Dune Wars 1.4.7 feedback

Ahriman

Tyrant
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Feedback for David's 1.4.7, available from here:
http://forums.civfanatics.com/showthread.php?t=326940&page=13
Post 249.

First up, awesome job David, and thanks for including a bunch of my ideas.
Hopefully you will also take a skim through some of the ones that weren't included when you also think about a 1.4.8 or beyond.
So I won't repeat any of them in this thread.

Fremen sandrider trait works well now. Very cool.

AH71
Very very minor issue. Barbarian (smuggler) units are refered to as "Arrakeen".
As in "Arrakeen soldier destroyed".
But Arrakeen is a city on Arrakis.
The barbarians are off Arrakis, not Arrakeen, so they should more properly be "Arrakian" I think.

AH72
Salt can spread to adjacent tiles, like forest and jungle, but this doesn't make much sense.

AH73
Master guardsman doesn't get the sandrider promotion. Intended?
Neither do rocket troopers.
Is it limited to melee class?
This will make Fremen assaults difficult once they lose access to suspensor transports, and impossible if they also lose access to carryalls.

AH74
Turbine level 1 takes 8-10 turns to build, much more than other improvements, for no discernable reason.
I think it would be good to scale up the build times of the higher level improvements; deep mine, deep well, turbines 2 etc., while keeping the level 1 at ~5 turns.
I had also intended for solar farms to scale too. Solar farms should get +1 hammers at the tech that allows turbines 2 and/or turbines 3 (refining techniques and Military complex, respectively).
 
Do you know if Deliverator's sound files should work ok? ...
Best solution is probably to remove the wind trap water. We're not using fresh water for anything anymore.

I don't play with sound, so I haven't tried it, but I don't see any reason why not. Are you sure fresh water doesn't give any benefit? I guess I could check the xml, but I would think that some more improvements are possible on fresh water plots. If there is no benefit to fresh water, we should change the improvements rather than removing the fresh water. That seems important from the theme standpoint.

AH73. Master guardsman doesn't get the sandrider promotion. Is it limited to melee class? This will make Fremen assaults difficult once they lose access to suspensor transports, and impossible if they also lose access to carryalls.

A few revs back, there were three foot unitcombats: light infantry, heavy infantry, and melee. Now there is only guardsman and melee. I would have given sandrider to melee and light infantry. A worm is not like a pickup truck that you can just sling all your gear onto, you have to carefully jump on and off. Right now the promotion is limited to scout, settler, warrior, and the melee unitcombat. If there is a logical reason to give it to some guardsmen but not others, I can change it.

I agree that if we change the game in the future to remove Fremen access to vehicles, some more things would need to change. But let's try to balance what we have now.
 
If there is no benefit to fresh water, we should change the improvements rather than removing the fresh water.

Well, there's the Qanat improvement I guess. But that gives just +1 water So at best you're getting 1 water/1 hammer/1 commerece, which is a miserable yield. Its never really worth building.
But it would be easy to remove the fresh water requirement for the Qanat improvement.
OR to buff the Qanat improvement with later techs to make it more useful.

I agree that if we change the game in the future to remove Fremen access to vehicles, some more things would need to change.

As long as fremen can still build suspensor transports and carryalls then I am fine with the status quo system of melee only.

My logical reason would be that it isn't really any harder to ride a worm with a gun strapped to your back than it is with a sword.
 
AH71 - Arrakeen is the adjective for natives of Arrakis - there is a Gurney Halleck song in Dune that refers to Arrakeen girls:

The Galacian girls do it for pearls,
And the Arrakeen for water!
But if you desire dames like consuming flames,
Try a Caladanian daughter!

It is confusing with the city also being called Arrakeen, I agree.

I think that lighter Fremen guardsmen should be able to ride worms, but not heavier ones.

I'm pretty sure the music pack will still work OK with 1.4.7, but I'll check it out.
 
The song could refer to those from the city. I am pretty sure they refer to "Arrakian sandworms". But maybe I am wrong. Lets leave it then.

Part of the reason for needing all Fremen infantry to ride worms is that this should be the only way they can get across the desert.
No aircraft or suspensors for Fremen. So they have to cart their stuff around somehow.
We also don't have a distinction between light and heavy guardsmen.

If they can get a palanquin type thing up onto the back of a worm (that they use for transporting Reverend Mothers) then they can cart around a rocket launcher.
 
AH75
Landing stage bug.
I built my two landing stages; in Sietch Tabr and in Carthag, and got my contracts.

But the landing stage building didn't actually show up once completed, though the contract did, and so I was able to build a third landing stage in Hagga, and now a fourth in Arrakeen.

I can never be building more than 2 stages at a time, but because the landing stage buildings seem to disappear when I get a contract, I can still build as many as I like in sequence.

*edit*
In fact I can even get multiple contracts in the same city.

*edit2*
This could be a particular problem for the AI; the landing stage is a high building priority, so the AI will keep building worthless landing stages over and over again even though there are no contracts left.
 

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AH76
The Worm rider has +25% vs guardsmen, which is not intended.
The worm rider was supposed to be a more mobile version of the shock trooper. Shock trooper is 1 move, strength 12, +25% city attack.
Worm rider is currently strength 13, 2 moves, sandrider, +25% vs guardsmen.

I think the guardsman bonus is too much, and isn't really accurate. Fremen are great melee fights, but don't have personal shields, so they're actually much MORE vulnerable to guardsmen units with guns. If they seem too vanilla, I would give them a +10% vs melee, or city attack, not vs guardsmen.
 
AH75. I can never be building more than 2 stages at a time, but because the landing stage buildings seem to disappear when I get a contract, I can still build as many as I like in sequence.

That is curious. There is nothing in the code which deletes the landing stage upon getting a contract. I will have to investigate why it disappears. BTW, it does not have any special weight for the AI to build, but perhaps the AI assigns a high value to the auxilliary effect of extra trade route yield. Having one each in several cities may be good from the income standpoint. Do you see AI cities with multiple of them?

In other news, I am curious to see what you think of the city attack/defense playability. We added the home ground promotion and slowed down suspensors in a previous release, but in this release we have also fixed the load/unload exploits. Or at least, load/unload works differently and we hope better.
 
Yes, I think you are right, the AI places a high weight on large trade-route yields. It always loves the customhouse building in vanilla.

Interestingly, the bug doesn't seem to be happening to the AI; its landing stages dont' seem to be disappearing when it gets the contracts.
I went into Worldbuilder (see attached save) and Salusa Secundus has Sardaukar cooperation contract and a landing stage, and one of the Bene Gesserit cities (I just forgot the name) has Sapho contract and a landing stage.

Make Fremen specific somehow?? But that seems unlikely.

* * *
AH77
The AI doesn't seem to be building improvements polar tiles. I suspect this is because it only builds improvements on the same continents as its cities?
So maybe we need to connect the polar tiles to the continents somehow, rather than having a 1-tile ring of polar desert waste.
 

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AH77. The AI doesn't seem to be building improvements polar tiles.

*You* don't seem to be building improvements on polar tiles either. That is, the only improvement which can be built on polar is the ice extractor.

The real intention of polar ice is for the arrakis mapscript. The idea is to have a valuable region in the center, equidistant from all the civs, which you can fight over. This hasn't been tested yet. We have marked the ice bonus as "very important to the AI" using the iAIObjective flag, but probably we need to test this more and do "something". Perhaps the benefit of ice is not strong enough for the AI to bother with.

I agree that one plot of this terrain along the top and bottom is not very useful. The main reason I added this to the archipelago mapscript is to make sure that the same set of terrain is used in both mapscripts. This makes it easier to test the python, without worrying about running autoplays on both due to terrain.
 
That is, the only improvement which can be built on polar is the ice extractor.

Ah, I hadn't tested it, I had assumed with your other changes to where improvements could be built that the full range of improvements were now buildable on polar tiles.

This is the way that I would go.

It that in either mapscript the AI is unlikely to really contest the polar areas very well unless it can build cities there, and that cities there are unlikely to be very useful unless you can build improvements. I had basically envisioned the polar region as being a super-valuable region where everyone would want to have cities because of the high water terrain yields.

I had also thought that the water-rich polar regions on archipelago were partly there to compensate civs for having the worse badlands/rugged terrain by giving them the very good polar terrain.
But they aren't very good compensation if you can't build improvements on them.
 
I had assumed with your other changes to where improvements could be built that the full range of improvements were now buildable on polar tiles. This is the way that I would go ... I had basically envisioned the polar region as being a super-valuable region where everyone would want to have cities because of the high water terrain yields.

In my view, polar terrain is damp sand. The only way I can rationalize "ice" there at all, on a hot dry planet, is if it is buried and you need drilling rigs to get it out. We have divergent views here which we should resolve before redesigning anything. Does anybody else have opinions on this?

I had also thought that the water-rich polar regions on archipelago were partly there to compensate civs for having the worse badlands/rugged terrain by giving them the very good polar terrain.

That was not the original intention, I view it as a happy accident.
 
My impression was that the small polar regions were the only areas cool enough to have anything like a normal climate; cooler temperatures, high atmospheric water, some actual plant life and soil. In some areas, small ice caps or glaciers.

Even though the planet is generally hot, you get the same kind of temperature variation due to the spherical nature of the planet on Arrakis as you do on earth; near the poles the sun's rays hit at an extreme angle and so there is very low solar energy:surface area ratio, so it is much cooler.

Note:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arrakis
"There are other cities scattered in the northern regions of the planet (especially near the ice cap, where water is harvested)"

Also, take a look at the maps.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Map_Arrakis.jpg
Both poles have a small ice cap on the surface.

I agree we should hear from others.

*edit*
Also, while we are on the subject of the map, I'll repeat my suggestion of renaming "tribal villages" to be the "Botanical Testing Stations" (and eventually changing art). In the books these are largely abandoned but contain all kinds of equipment and goodies which could be salvaged.
*edit2* I agree of course with deliverator that it is a minor flavor point that should take low priority. Maybe we could eventually design some neat extra bonus possibilities from salvaging botanical testing stations.
 
This post contains a quote from Dune mentioning ice at the poles, and there is the other quote here about a summer mansion near the pole. Also you can see on the map I made from the book map that there is a very small ice cap.

In my view the polar terrain should be fully settle-able and improve-able. Since polar gives +2 water it is the equivalent of grassland and I feel it is appropriate that this is the most 'fertile' terrain in the mod. That it exists in limited qualities, in specific locations makes things interesting strategically. If we are concerned about there being too many big cities on the polar terrain then we should reduce the amount available in the mapscript so that that is not possible. I'm happy for the amount of polar to be quite small.

I'm fine with the Botanical Testing Stations idea. Aside from graphics it would mostly involve changing the text - "The villages give you...", etc. I also think this is something that can wait since it is purely a flavour thing.
 
Here is a place where the archipelago mapscript significantly differs from the arrakis one. If we make polar terrain very valuable, in archipelago half the civs wil not have access. Being only one plot tall on most maps, it is not really big enough to build a city. If you recall about globe projections, that one long strip really represents a small circle. So making it two or three plots tall grossly overexaggerates how much space would actually be there.

In the arrakis mapscript it might work well. At some point we may discontinue archipelago. Unfortunately, I think right now arrakis is not working quite well enough to make it the primary script.

I agree that the canon maps show small polar ice caps, but you notice they do not show any cities built there. I can agree with a mansion built within view of the ice cap, or a small driling station on the ice; but if the ice cap supported building super-cities there, I think we would see evidence of that on the canon maps. Do you guys really think that the polar terrain should be the site of super-cities?

Part of the confusion is about the meaning and graphical view of the DW terrain types. We have "polar desert waste" (coast) which meets my view of "damp sand". The other terrain is called "polar" (land). To me, this represents "cold, damp sand with ice underneath". But since it is land, to you it represents "land with valuable water to build cities upon". Maybe we only want one type, which is the "cold, damp sand with ice underneath". This would be a coastal terrain, with no corresponding land.

What do you think?
 
There is still value in having the polar terrain in archipelago; you can build cities 2 tiles south of it, and still get 3 tiles of valuable water providing grassland types.

Yes, it it only available to civs at the poles, but these civs are already massively disadvantaged by lower tile yields and longer improvement build time from having badlands/rugged rather than rock/mesa.

I'd leave the polar waste as it is, and just allow turbines and cottages to be built on the polar terrain.
 
AH78 Workers (or Fremen workers at least) can't be loaded into carryalls. Intended?

AH79
Pro-terraforming economies are still much more powerful than spice economies.
Pro spice gives you little, while pro-terraforming gives you huge massive supercities.
The benefits of pro-terraforming have been exacerbated by adding the +% water buildings, since these stack with the terraformer tile bonuses.

My suggested fixes are:

a) Previously discussed tweaks to spice economy, reducing decay of spice tiles for spice economy civs.
Maybe also make something so that worms don't destroy all your harvesting activity so easily? Its problematic because its somewhat random. If you happen to get a worm in your spice patch, it will hand around forever destroying all your stuff, so you can't really get much spice there.

How about increasing the spawn rate of worms, but making sandworms disappear once they have eaten a unit or devoured a harvester?

b) reduce the terraforming rate and make the catchbaisen and reservoir -3 water
OR
c) make the catchbasin and reservoir into -x% water rather than -x water. Maybe -15%?

And maybe:
d) Change the ice seller building into +y water instead of +25%. After all, you're just importing water from elsewhere, it shouldnt' be boosting the yield of your own local tiles.
 
How about merging some of the ideas of the CHOAM religion from your religion redesign into the pro-spice civic? There is conceptual overlap between CHOAM and pro-spice anyway.
 
AH78 Workers (or Fremen workers at least) can't be loaded into carryalls. Intended?

Not intended. I didn't change the unit defintions for cargo, and I doubt keldath changed it on purpose. Can you load other units? It could be related to the sdk change for load/unload, but only if it applies to all cargo units and all transport units; the sdk code does not differentiate between cargo or transport units.

AH79. Pro-terraforming economies are still much more powerful than spice economies. [...] My suggested fixes are: a) Previously discussed tweaks to spice economy, reducing decay of spice tiles for spice economy civs.

This is done in 1.4.7. For spice industry civs, the chance of harvested spice decaying is half, and the chance of unharvested spice decaying is 5x less. These numbers seem large, but evidently not enough to notice. You said, and I agree, making the decay rate zero is probably bad. So we will have to look elsewhere to balance them.

How about increasing the spawn rate of worms, but making sandworms disappear once they have eaten a unit or devoured a harvester?

That is a good idea, but it doesn't help spice industry people especially.

b) reduce the terraforming rate and make the catchbaisen and reservoir -3 water OR c) make the catchbasin and reservoir into -x% water rather than -x water. Maybe -15%? And maybe: d) Change the ice seller building into +y water instead of +25%. After all, you're just importing water from elsewhere, it shouldnt' be boosting the yield of your own local tiles.

I agree with all of those; b and c will reduce terraforming advantage. We can see if that will be enough to balance the two.
 
Yeah, CHOAM and pro-spice have some overlap. I'd ideally prefer them to have synergies rather than duplication. You get bigger benefits from CHOAM if you are pro-spice because you get more spice tiles.

We also need at some point to discuss overlap issues between the design for Technocracy religion and Ixian faction bonuses.
Currently these seems like replacements (they do basically the same thing); we need to think of a way to make them into synergies instead.

* * *

Can you load other units?

Yes.

These numbers seem large, but evidently not enough to notice.

Maybe they are. Its hard to tell, because the tech requirement for the Arrakis spice civic was mis-entered (its supposed to be Spice industry, an early-midgame tech, but its currently water of life I think, or something fairly late).
I have only tested terraforming civs thus far, so hold off on tweaking these further, maybe they are enough.

There are some other tech tree errors that I noted in 1.4.6 feedback that are still there (Dune topography for eg).

That is a good idea, but it doesn't help spice industry people especially.

Yes it does, it means that once you build a harvester on a spice, you will manage to keep it for much longer. If a worm gets into your spice field you lose *1* harvester, rather than losing all of them as the worm moves around and pillages.
Since spice industry people will have many more spice resource tiles, they will benefit relatively more from the change.
 
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