If you could still change some things in Dune Wars, what would they be?

Horatius

Prince
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Dune Wars is one of the best fantasy mods, for sure. I really like it's flavor and it's a proper game.

Still some things, even after the latest patch, may not be perfect.
Assuming there could be one more patch, what would you change, tweak?
I'm talking to everyone.

Just some things that could be tweaked according to my opinion:

- CHOAM HQ: 2 gold per spice a little too much, I feel. Much more powerful than the +1 gold per city from normal shrines.
- Chamber of Visions: 2 spy pts per spice, again too much.
- Guild Research Facility: +2 beakers per spice: the most important wonder of the game, I always beat the AI to it easily even on diety: imbalanced, easily around 700 beakers with multipliers in the late game just from the capital if not more.
- Stoneburners: too cheap, imho.
- Death Hand Missile: too soon.
- Elaccan Gladiator: too easy to be cost effective against, imho. The AI does not understand them.
- Fremen mobility on sand: a little too much. Should be slightly less.
- Late game research: its typical that normal speed feels like quick or epic feels like normal to me in the late game.
- Quad vs Thopter: Thopters are better and cheaper. Quads need some sort of buff. Later vehicules are alright but I really dislike the quads in comparison with Vulture thopters. More withdraw does not compensate for the other differences,imho.
 
I'm considering that perhaps it is not the CHOAM HQ, Chamber of Visions and Guild Research Facility that are overpowered, but Arrakis spice. Try playing a game without doing Arrakis Spice, it is not that easy. Without spice industri a spice patch gives you on average 60 commerce plus 40 gold, 40 espionage and 40 science from wonders. With spice industri they give you 150 commerce plus 100 gold, 100 espionage and 100 science from wonders. Taking into acount turns it takes before a spice patch is improved spice industri becomes relativly better.

Fremen are just immensly strong in the mod.

But on to my changes.
1. Spread out peace weight more to make the AI dislike eachother more. When I play on Diety it is not uncommon to see several AIs peace vassal to Fremen. I would like Fremen to be an outliner having hard time to get friends, except for perhaps Bene Gesserit and Atreides.
2. Allow leaders to convert to religions they are unable to found. If you people has embrassed a religion I think the leader may convert as well.
3. Give Ordos a espionage mission to steal a unit from an opponent. Or turn the unit barbarian. Ordos had ability to take over opponent units in Dune 2.
4. Quads are weak. Giving them 6 in strengh might be just enough. At the moment I rather build bladesmen.
 
For me it's the Ecaz house which need improve, because it's not fun to play. I have try something in the thread "make ecaz better" which done some interesting results.

I agree for the quad, usually I built only one for pillaging when my army move, but except that it is useless. Don't even beat an infanterie because of terrain bonus...

Power of spice and spice building : your right but it is quite easy to destroy harvesters and shut down all this power. The problem in my opinion is the production of wonder is not proportional of the scale of the map. In small maps, guild research alwaus produce +2/spice but you can have very far less spice. I think the cost of tech which become bigger in bigger map is not as bigger to preserve balance.
 
I had this rather extreme idea about the Tleilaxu that would require quite a bit of new art assets and a lot of tinkering.

I noticed the Bene Tleilax faction is pretty neatly set up to have an unique specialist type with their unique religion and the buildings it will allow. Let's say we invent a new specialist type called "Tleilaxu Master". It would probably give a combination of espionage and something else (to sorta nudge Bene Tleilax towards an espionage-heavy strat). The Bene Tleilax/Sensufi buildings would come with Tleilaxu Master slots and the free priest from their palace would be replaced with a Tleilaxu Master as well. Tleilaxu Masters would contribute GPP's towards a new type of Great Person called a "Tleilaxu Grandmaster". He would have following abilities:

Found Zensufi Shrine.
Oversee Development: The grandmaster becomes a building that gives production/science bonuses, autodestroyed if the city ever loses the Zensufi religion.
Oversee Flesh vats: The grandmaster becomes a building that gives water bonuses, great people points, and experience, autodestroyed if the city ever loses the Zensufi religion.
Sing to the Dancer: The Grandmaster "joins" a facedancer in a similar manner to a burseg joining a military unit.
Sabotage Breeding Project: A sabotage mission that can only target one of Bene Gesserit's breeding projects. It is automatically successful but consumes the Grandmaster.

I am not too sure about whether the last two options are possible at all, but it would be extraordinarily neat if they were.

BTW, he would not have the ability to settle as an ordinary great person as Grandmasters should never show up in non-Tleilaxu/non-Zensufi cities.
 
I'm considering that perhaps it is not the CHOAM HQ, Chamber of Visions and Guild Research Facility that are overpowered, but Arrakis spice.

I never thought of it that way. I wonder if Arrakis spice should bring in a culture penalty at least?

2. Allow leaders to convert to religions they are unable to found. If you people has embrassed a religion I think the leader may convert as well.

I see your point. I guess it's a flavor decision originally? Should the Tleilax be able to convert to others?

3. Give Ordos a espionage mission to steal a unit from an opponent. Or turn the unit barbarian. Ordos had ability to take over opponent units in Dune 2.

I tried doing this. It should've been easy with just XML. But something in the DLL somehow connected to <iBuyUnitCostFactor>, I think, gives automatically to the converted unit the Impersonated promotion and you only keep the unit for one turn. I don't know how to do stuff in DLL files and I can't get around this.

4. Quads are weak. Giving them 6 in strengh might be just enough. At the moment I rather build bladesmen.

I wonder if they should have some special promotion, attack or ability instead of 6 str, though. Also, I think that they should not have city defense penalty at least.


I had this rather extreme idea about the Tleilaxu that would require quite a bit of new art assets and a lot of tinkering.

That's some nice ideas but it would require quite some work:)

The problem in my opinion is the production of wonder is not proportional of the scale of the map. In small maps, guild research alwaus produce +2/spice but you can have very far less spice. I think the cost of tech which become bigger in bigger map is not as bigger to preserve balance.

That's interesting, again I never thought of that.
Still what would be a solution? Just reduce the bonus per spice or/and tweak the worldinfo file, the arrakis spice civic?

Cheers
 
I see your point. I guess it's a flavor decision originally? Should the Tleilax be able to convert to others?

I think Tleilax remove all other religions from their cities so it is not a big concern.
 
Getting back into the mod with Folket's new patch, a couple of things stand out:

- When going for a religious victory, it would be nice if you could choose "Missionaries and Executives start automated" and be sure that your missionaries would aggressively convert all cities with open borders to your religion. Manually doing this is tedious. Would be good if you could automate Inquisitors as well. Can they remove religions from enemy cities? If not, why not?

- Better understanding of logistics overall. Especially workers and missionaries using airlifts. Having 10 workers all lined up in one city awaiting airlifting is stupid. The AI should calculate that the 10th worker will have to wait in line 10 turns and discover that it would be quicker to simply walk to the destination on foot. Missionaries should airlift closer to where they need to get to.

- Make the AI understand reinforcements and airlifting better in general. If all my cities have spaceports, then I can theoretically move 10 or more units to the site of attack each turn. Make
sure that when the AI invades, it REALLY invades with overwhelming numbers.

- Make the AI value peace more if there is no decisive way for it to take cities. Having a war drag on for more than 20 turns just puts both parties way behind the rest of the AIs.

Thats it for now really.

Edit: Some more:

- Both Mahdi and Thinking Machines convert large numbers of your cities upon founding. This can really screw you up if you are heavily invested in a previous religion, causing massive unhappiness. As a human player you can simply put off researching these techs until someone else founds them. But the AIs will gladly blunder into them and loose all their happiness bonuses from their previous religion. Really, the AIs should actively avoid founding Thinking machines altogether unless IX. It does more harm than good.

- Workers on Automation should aggressively update mines and wells. I have seen workers sitting around doing nothing when half of my cities have un-upgraded improvements. I then had to pump out another 5 or so workers and manually go around upgrading everything. Very tedious. Setting them to Auto-Upgrade still causes them to sit around at times.

- Workers on Automation should really stay indoors during war time. So many times, my workers all get poached by enemy thopters, and there goes 5 workers. Worker danger AI simply cannot take into account bombers, fighters, thopters and suspensor craft. They have too big a movement. Same with Fremen troops on worms. So all workers should head to the nearest city as soon as war is declared. Would save a lot of hassle rebuilding lost workers. Also better for the AIs.
 
Oh, a suggestion that would require some work, but nothing difficult, nor impossible:

Finish the damn Civilopedia!
 
my first goal will be is to merge k-mod.

If you do get back into modding, I'm sure there will be plenty of people come back out of the woodwork to playtest and file bug reports for you.

Also, merging K-Mod would be great. Get multiple units per turn built in high production cities ;)
 
hey all,

lately ive been thinking on going back to modding dune wars.

since i created it, i turned to other projects, but alwyas had a special place for dune.

maybe ill do something for it.


my first goal will be is to merge k-mod.

What a nice surprise. I had completely given up on seeing experienced modders getting back to Dune Wars.

I wish you a joyful work on it. It deserves the effort.

I can't help on DLL, being uneducated on coding stuff, but if you eventually want to save time regarding some simple XML and Python things, you can feel free to ask for my meager help, if you care.

Cheers
 
America Mod?
 
Indeed Keldath, Dune is a great mod! The populace would surly enjoy some add/changes/ tweaks etc. Plenty of testers around:cheers:
 
I guess its not needed due to the strength of the Fremen ... but it'd be nice if the leader Paul had some access to a Kwisatch Haderach unit .... perhaps losing his traits if said unit dies?
 
I guess its not needed due to the strength of the Fremen ... but it'd be nice if the leader Paul had some access to a Kwisatch Haderach unit .... perhaps losing his traits if said unit dies?

Losing the traits is too a big a blow. This is not Ffh2.

Besides would Paul be the KH? Or would it be called Duncan Idaho in honor of Sandworms of Dune?:lol:

Inside jokes aside, why Paul and not Leto? Why not the Tleilaxu have one as well?...
 
I was thinking of making the KH a super mentat and reintroduce another version of the instructress for the BG.
Any thoughts on this?
 
I think the actual KW is as good. Paul is not actually the KW the BG have searching for. He is something else. Because leader are not in the map, there is no reason to make a prescience avantage for fremen when they are played by paul, except maybe if this is a real trait which replace an existing one.

For Leto, in my dunewars I have already replace LetoII by lady jessica, because :
-leto2 is in fact more fremen than atreides
-leto2 has nothing to do contemporary whith other leader of the first book era, and even whitout that, he is definitly too "divine" to be seriously use as a egal of others.
-have a game with leto2 opposed to paul-muad'dib is to unbearable for me. Break the exquisite dune ambiance of the mod.
 
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