the draft. I will put this into 1.4.7 when it is released, perhaps this weekend depending on the tech tree from keldath.

For now, I recommend everybody who uses 1.4 or 1.4.x should make the change of deleting the "self.AtreidesDraft()" line.