ChrisAdams3997
Prince
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
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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.
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
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
----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
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