1.6 feedback

arkham4269 said:

That being said, I was happy the day the "Cease Bothering Me!" option was added!

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Ahriman said:

Does this actually do anything? Does it stop them from approaching you with requests, until you next initiate relations with them?

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That's correct. For DW, it may not make that much difference. But if you play the main scenario of HOTK, where there are 30 civs, it would help a lot. I get 4-5 requests per turn, sometimes, to join a war or trade something.

davidlallen said:

That's correct. For DW, it may not make that much difference. But if you play the main scenario of HOTK, where there are 30 civs, it would help a lot. I get 4-5 requests per turn, sometimes, to join a war or trade something.

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In fact I remember asking in that Mod if there was a way to keep Civs I hadn't met yet from talking to me. If I remember right you'd be in Eastern China and some Western China Civ who got your "address" by buying a map from another Civ would appear and want you to go to war with some Civ you had no clue who they were or where they were! I mean I don't think a Civ should be allowed to ask you to go to war with another Civ is the only way you have to get to there is through the territory of another civ.

I think they tried to fix that.

@ Ahriman, are you up for another design challenge?

A while ago, we observed that the flavors for the various techs are set randomly. These flavors are used by the AI to decide which tech to research. The flavors have a value from 0-10 in categories such as culture, gold, etc. I have extracted the current flavors into the attached spreadsheet.

If you have the chance, could you update this sheet with "reasonable" flavors? It is not exact; but just about any values you give will be better than the current random ones.

I will get to it, possibly tomorrow. And similarly pick leaderhead flavor priorities.

Something that would help on this; is it easy/possible to pull out the flavors from vanilla and dump them in an Excel file?
Just so I have some idea of starting values, and things like: do all techs need flavors to add to the same number or not (ie are they just weights, or do they also emphasize particular techs, by giving higher total flavor values?).

I think its about emphasizing too.

Ahriman said:

Something that would help on this; is it easy/possible to pull out the flavors from vanilla and dump them in an Excel file?
Just so I have some idea of starting values, and things like: do all techs need flavors to add to the same number or not (ie are they just weights, or do they also emphasize particular techs, by giving higher total flavor values?).

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Ah ... did you notice the spreadsheet I attached two posts back?

I assumed that was the existing Dunewars file values.
How do those compare to vanilla? Are they all identical to particular vanilla techs that served as the base?

Sorry, I missed your point about *vanilla* values. The spreadsheet does give the current values for DW. But individual technologies in the DW file have been renamed and reorganized, while the flavor values themselves remain untouched. So, for example in 1.0, a vanilla technology like "Optics" was renamed to "Riding the Worm", and then in 1.4.x the "Riding the Worm" technology was given some different prerequisites and moved elsewhere in the tree. "Riding the Worm" is now renamed in 1.6.1b, but it still has the same flavor values as vanilla optics.

So, any statistical analysis you want to do, such as looking at expected ranges of the flavors, is perfectly valid on the existing DW file. The names and effects are all different now, but the distribution of flavor values is identical to vanilla.

So, any statistical analysis you want to do, such as looking at expected ranges of the flavors, is perfectly valid on the existing DW file. The names and effects are all different now, but the distribution of flavor values is identical to vanilla.

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Understood. Thanks, I will use these as a guide.

Flavors in Excel and tweaked Leaderhead flavors.

A few pages back, arkham4269 commented that he lost a bunch of spice income due to a well being built on a coast, and several people agreed that you should have large inland cities and small coastal cities. We want to have an irrigation bonus so that the AI will build villages; but perhaps there is another way to get it.

I did an experiment by removing fresh water from wells and adding fresh water due to the early game water cache building. I also turned on the irrigation system, and allowed most improvements to carry irrigation. So, a city acts as the only source of fresh water, and as long as you build improvements near the city first, pretty much all villages get irrigation from the city.

I compared the total scores of the civs after 255 turns, and they were pretty similar in the original game, and with this irrigation system. The total commerce of all the players was similar. I visually inspected, and the number/size of villages seemed pretty similar also.

The main difference that I can see with this system is less unexpected removal of spice (due to wells), and perhaps a little bit less spread of terraforming. You won't get any terraforming around wells. But since grassland can spawn an oasis, which is a source of fresh water, it is possible for terraforming to spread a long distance.

What do you think? Is it worth putting this variation into 1.6.3 to see how people like it?

I like this idea/change
Terraforming needed some little "hampering" anyways, and spice economy needs light boost

that (with hw discount implementation) will be enough and well balanced change.

I still think Terraforming is wayyyy too slow. i only got 2 ancored grassland tiles throught my 9 city empire over 100 turns and every one of my cities had the first building that spreads anchor grass (i forget the name)

it could be good if there was a game option called 'Rapid Terraforming' which increased the rate of terraforming. and an option for 'Rapid Spice Formation' which increased the rate that spice is generated and increases the lifespan of Spice.

I did an experiment by removing fresh water from wells and adding fresh water due to the early game water cache building. I also turned on the irrigation system, and allowed most improvements to carry irrigation. So, a city acts as the only source of fresh water, and as long as you build improvements near the city first, pretty much all villages get irrigation from the city.

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My issues:
1) Does giving the water cache fresh water cache fresh water mean that tiles around a city will terraform without a catchbasin? If so, this severely discourages construction of catchbasins, which is a bad thing. I'm assuming this isn't the case. [I always mess up fresh water on the tile vs access.]
2) Why spread irrigation? The whole point of the cottages bonus with irrigation was that this should be a bonus *only* in a few tiles, and only around fresh water sources. So you couldn't just spam cottages everywhere with their hammer bonus; you should build turbines or solar farms elsewhere where there wasn't fresh water.
If improvements spread irrigation, then you can just get cottages with hammer bonus everywhere.
Also, even if you switch from wells providing fresh water to cities providing fresh water, why would that chance also need to include improvements spreading irrigation?? I don't see how these are related. We can switch the water supply from well to city without needing improvements to spread irrigation.
3) I dislike only getting terraforming near catchbasins. There are distributional issues. In the status quo, a city with low water income, where you don't really want to build a catchbasin to start with, can still get terraforming around it if a well is nearby, which can give it enough water income so that it can later build a catchbasin without starving to death.
In the new system, terraforming *only* occurs on tiles adjacnet to catchbasin cities until arrakis transformation. So there is waaay less terraforming, not just slightly less.
I think the cure is might be worse than the disease.
If we do implement this, could we at least have the Reservoir fresh water range moved out to 3?

Personally, I tend to think that the spice loss from wells is over-rated. If we're doing tests, how about:
a) Game with wells providing fresh water.
b) Game with wells not providing fresh water and water cache doing it instead
And monitor the number of spice resource each player has. Does it really change the total much?

I still think Terraforming is wayyyy too slow. i only got 2 ancored grassland tiles throught my 9 city empire over 100 turns and every one of my cities had the first building that spreads anchor grass (i forget the name)

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I find that very surprising. If you had 9 cities with catchbasins, each fresh water tile should have had ~2.75% chance to terraform per turn. You are aware that only tiles with fresh water (ie next to wells or catchbasins) can change?
If anything I find terraforming happens quite quickly - often before I get to Arrakis transformation tech.
What game speed are you playing?

I can't start Dune Wars, I installed and played (immidetaly after first instalation) in DW 1.6.1 and everything was OK. (I have BTS 3.19) I saved game, came back after few days and when XML is loading DW is crash down. Why? Anyone has similliar problem? Do you have any partch or idea how to repair?

Thanks for answer

Gisz said:

I can't start Dune Wars, I installed and played (immidetaly after first instalation) in DW 1.6.1 and everything was OK. (I have BTS 3.19) I saved game, came back after few days and when XML is loading DW is crash down. Why? Anyone has similliar problem? Do you have any partch or idea how to repair?

Thanks for answer

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You downloaded 1.6.1 and started a game. You played for a while and saved. Then you came back later and you cannot load the game. Is that correct? Did you change anything on your system in the meantime?

Also what system/OS you using?

Did you change anything on your system in the meantime?

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To emphasize David's point; did you install another patch after saving the game?

hey,

this wasn't adresed yet, but some vehicles like quad can go over some of the peaks,

i think i know why, peak isnt a regular terran, its placed over a regular terrain , so theres one terrain that it allows the quad to go over and another - that wont allow it to pass.