Dune Wars

Ahriman said:

Perhaps the unit with the thumper promotion should itself act as a thumper

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This doesn't do any good though. The point of the thumper is to make the worm go away by eating the thumper, without having to sacrifice a unit to feed the worm.

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I did not explain very clearly. My suggestion is to eliminate the thumper unit. Instead, the sandworm would be drawn towards any unit with the thumper promotion, in preference to any other unit. When the worm reaches the unit with the promotion, it would perform the attack animation without damaging anything, and then disappear. So there is no more action button and no more thumper item to drop. What do you think?

ahriman said:

What are we going to do with the UN anyway? Turn it into the Landsraad?

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Yes, this makes the most sense.

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This is already done, a while back. The Landraad technology allows building the Landsraad building, which enables all these resolutions. The only problem is that the popup text about voting still calls them "UN resolutions"; these should all be fixed to say "Landsraad resolutions".

ahriman said:

There is one point I am missing somehow; it seems every civ has 1-2 more trade routes than it should, by the midgame (turn 250). I compared vanilla civ archipelago against DW.

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Possible source: the United nations trade route resolution?

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That could be. I autoplay the game and look at the results afterwards. Is there any screen to look at, which shows what resolutions have been passed?

EDIT: perhaps the "Resolutions" tab under victory conditions. Duh. Yes, the trade resolution is the one which was missing from my calculations.

My suggestion is to eliminate the thumper unit. Instead, the sandworm would be drawn towards any unit with the thumper promotion, in preference to any other unit. When the worm reaches the unit with the promotion, it would perform the attack animation without damaging anything, and then disappear. So there is no more action button and no more thumper item to drop. What do you think?

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This seems good; so any stack with a unit with the thumper promotion in it is immune to worms.

How about though making it that when the worm attacks the thumper unit, the worm dies without doing any damage, but the thumper promotion is removed?

The scout thumper, desert raider and worm rider could start with the thumper promotion, and the thumper promotion could be a purchasable promotion that requires the sandrider promotion.
So the scout thopter gets *one*, and other fremen infantry and water debt units get one to start with and can spend a promotion slot to gain another.

This seems good; so any stack with a unit with the thumper promotion in it is immune to worms.

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Yes, but also, since the attraction has a radius and high priority, stacks/improvements nearby are also safe. The worm will ignore anything else in favor of the thumper. Of course if there is a stack/improvement standing between you and the worm, it is not safe, but that makes sense to me.

Ahriman said:

How about though making it that when the worm attacks the thumper unit, the worm dies without doing any damage, but the thumper promotion is removed?

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So you are protected from the first worm you ever encounter, but the second one you encounter eats you? I do not understand.

So you are protected from the first worm you ever encounter, but the second one you encounter eats you?

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Yes. This way the thumper is a nice flavorful bonus for both the human and the AI, but doesn't make you permanently immune to sandworms; it would be sad if you could easily and costlessly be perpetually immune to worms.

The only way that makes sense to me is if the maker hooks are a rare and valuable commodity which get used up by the worm. Why should I be unable to defend myself against the second worm?

If this is a valuable ability, perhaps it should be harder to get in the first place, for example by putting it a little deeper into the promotion tree. But it does not make sense to me that a unit would lose this capability once it has it.

Why should I be unable to defend myself against the second worm?

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Well, the main reason is that the mechanic works as a concept.
The "explanation" is that the thumper is a physical object that the worm consumes; you place a thumper on the sand and activate it, and the worm rushes towards it and devours it, and then you climb on the side as it rushes past you.
Once you summon a worm with a thumper, the thumper is gone.

It makes perfect sense to me that you could lose the ability once used up the thumper, and it fits well with gameplay. A scout thopter is able to scout slightly more effectively in the early game, because it is immune to one worm attack. Fremen water debt units can survive better in the desert because they get to survive a worm attack, but they are not invincible.

If units with thumpers are just immune to worms, then worms become much less interesting; all you need is a single thumper promotion and you can safely cross deserts. If you aren't afraid of worms at all when crossing the desert, then they're kinda lame.

Let's get a few other opinions here. Civ does not normally model limited supply. An archer does not degrade into a warrior when it fires its one arrow. I think Fremen *can* travel in the desert without fear of worms, and it seems to me that other stacks protected by Fremen type units would have the same advantage. If this is powerful, let's make it a rarer promotion, but not used up each time.

Let's get a few other opinions here.

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Agreed.

I think Fremen *can* travel in the desert without fear of worms, and it seems to me that other stacks protected by Fremen type units would have the same advantage.

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If the only design purpose is to make fremen immune to worms, then why not just make sandworm attacks do no damage to any unit with the sandrider promotion?
No need for thumpers.

Ahriman said:

If the only design purpose is to make fremen immune to worms, then why not just make sandworm attacks do no damage to any unit with the sandrider promotion?

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Possibly merging Sandrider and Thumper into one promotion is worthwhile. However, Sandrider is automatically granted to Fremen units when they are built. Thumper is powerful enough that we may want to put it a little deeper in the promotion tree.

BTW, what I have described is a little more than "does no damage to the unit". Think of the unit as a lightning rod. It attracts the worm and causes it to disappear harmlessly.

The problem with making it a normal purchaseable promotion, is that the AI will tend to either not get it, or get too many. Either it has a high perceived value (and so the AI gets it on lots of units) or a low perceived value (and the AI never gets it).
In your design, you only ever need *1* unit per stack with the promotion. So if the AI gets multiple units with the promotion, they are wasted.

This is the advantage of making it consumable; it means that having more than one unit with the promotion is not completely redundant.

* * *
On an unrelated note
AH118
I suggest that we halve the cultural defense bonuses, and reduce the value of the perimeter defense (or whatever its called) to 25%, leaving the force shield at 75%.
As it is, the ignore city walls on melee units only ignores city wall defenses; cultural defenses are unaffected. So melee units still have no real chance to assault a well-defended city.

davidlallen said:

I have seen this also. I assumed that it was the "Great Wall" wonder, which reuses the same graphics as the wall, but I tried that with WB and that is not the cause. It may be a random display problem. I have locally made the force shield less "interesting" by removing its free trade route, but if I see it again I will post the game.

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The problem here is, i guess, that LSYSTEM_ARCOLOGY scales with the city's building size. If you have a building, which is very big, like the space elevator model, which is very high, the shield will scale with the building.
Easiest solution: Change it to LSYSTEM_1x1. Maybe some buildings will be outside of the shield, but that shouldn't matter.

Wow ! This mod is great !

The_J said:

The problem here is, i guess, that LSYSTEM_ARCOLOGY scales with the city's building size. If you have a building, which is very big, like the space elevator model, which is very high, the shield will scale with the building.
Easiest solution: Change it to LSYSTEM_1x1. Maybe some buildings will be outside of the shield, but that shouldn't matter.

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The problem doesn't seem to specifically be large buildings. This problem has happened before in various Next War modmods and such - in once case it was found to be a stable building in the Ethnic Artsytles modcomp that was causing the problem:

Chiyu said:

I solved the mystery! Apparantly, the Ethnic Artstyles graphics modcomp added a new graphic for the Stable. For some reason, this version of the Stable causes conflicts with the arcology shielding. Simply delete the "Stable" folder from \Assets\Art\Structures\Buildings\ and it will be fixed.
That's the reason why this bug doesn't appear in Expanded (come to think of it, I should have posted this in the Extra topic) or Next War, only in Extra (in which I implemented that modcomp).
Thanks for your help anyway, LordGek and Kalimakhus.
Pwew.
Should we inform GeoModder about this?

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What the exact problem with that building was, I don't know - I haven't found a post where the specific reason is given.

question about the terraforming... i think there should be some new improvements that could only be place upon the grass, i see my workers try to terraform and then place some wind turbines. it will be nice if there was a way to terraform the deserts to sea... the terraform should have a bigger system, similar to Fall From Heaven's Armageddon system or Planetfall's planet value system.

Actually, the game does have a Terraforming Counter like the FFH Armageddon counter. There isn't any kind of a widget in the game which shows the value of the Terraforming Counter, but it is in there. As you build more Reservoirs of Liet, the rate at which your terrain transforms into grass gets faster. If you get seven reservoirs, you win a terraforming victory.

Ahriman has suggested that other terrains should transform, and eventually there could be standing water (lakes, then ocean). We haven't implemented that yet however.

I dunno if it's the right thread to ask:

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How about answering the previous post?

Fenring's issue was dealt with on the subforum.

Thanks a lot to those who've posted positive feedback. However, as David says, we also need constructive criticism...

1. I see in the sub-forum you guys are changing the terrain up a little. Currently, Rugged terrain does not terraform. This makes it extremely poor terrain, particularly in light of my concerns with other aspects of the terraforming civic (see below). Perhaps Rugged should only terraform into plains?

2. Currently, building a Reservoir of Liet yields thats -2 diplomatic penalty with, I believe, only civs running the pro-spice civic. A few problems with this. First, if you convince them to switch civics to Arrakis Paradise (side note: I wonder if you should even be able to do this...), you retain this penalty. Second, if you disable the terraforming victory condition, you can accumulate enormous negative diplomatic penalties. Its enough to overwhelm every other factor in diplomacy and basically means you will never trade with a pro-spice faction for the rest of the game. Perhaps cap the penalty at -8ish, or perhaps -10 max total for the Reservoirs and the current -4 for using terraforming. It would be nice for two civs who are strongly the same religion but clearly differing on the future of Arrakis could still trade techs and resources.

3. At least in my games so far, the vast majority of civs switch to pro-spice. I think this is because they research it first as it is a much cheaper tech and comes sooner in the tree. It seems like a civ immediately switches to the first Arrakis Future civic they get, unless they are, what I assume to be, hardcoded to prefer one over the other, i.e. Corrino for pro-spice and the fremen for paradise.

4. At regular speed, at least the first half of the entire tech tree goes by way too fast, even with no tech brokering. Increasing tech costs by 25-50% wouldn't be crazy, in my opinion. However, it is actually fairly well balanced on epic speed, so maybe its just a personal preference.

5. I still think the pro-spice civic is way too weak, especially versus the terraformers. Spice in general is still way to weak as well. I don't feel like it is a must-have thing right now, which makes no sense in the Dune universe. You get a modest economic bonus for each one right now. Why not, at the least, a much larger CREDIT bonus in the capital for each resource? Since upgrading in this mod is SO expensive, this would provide a great incentive to devote more energy to mining spice.

6. Related to 6, I think upgrade costs should be decreased; significantly so if you don't implement 5 above. Planetfall has done this well, I think.

7. I know this is probably pretty far down on your list, and I've already complained about this before (sorry!) but city placement remains god-awful. I know this is more of a base civ 4 problem, but its effects are much more pronounced in this mod because water is relatively scarce. While I know I can change the following myself, maybe force the AI to settle a minimum of 3 squares away (it is 2 right now, right?). In fact, this may be blasphemy, but 4 squares might even be better. Much less cities, but much better quality ones.

8. Really minor quibble, but the tech that lets you build a library immediately precedes the tech that lets you build the observatory. Seems just a bit odd to have two research buildings directly next to each other. And, by the way, the name "observatory" doesn't really seem to fit the Dune theme. Hate to criticize without offering an alternative, but I can't think of one right now.

9. It would be absolutely amazing if terraforming lead to the development of oceans and lakes as mentioned above. The contrast between the terraformed lands and the rest of Dune would be great to see. No complaint here, just a hope that its possible to do.