1.9.6 Feedback

Hey guys, I do check in every once in a while, I was surprised to see a little bit of discussion I missed ;).

About a month ago I put in several games of Dune Wars and made a few additions, some previously planned, some based on observations in those games.

1.) In case nobody has every noticed, culture doubling has never worked in dune wars. I looked into the code and found this to be because of the different calendar used. Without going into technical details, I'll just say it's been fixed. I didn't add or take it away from any buildings, just corrected the code to work with the dune wars calendar (including being properly scaled to game speed), and if I recall correctly set it to double after 70 turns on normal speed.

2.) The Corrino Levi troopers (replacing lasgun soldiers) are way overpowered. The fact that 'upgrading' them to lasgun troopers actually made them weaker seems pretty off, that's all I'm sayin'. Here's the rundown:

(Cost) (Strength)
Lasgun Soldier 150 12
Levi Trooper 125 18=>14 (removed odd additional withdrawal chance as well)
Lasgun Trooper 210 17

They still retain the ability to be upgraded almost for free from heavy troopers, AND remain better than the base Lasgun Soldier, but are no longer a "i win" button with this change. It also actually makes sense to upgrade them with 'advanced lasguns' technology up to the Lasgun Troopers now.

3.) Excited about this one, as I wanted to do it for a while. I added a new worker automation, aptly named 'automate spice'. You can now tell a particular worker to just upgrade available spice before spice workers (or without ever building them for you fremen hippies out there). The spice worker is still of course better as they work faster and move faster, but this helps nicely in terms of micromanagement for those without them.

I'd also made a 'automate upgrade' that would send the worker to upgrade available improvements only (mines to deep mines, deep wells to aquifers, etc.), but it's got a CTD occurring somewhere in the code and looks like it's needs to be rewritten, so.. not finished for now.

4.) Argg, don't even want to mention this one as it opens up old arguments, but hey, here we go.... Right now, improvements can't be built on polar sink... unless... it's been terraformed. However, after you've wrestled that polar cap away from the fremen and watched it all turn back to polar sink, the fremen towns and such built on their terraformed polar cap are there to stay. Which doesn't make much sense, if I do say so myself. I've changed this to where they will slowly wither away (think town->village->on down the line to nothingness) over a period of time in the newly harsh environment till it all returns back to empty sink as Shai-halud intended it. ;)

5.) Made the 'industrial complex' at least a little useful by adding an additional 5 production from the building. Might still feel too useless. I'm just saying, don't know about anyone else's strategy, but I've never felt the urge to build one as it was before...

6.) This last one could be controversial, but I think it's a good change. So first off, what I've done is applied a diminishing returns formula to the various buildings that give a bonus for each spice produced. This is sensitive to the overall amount of spice available on the map, so that it falls off more sharply on a small map than a large one, since there is less spice. Essentially, in plain english, it's balanced so that as a player (human or AI) gets closer to the spice victory threshold, the return for each additional unit of spice drops off slightly so that it's no longer a linear function, but rather a power function. Ok, ok, here's a picture to illustrate:



This shows the expected values before and after given a typical amount of total spice on a large map for the palace where x is the number of spice produced. Around that 200 mark you are getting really close to a spice victory (depends on the production of your rivals on the exact number) and you can see that what before returned 600 commerce would return around 375, while the disparity is much less at lower numbers.

I feel that this balances the late game much better without creating a total runaway civ as one grows larger than the others, especially once you throw in some of the wonders that utilize spice in the same way (guild research facility, Choam HQ, etc.), while still giving enough incentive to continue to try to produce more spice. The exact formula can be tweaked easily if it looks too extreme of a dropoff, and I might also tie in some .ini settings to allow easy customization (or disablement) of this system.

7.) Oh, yea, also fixed the whole 'salt pan' trade thing too :lol:
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So, I can roll these into a new patch and release it in the next week or two (I need to re-setup the installation .exe scripts) along with any other simple changes. I'm ambivalent on the laza tiger/KH issue, hadn't ever thought about it before. Seems a good point.

Were the Mahdi units changed to require upkeep? Having no upkeep was pretty powerful, but now paying upkeep on a bunch of low end units meant to wear down enemies with continual assaults can really sink an economy. This is especially true for the Freman running Arrakis Paradise because they can't build as many units and they don't generate as much commerce (at least before the terraforming gets off the ground). Maybe Mahdi units should get half off upkeep?

I'd made a point once to look into how this was coded, and to my surprise, found no code whatsoever that changed the way mahdi units count towards upkeep, not even a way to potentially implement this in the code. Ahriman will have to chime in here I guess, but from what I've seen in the code, if this was ever actually implemented, there's nothing left of it. I'd thought about how to apply exactly what you proposed (half upkeep for them) before, but it requires a fairly radical change in the way the game calculates unit upkeep by my recollection. Doable, it'd just take a little work.

I also want to nip the pick religion 'bug' in the bud for a patch, but that's fairly simple to do, just haven't done it yet :)
 
Hey, GREAT! :) :) :) Glad to see you again. (No, I'm not a fanboi.)

Would you mind killing a few more "bugs"? Here they are:

- Light carryalls do not show "may defend only" in their tooltips, as heavy carryalls and suspensor transports do. IIRC the light carryalls still can't attack, but they CAN pillage. IMHO no carryall should be able to pillage, just like thopters can't (for good reason).

- Assault cannons may fortify, other siege engines can't. Don't know if this is intended.

- You can't build a force shield in a city with a House Shield Generator. However, you actually CAN build a House Shield Generator in a city with a force shield. I need a few turns more to see how this works graphically or if the force shield gets removed, but I was able to put it in the building queue as the actual project.

- I'm a bit confused about your text with the sardaukar. However, when I played my last game (Atreides this time), upgrading from heavy troopers to lasgun troopers was ordinarily cheap. Intended?

- Is it intended that carryalls are a special category of units and therefore can't get any promotions at all?

I also noted that vassals, if asked to trade their spice to me, answer sth. like "That sounds fair to me" if asked "What do you want in exchange for it?", but demand nothing. So you can get all their spice for nothing in return. If you ask for other ressources or sth. else, they behave normally and want something equal in exchange. :confused:

Further: I canceled and reloaded a game when I managed to found "thinking machines" for my first time, because it spreadfired into several my cities. Nothing wrong with the spreadfire itself, but IT KILLED other religions in the process! Especially it killed my state religion Mahdi out of the cities. Since there's no Mahdi Missionaire, I was everything but amused :mad:.


For future patches:
- The accommodity exchange building (it's a BUILDING, not a wonder / national wonder!) may produce OBSCENE amounts of money (more than 3 spice silos, actually). The only prerequistion (except for the tech, of course) is having CHOAM present in the city (no big deal). CHOAM hasn't to be your state religion. Is this really intended???
- Maybe Bombers could get some additional promos available? For instance desert combat I or some anti-unit_category-promotions. I have two bombers now that have the exp to get promoted, but there are no promos available. That wouldnt happen to melee fighters or guardsmen, at least not that early.
 
About the upkeep issue with mahdi zealot and mahdi mujahids: Maybe it's just a tooltip error? The units.xml shows them as free of upkeep.
 
Artificial spice is very deliberately dead-end, and giving nothing but the Wonder. The idea is to make it an optional tech; very helpful if you're trying to get a Spice victory, but otherwise low priority.

I missed that aspect. Of course THEN it has its use.
 
1.) In case nobody has every noticed, culture doubling has never worked in dune wars. I looked into the code and found this to be because of the different calendar used. Without going into technical details, I'll just say it's been fixed. I didn't add or take it away from any buildings, just corrected the code to work with the dune wars calendar (including being properly scaled to game speed), and if I recall correctly set it to double after 70 turns on normal speed.

I don't think I understand the issue here, probably a vanilla mechanic I don't understand. Could you explain briefly or provide a link?

2. I think this was a generally broken issue where they were replacing the wrong unit. A bug intruduced because we kept changing the names of the late-game guardsmen units.

Honestly, I think we need to totally change the current design, it doesn't make sense to me.
Levy troopers are supposed to be the generic levy soldiers provided by the Houses to the Emperor for use.
I think we should make them a slightly better replacement for the Maula Guardsman, or we should make them a weak free promotion that is available to all Corrino guardsmen units. It isn't in flavor for Corrino to have a powerful late game guardsman unit. Late game, Corrino should be about Sardaukar, which are their iconic unit. Their levy trooper should be something that helps in the early game, before Sardaukar are available. Levy guardsmen could be Maula guardsmen with an extra defense or city defense or first strike.

3. That sounds cool.

4. As I've said before, I think the design here is totally ridiculous, and I think your change has very modest impact but in the wrong direction. We shouldn't be making polar terrain weaker. It's already very weak, particularly given the high cost of the water shipper building. If you must make it so that the polar cities are useless on their own, then at least make the water shipper building very cheap.
I also think it is a serious handicap for the AI to make the polar cities weak. The AI very often settles the polar region early, in part because it is programmed to do so and it part because it sees the high yields of those polar tiles, and doesn't understand that they're useless because improvements are blocked on them. [Which just makes NO SENSE AT ALL. Why is terrain that is sheltered and has a mild climate and has good water somehow worse than bare arid rock that is blasted by sandstorms?]
If you really insist on keeping polar cities very week, then could we at least have a "polar outpost" building that requires the polar water resource within the city BFC that reduces the maintenance costs of the city? Those cities get hammered with distance maintenance.

5. Seems ok. I agree they're underpowered. They're a copy from the vanilla building, but that always seemed weak in vanilla too.

6. I don't like this. What is the motivation for this? I don't think "reducing the marginal value of spice" is a sensible design goal. I think its plausible that some of the spice wonders may still need their power reduced further (eg 1.5 yield per spice) but I don't see any need for non-linear benefits. That is jsut confusing.
If you have a really huge amount of spice, that should lead to a runaway victory that lets you win. Like simialrly if you have a really big army or a really big population.

7. Good.

Ahriman will have to chime in here I guess, but from what I've seen in the code, if this was ever actually implemented, there's nothing left of it
I didn't write the code, but I could have sworn this was implemented. Probably by Deliverator, or maybe David.
It could well be a tooptip issue.
 
IMHO no carryall should be able to pillage, just like thopters can't (for good reason).
Agreed.

Assault cannons may fortify, other siege engines can't. Don't know if this is intended.
Not intended, I don't think any siege unit should be able to get fortify benefits. They're not defensive units.

Is it intended that carryalls are a special category of units and therefore can't get any promotions at all?
No. They should be thopter class. I'd also be fine with suspensor class.

So you can get all their spice for nothing in return
Intended. You can demand spice from vassals. Non-vassals shouldn't ever be willing to trade you spice.

found "thinking machines" for my first time, because it spreadfired into several my cities. Nothing wrong with the spreadfire itself, but IT KILLED other religions in the process!
Intended.

CHOAM hasn't to be your state religion. Is this really intended???
I think all the late-game religious things should require X as state religion, not as just present.
I also think that stacking religions isn't painful enough, I think we should consider moving to +2 unhappy for non-state religions in a city.

Maybe Bombers could get some additional promos available? For instance desert combat I or some anti-unit_category-promotions
I don't think they should have desert combat. I don't remember what promotions they have available, but they should have the same promotions as hornets (except evasion instead of interception), which should probably be a full set of combat promotions, range promotions, and anti-guardsman anti-vehicle anti-aircraft anti-hornet promotions.
 
I've found two more issues maybe worth thinking abot when patching:

- Trade routes are limited to 8 currently (in the globaldefines.xml). If you have CHOAM available, you regularly hit he cap (and could go over it). You could have even 12 or more routes wizh Tueks Sietch. I think, if a building (or even worse, a wonder) says "you get +1 trade route if you build me", then you should actually get it and not hit some undocumented cap.

- Suspensor destroyers don't show "No defensive bonuses" in their tooltip, as all other suspensor craft do, so I think they can actually get defensive bonuses. Probably this is not intended.

Btw, I think carryalls should belong to the suspensor category since they upgrade from the suspensor transport.

Oh, and about the bombers: Maybe I wasn't clear bout that, but I just meant they have a too low number of promotions available. Give them whatever promotions you think may fit, but it's annoying if your bomber has something about 140 XP (which isn't that much given the long peacetime I had) but cant' be promoted further since 30 XP because it simply already got all promotions. You even can't get the "heal half the damage" effect of the promotion!
 
Intended. You can demand spice from vassals. Non-vassals shouldn't ever be willing to trade you spice.

Fine with me. I just wondered b/c I nowhere read about that. Maybe I overlooked it.
 
- Trade routes are limited to 8 currently (in the globaldefines.xml). If you have CHOAM available, you regularly hit he cap (and could go over it). You could have even 12 or more routes wizh Tueks Sietch. I think, if a building (or even worse, a wonder) says "you get +1 trade route if you build me", then you should actually get it and not hit some undocumented cap.
I'd be fine with removing any cap, or setting it arbitrarily high.

- Suspensor destroyers don't show "No defensive bonuses" in their tooltip, as all other suspensor craft do, so I think they can actually get defensive bonuses. Probably this is not intended.
Sounds like a bug. Suspensors shouldn't get defensive bonuses.

Btw, I think carryalls should belong to the suspensor category since they upgrade from the suspensor transport.
The main issue for me is whether people will think that anti-suspensor or anti-air promotions should work on them, I'm guessing from the sprite that it looks more like aircraft than a suspensor, but I don't really mind either way.

Oh, and about the bombers: Maybe I wasn't clear bout that, but I just meant they have a too low number of promotions available. Give them whatever promotions you think may fit, but it's annoying if your bomber has something about 140 XP (which isn't that much given the long peacetime I had) but cant' be promoted further since 30 XP because it simply already got all promotions. You even can't get the "heal half the damage" effect of the promotion!

I think I understoodd this correctly, which is why I said they should be able to get any of that big long list. So they should be able to get any of at least dozen or so different promotions, so they shouldn't be running out even when highly experienced.
 
Fine with me. I just wondered b/c I nowhere read about that. Maybe I overlooked it.
Does it need to be specifically documented somewhere? If you try and trade deal for spice for a non-vassal AI, they'll refuse. If you demand it from your vassal, they'll accept.
 
Thanks for catching all these, btw! I haven't had a chance to play the mod in ages, so it's great to get bug reports.
 
I'd made a point once to look into how this was coded, and to my surprise, found no code whatsoever that changed the way mahdi units count towards upkeep, not even a way to potentially implement this in the code. Ahriman will have to chime in here I guess, but from what I've seen in the code, if this was ever actually implemented, there's nothing left of it. I'd thought about how to apply exactly what you proposed (half upkeep for them) before, but it requires a fairly radical change in the way the game calculates unit upkeep by my recollection. Doable, it'd just take a little work.

Hi folks. Glad to see that another patch is planned...

Regarding the Mahdi Zealot support thing, I think this was only ever an XML change. bMilitarySupport is set to zero for them in UnitInfos unlike for other military units. Possibly this number only affects the Military Unit Cost (calculation info here) component of Unit Maintenance? Haven't looked at the code in a while and it may be we didn't understand unit maintenance fully when this was done.
 
Great to hear another update is coming out for a great mod! Just one thing, and I don't know if this has been addressed, but in reference to an earlier post (#23) I've been experiencing OOS errors in multiplayer upon initiating combat with air units that cannot be fixed with an autosave reload. Are there any workarounds or fixes for this? Thanks for all of the work!
 
Regarding the Mahdi Zealot support thing, I think this was only ever an XML change. bMilitarySupport is set to zero for them in UnitInfos unlike for other military units. Possibly this number only affects the Military Unit Cost (calculation info here) component of Unit Maintenance? Haven't looked at the code in a while and it may be we didn't understand unit maintenance fully when this was done.

The military support xml field applies only when a civ is running a civic that adds additional unit costs for 'military' units, e.i. vanilla Civ4 pacifism. Since DuneWars doesn't even have a civic that adds military support costs, this xml field has no effect.

Great to hear another update is coming out for a great mod! Just one thing, and I don't know if this has been addressed, but in reference to an earlier post (#23) I've been experiencing OOS errors in multiplayer upon initiating combat with air units that cannot be fixed with an autosave reload. Are there any workarounds or fixes for this? Thanks for all of the work!

I can take a look, if it's something fairly obvious in the way the random number generators are used in air combat I might be able to fix it.

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Thanks guys for bringing up the observations you have, those little things can really sneak through. Some time in the next week I'll step through the list of small fixes needed and see what I can do with them. I'm not spending a lot of time on this right now, as I've got plenty of other things going on right now, but I'd like to fix the easy things.

Not getting into any arguments on polar cities today, we've beat that to death ;), the addition there is just a simple script change that takes out an inconsistency within the current design. And no, I still don't think polar cities are weak, they can be economic powerhouses that also give access to the powerful polar ice resource. Their only 'weakness' is that they typically aren't good for production centers, as they shouldn't be lore wise...

The only other controversy (I said it'd be controversial) is the inclusion of the diminishing returns function on spice production. It's my solid opinion that it's good for late game balance, that's why I added it. But I'd like to make it a selectable game option, off by default, but there for those who want a less runaway end game. It keeps a little more competitiveness between the big boys and the smaller powers late into the game essentially, lord knows there's already enough vanilla mechanics that favor larger civs anyway, just one way to counteract it a little.
 
@6.
But I'd like to make it a selectable game option, off by default, but there for those who want a less runaway end game.
Thanks for making it an option !
While I'm just a (silent) player and get the gripe about mechanics snowballing out of control due to multiplicative factors, I also think that is a part that should be eligible to have that snowball-effect: "He who controls the spice controls the universe" -it's just so flavorful imho.
So I think it'd be more flavorful to rather balance other snowballing aspects (e.g.: military, population), but I guess that's something that can't be done as easily. =/
(As those aspects are quite hard to change in Civ to avoid total stalemate games and thus changing Civ from 4X to say, a tactical battle game)

So thanks for making that optional for all those out there actually liking that "unbalanced" mechanism that nonetheless fits the lore perfectly :D

PS: Ideas for fixing the snowballing effect of huge Spice amounts:
Not sure if it's copy-able, but in the Master of Mana-Mod some buildings give a fixed bonus for having access to it, but a smaller effect for each additional resource.
E.g. a Weavers Hut grants +3Coins for having access to Sheeps and +1 Coin for each Sheep thereafter.
Perhaps it's possible to do stuff like the palace granting 3 Coins just for the first 25 Spice and then 1 Coin thereafter.
That would be more crude than the shown graph, but it would be alot more visual for players to see.

Another way to avoid that snowballing effect when controlling hundreds of spice would be to restrict buildings granting a percentile bonus (like universities) to _not being able to be build_ in the Capital.
That way each extra spice would still be useful (+3 Commerce), but it would not spiral that easily out of control in the mid-/lategame b/c it's not additionally multiplied by a ton of percentile bonuses.
This would affect other aspects of the game massively, though (eg. I guess the endgame technology research costs are balanced around a supercity with tons of Commerce (due to spice) and such buildings)


1.) In case nobody has every noticed, culture doubling has never worked in dune wars. [snip]...and if I recall correctly set it to double after 70 turns on normal speed.
Personally I noticed but I thought that was intended. o.0

I mean, in Vanilla Civ it made abit of "sense" that some _really old wonders_ get that extra "Aaaaah"-effect (double culture) when hundreds or thousands of years passed, but in Dune ?
Even though a normal game does span 500 years I' not sure it fits that idea.

If you feel that the cultural victory condition needs a buff, I think buffing individual culture providing buildings or specialists (or just enable the doubling for wonders, not every culture providing building) would fit much more into the general "feel".


@3. Sounds great !

@4. Well, i just know the "weak plots but powerful resources"-version and like it as it is. Polar cities itself are weak, but potentially providing 1food for each Polar Ice in EACH city is a huge bonus.
Right now there is just 1 downside: it's almost always not practial to take a polar city early (when I got 3-4 normal cities) to secure a spot there (and letting the Polar city time to grow culture to provide more ice than other opponents cities)
Almost every time it's easier to conquer it later on =/ to basically get 30 free specialists (assuming 30 cities) late game.
So it would be nice to see some added bonus to polar cities though. The proposal of a polar city only building to remove maintenance sounds good - this would make it less crippling (financially) early game. As the AI tends to build those quite early, too, I guess this would help the AI, too.

@5: I think the main problem is not that Industrial Complex is weak, but that the Factory (which is a pre-requisite and less expensive) is so powerful.
How about simply switching those bonuses ?
I think the Industrial complex would be worth considering when it gave +25% hammers... (and to avoid percentile stacking, change the Factory to a flat +2 or +5 hammers, whatever seems to be balanced)
That way it would be kind of a "progrssion" along the Factory buildings, too - first +Xhammers, then +X% ...right now the Complex feels like a downgrade, even if it gives an engineer and 5hammers...
 
The proposal of a polar city only building to remove maintenance sounds good

As I think about this idea, I think I like it. I'd go so far as to say let it be an automatic building that you don't have to build that only shows up in polar cities (Ahriman's suggestion of 'polar outpost' seems fitting enough to me to call it) reducing the maintenance there.

As for the industrial complex, I'm not wanting to change general functions of buildings around, but I'm thinking on buffing it just a bit more, giving it a 10% production bonus on top of the +5 hammers and free engineer. That'll give it a niche in small cities with lots of excess health (where the free hammers will really matter) or in your specialized production cities where you say health be damned :lol:
 
Ah, still time to add more issues to the next patch list :D

- The monitor (categorized as thopter, which is ok) seems to be able to get defensive bonuses from terrain. :eek:

- The No-ship is kind of weird. When you move it through an enemy city (by clicking behind it), it moves all eney units within the enemy city one square away, leaving en empty city. Same when attacking the last military unit in a city (moving the civil units away). The no ship cant conquer the city, although it'sa thopter, which is able to.

- Might it be possible to add arrows or something like that to the city list in the "reinforcements from home"-screen, so one could scroll down (and up) the list? My list is too long, and there's nothing I can do to delever these homeworls units to my newest cities directly.
 
The monitor (categorized as thopter, which is ok) seems to be able to get defensive bonuses from terrain.
Bug.

The No-ship is kind of weird. When you move it through an enemy city (by clicking behind it), it moves all eney units within the enemy city one square away, leaving en empty city. Same when attacking the last military unit in a city (moving the civil units away)
Weird bug. Does it do that every time, or only sometimes?
Would the simplest fix to be to prevent it from attacking a city at all? I'd have no problem with that from a gameplay perspective, it isn't designed for city assaults.

Might it be possible to add arrows or something like that to the city list in the "reinforcements from home"-screen, so one could scroll down (and up) the list? My list is too long, and there's nothing I can do to delever these homeworls units to my newest cities directly.
I'm guessing that this is not possible, since the coders for the home-world mechanic and UI are long gone.
 
So, I can roll these into a new patch and release it in the next week or two (I need to re-setup the installation .exe scripts) along with any other simple changes.

I really don't want to hassle you, but ... will there be a new patch, and when? I'd like to start a multiplayer game, and that would be far better with a fresh patch...
 
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