A mod-mod: "Dune Wars Reduced"

[davidlallen]

I think I'm smart enough to realize that water yields without dew collectors are obviously less, and not to start complaining about that.

Let me rephrase. There is no question about smart, you have given some of the best playtest feedback I have ever gotten. But the key playtest question is, whether one groundwater type is enough. Without having dew collectors, you cannot evaluate this completely. So fixing dew collectors is important, to get feedback on groundwater.

 

[Deliverator]

so...nobody cares of the full version no more?

I think there has been this philosophical difference between us for a while. I'll try to explain my view on it.

Kael's FFH2 will never be surpassed in its popularity, I think it's fair to say. I posted above this quote from Kael's philosophy on The Danger of More:

Every new object has a cost, not just in what it takes to create, test and manage, but the player has to keep track of it as well. In general we should only add items because they offer a significant improvement to some aspect of the game, and not just to have more units, more resources, etc.

I think so far this mod has fallen into the Danger of More trap. There are many things that have been adding 'just to have more' .

This is not a criticism of you and the work you've put it, but I think these quotes from yourself show that you do not (yet) share this viewpoint.

i do not wish to trim the mod more...

see planetfall, theres much more stuff there....i dont see any problems with more stuff,

less stuff will be boring.

most players prefer bigger mods - see the amount of dl of ech mod, youll see that a mod with tons of stuff in it - gets more dls in total

I would like to persuade you that having more is not what makes a mod popular or fun to play. Lord Tirian, I think expressed this really well:

I feel a bit the same, one of the reasons why I haven't gone into this mod with full enthusiasm (except for Del's great art stuff): BtS works, because everything fits the theme of different epochs (ancient, medieval etc.), in Dune Wars, a lot is a bit like vanilla with a different paintjob, but only one theme - Dune. Meaning it feels like a lot more, because there's no larger organising principle - by the way, I think the resources are okay, the buildings and units are the problem - they need to be slimmed down, a lot of units feel like "unit before, but with more power" - Final Frontier also suffered from this for me. In Civ4 you'd never think of confusing a club-wielding cavemen with a swordsmen - flavour, strategic resources and small bonuses all play together and make it feel like more than "unit with some extra stuff". Ditto buildings. But I can't really put my finger onto it - because there is just so much material.

Note: I'm *not* a fan of the mods that just add a lot more stuff and options to the game - I prefer the sleeker, more themed and focussed ones. That's why I like FfH2, Planetfall and Legends of Revolution - they don't just grab as much stuff as possible, they have strong themes and only have things that work with that (and FfH2 is probably the most polished, most beautiful way of doing that - they have a lot of stuff, but only because every Civ is its own theme - meaning if you play, it's rather slim, as you only play one Civ/theme at once). And vanilla Civ4 works - because it's whole theme is "playing six millennia of world history". Dune Wars isn't doing that, its theme is - in a nutshell (deep apologies to all fans of the book, I know that I'm vastly oversimplifying it for the sake of the rhetoric) - "drug-addicted nobles battle on a desert planet for more drugs".

Not that the mods with lots of things are bad, they're just not my taste - for me a mod needs to be as complex as it needs to be to create its specific flavour - and no more!

I know the aim of modding has to be 'make the mod that you want to play - if others like it then that's a bonus'. I'm a firm believer in that. If you want to play something that has more of everything then that is OK. However, you have to recognise that most of the people who've fed back to us want something different.

I'd fully expect this modmod to evolve into something that has as much diversity and strategic depth as Planetfall, say, but I'd rather take it steadily and do it right.

 

[Ahriman]

Without having dew collectors, you cannot evaluate this completely.

Agreed. Apologies for snark.

On the above: I agree that often less can be more; for a great example of this, check the Fall Further modmod for FFH. It started as an awesome mod adding a few more factions, but has since become bloated with features and (IMO) gameplay has seriously suffered because of it; there are so many extra barbarian things that all the other AI factions get crushed (not I am a few months out of date on this).

I am undecided about which is the better approach, to start from the full Dune mod and trim back, or to go to a limited mod and build up.

From the little time I spent on it, even the "reduced" mod has many issues; religions still feel bloated to me (I think there are too many, making founding a religion less special, and they feel too vanilla as well which detracts from the Dune feel) and it looks like the entire tech tree was still there.

I think the most important things from the main mod that needed to be changed were:
a) Tech tree trimmed, particularly at the upper end
b) Buildings reduced and rationalized, particularly at the upper end
c) Units rationalized and consdensed, and less wild jumps in strength between layers. (30-50% strength increases between tiers in general)

FFH is great, but sometimes does the simplification a bit too much; melee, recon, mounted, archer, mage, priest, and the combat system got a bit too boring because all you really ended up was spamming whatever tech line you produced.
No use for combined arms, and combat pretty limited to building big stacks and going stomping.
I got a bit bored of the mod because many of the factions weren't quite different enough, and still played pretty much the same.

I also find Planetfall warfare a bit boring; most of the fun there for me is in economy building, there aren't enough different units for me in Planetfall, too many 1-move infantry units that all have basically the same combat role.

These are why my designs for the Warhammer mod (if we ever get the programmers to actualyl implement them) are mostly about intense faction differentiation and a combined arms combat system that emphasizes the difference between core and (national limit) elites.

Also note that FFH was very concise in some ways, but still very much more developed than vanilla in others; all the different religions that played quite differently, and all the different magic mana types.

 

[davidlallen]

Thanks for the feedback. My opinion is similar to yours; I think the most important remaining priorities are:

1. Trim buildings
2. Add unique abilities to remaining civs (including offworld trade)
3. Trim techs

I am hoping that unit strength is solved, by comparing the vanilla units against the DWR ones as shown in my spreadsheet. The strength jumps are similar to vanilla now. Of course we can tweak it but I feel that getting rid of all the UU allowed me to focus much better on the roles of the remaining units. I was trying to think of the right wise man's saying, something about not being able to find the forest because it had too many trees.

I want to take incremental steps on 1,3 because one of the common complaints about my other mod, Fury Road, is that it is *too* small. Also I am not much of an economy builder when I play, I like to get a medium size economy then build the rest by conquest. So I tend to under-represent the builder strategies.

Based on my recent unit/tech experience this weekend, trimming the buildings will be painful also. So I am going to do a little more of what I consider the fun stuff, in civ unique abilities.

 

[SwordOfJustice]

As an interested party who has been lurking and following this mod with interest in recent weeks or months, I too fall into the camp of enjoying mods that have polished gameplay and controlled themes, rather than simply adding new content for it's own sake.

There's no "right or wrong" in that. It's fun to see new custom units and buildings added to Civ4 for their own sake. And making a mod like that is certainly a worthy achievement!

However, for me personally, I look for strategic gameplay rather than bulk content. LoR is one of my favourite Civ4 mods for this reason. As alluded to already, I find it too hard to keep track of multiple new units and buildings which are added in a "shotgun", scattered way. After a while, I lose interest and give up. To give some adhoc feedback, I find Dune Wars like that at the moment, though it's very exciting to see the awesome graphics and custom content take shape for a fictional world that I like very much!

I prefer new units to have their stats worked on and refined in comparison with other units so there's a solid strategic gameplay for each unit.

Of course, this mod is started by Keldath and his lead in the project and opinions should be given due respect. I am only adding my opinion as an interested party.

I will continue adding some tech quotes in small batches in coming days and weeks as a small contributor. I enjoy doing that, but have limited time for an additional modding project like this.

Cheers,
Sword

 

[Ahriman]

AH16
Another thing I should add; the civics need a redesign.

Try and make them more interesting, more in-theme, more strategic and get rid of some of the weirder ones (Honored Matres makes *no* sense as a civic in a present-day-Dune-era mod set roughly in the time of Dune and the near-past prequels - it takes 5000 years for them to show up, nor do its bonuses).
What is "Conservative movement" anyway - and why are you jealous if other civs have one?
Why do imperial civics give favor solar farms?
Why no civics that reduce city maintenance?
Why +3 beakers per specialist in a mod that already has lower tile yields from non-bonuses (why work a cottage tile for ages when you could get massively higher income as a scientist or trader with the civic)?
Why are some civics so late in the tech-tree?

If feels like they were mostly cloned from vanilla civ and renamed without a lot of design thought.

 

[davidlallen]

Offworld trade
* Added "offworld trade" concept to dune-o-pedia and added a hint
* Each building gives three units of its bonus (some were 4,5,6; Caladanian Wine was missing)
* Change slig to 2 health, opafire and wine to 2 happy
* Added Fremen Water Debt, 3 units provided by Fremen Palace, required for Desert Raider and Worm Rider
* Added picklist when Trade Port building is built; you can choose any of the contracts, unless it has been chosen already or the owning civ is in the game. We had discussed automatically giving your civ's unique resource; but most of the civs don't have a unique one. So what do they get? If they get a pick, why shouldn't the civs with unique resources get a pick?
Terraforming victory
* Bug fix: terraforming was taking place much too quickly; now it occurs slower.
* Terraforming only appears if there is "some" improvement in the square, and disappears if there is no improvement
* Added Anchor grass improvement which is inexpensive and not very useful, but it will trigger a terraforming improvement.
* Remove spice within *2* squares of Reservoir of Liet
* AIs following Spice Paradise get -2 reaction per Reservoir of Liet; as you build more Reservoirs, they will hate you more and more.
Minor changes
* Fixed missing "English" tag in DuneWarsText.xml
* AH05. Windtraps buildable outside cultural borders
* AH06. Accidentally removed "build dew collector" order
* Scorpions: new role of land defense: move 2; -25 city attack/defense
* Removed iron ore requirement from all units

Short term plans
* Add Atreides recruiting/leader abilities from the "making Fremen different" thread
* Add Fremen double move ability from the "worm rider mechanics" thread
* Create a spreadsheet listing all building abilities, collect opinions on weeding them out
* Review, tweak strategic resource requirements

Ha! I said I would release it "today" and it is 11:58pm local time.

 

[Ahriman]

Installed patch.

AH12
After creating a game and at the start of many turns I get python exception:

File "CvEventManager", line 30, in onEvent
File "BugEventManager", line 322, in handleEvent
File "BugEventManager", line 327, in _dispatchEvent
File "BugEventManager", line 339, in _handledefaultEvent
File 'DuneWars', line 149 in onEndGameTurn
File 'DuneWars', line 1089 in StatPrint
IOError: [Errno13]: Permission denied: 'c:\\stats.csv'

 

[Ahriman]

AH13
Water does feel too scarce; it used to be you could usually get 3-4 water sources for a city (appropriately spaces hills, groundwater or water plant), and use most of your land in city fat crosses. Now, it feels like you can usually only get 2-3 water sources, and even then you have to leave lots of land empty.

Check this save for eg.

AH14
The AI is also worse at placing cities because it evaluates the higher tile yields (and the strategic resource nature) of spice tiles when suggesting city placement spots.
This is exacerbated by the general lower quality of terrain; you have to place your city just right to get a decent water income.

Also, hills/windtraps are highly variable in value depending on their placement. Eg: 3 hills in a line allow 2 windtraps, but 3 hills in an L allow only 1 windtrap.
But the civ start position placing algorithm looks only for areas with higher water/food yield, so it is indifferent between groundwater or hill tiles in any placement, even when these will have radically different water yields.

AH15
Promotions need to be redone, so there are shock/cover etc type promotions matching the various unit classes.

 

[davidlallen]

After creating a game and at the start of many turns I get python exception: IOError: [Errno13]: Permission denied: 'c:\\stats.csv'

Instead of describing the four character change and going through the whole debate about plain text editors again, here is the fix to assets/python/dunewars.py. There is a routine which prints statistics every 10 turns, which is causing the problem. Do you keep your c:\\ directory write-protected? That is where the file gets written. I try to remember to turn off this routine each time before I release, but I sometimes forget.

The AI is also worse at placing cities

Good point, this will be a hard change. The problem of *initial* starting location may be solvable by cephalo since he is working on the starting positions in his mapscript. The problem of *later* city location will require changing the insides of the AI. Perhaps koma13 can do this when he returns.

Promotions need to be redone

Agreed, I will put that on the list after civics.

EDIT: missed one:

Water does feel too scarce

If it feels "less" than the previous, I am fine with that. Do you find that it limits your city growth excessively? As we have discussed, I feel that the early game was too water-rich, failing to capture the feeling that water is limiting your growth.

 

[keldath]

hi,

i wanna say im not happy with naming this modmod as 1.4.

i want 1.4 to still have the current structure, until i rebuild the unit tree with similarities to davids reduced.

i know you guys wanna have a trimed trimed version of the mod,
but i think your going too far with this for me, i always thought a mod should add more contents, more richness to the gameplay, not to be very thin.

i like having uus and ubs and a larger verity of civs to play with, and my modding motto, was to divert the gameplay as much as possible, without pumping up the mod size, in order to reduce lag on later stages.


i feel like i somewhat loosing grip here, and dune wars is turning into dune reduced.

i very happy that there's a mod mod, don't get me wrong, im all for it, but it seems that your abandoning my main version.

i hope you guys understand me,
i will try to merge in davids work into the 1.3.8b patch with keeping most of my elements.

thanks for everything your doing here, and david keep up the great work your doing with this, hope youll still help the main version.



******

ive read deliverators post above only now,

well,
perhaps your right, i seem to be ina minority here.
so i have to accept what you guys want.

so, perhaps we can compromise?

all i want is to have :

- at least 2 uus for each civ

- 1 unique building

- i wish to have ecaz + fenring back.


- some unique power units.

on all the rest im willing to let go, i personally like a fuller tech tree, but i can accept what you guys think is better.

 

[davidlallen]

all i want is to have :
- at least 2 uus for each civ
- 1 unique building
- i wish to have ecaz + fenring back.
- some unique power units.

I agree with all of this. To be honest, I found it impossible to understand the relationships of all the units when there were 30+ UU in the game. So I trimmed out all the UU so that I could focus on the relationships of the base units. I think we need to agree that the base units have the right relationship, and then we can easily add a small number of UU.

For the buildings, I still find it impossible to understand the relationships, even having removed all the UB. One problem is that so many of the icons are identical. I am working to create a spreadsheet listing all the buildings, and then we can hopefully trim this down. Just like UU, once we have a good set of base buildings then we can add UB.

For the civs, I fell strongly that each civ should have a unique ability like the Harkonnen, BG and Ordos have today. That means there are six civs so far, where we are completely missing abilities. I would like to fill in the abilities for the other six civs and make sure they are differentiated and balanced. *Then* I am perfectly happy to add more civs, as long as we can find differentiated unique abilities for them also.

 

[keldath]

well glad we agree on something..

im happy with the bonus cutdown you did.

and yeah, your right that its hard to understand the unit and building relations.

ok then, i would be happy to make the uus after you think you have a stabelized unit class set.
i must say, that, i always liked to have 2 types of each unit class - meaning , like in the vanilla the modern armor is the last unit and the strongest, - i like if there where two modern tank types - 1 with 1 advantage and the second with another - this why - your army will be diverse.
just noted this, cause it can be fun - thats why i orininally created the burseg class.

im also in for making each civ have its own very unique gameplay and unit types.

as for the remaining civs, well i guess we cant find a book oriented abilities and we will have to improvise.


basically, what you doing here, is starting over the mod, from small, balance it, and then add some stuff like a bit more units and civs.


i accept your trimming work, since, trimming means better stability, simple and not complicated mod game play,
and most of all much more speed on late turns.

bottom, line, you guys convinced me that this is the right course,
so lets talk bussines, i want to join building this reduced - 1.4,
so just lay down you plan and tell me what you need/want to do, and ill join in, i have time, and it will speed up the mod, if we are going to name it v 1.4, then before releaseing the official build, i wish to have it balanced as much as we can, all civs have special abilities, and some units.

 

[cephalo]

Good point, this will be a hard change. The problem of *initial* starting location may be solvable by cephalo since he is working on the starting positions in his mapscript. The problem of *later* city location will require changing the insides of the AI. Perhaps koma13 can do this when he returns.

This is a strange problem. Since I have so far been using the default starting routines, I'm guessing there is something fundamentally different about how the AI is evaluating map plots. It may have something to do with the fact that there is no food on most plots. I think the related function in the SDK is CvPlot::getFoundValue or something like that. It may be finding something unexpected, and then giving up and returning zero or something.

Until this problem is nailed down, the AI will have trouble recognizing where to build cities. I think they usually build them on the little blue circles when you select a settler. It might be useful to select a settler and see where the blue circles pop up. If you don't see any, you'll want to find out why.

 

[davidlallen]

so just lay down you plan and tell me what you need/want to do, and ill join in, i have time, and it will speed up the mod

That is great. I hope to release a spreadsheet of the current buildings in the next few hours so we can have a lively discussion about that. But, two projects which could be separated out are a redesign of promotions, and a redesign of civics. Now that we have a small set of unitcombats, it would be interesting to redesign the promotions to go on top of that. Do you want to try that? Redesigning civics is also worthwhile but it may be a little harder.

 

[Lord Tirian]

on all the rest im willing to let go, i personally like a fuller tech tree, but i can accept what you guys think is better.

Personally, I think that your compromise is more than acceptable - and I think there's a different approach to design:

In the original dune wars, there was a lots of stuff and development was adding, removing and changing stuff.

The idea of dune wars reduced is, as I see it, getting the bare stable minimum running - so we get a solid foundation that's not changed a lot any longer - and once that bit is up and running, we'll flesh out things and add UUs, UBs, extra mechanics and so forth slowly and in a tested and controlled fashion.

It would be a shame to see you being disappointed, keldath, as you started this - I hope you can have a little patience with davids base and then we can start to make it "click" for all.

Cheers, LT.

 

[davidlallen]

This is a strange problem. Since I have so far been using the default starting routines.

Hm. Do you think you will be able to spend some time on this and understand at least the initial city location part? It is a big problem for the mapscript that civs start so close to each other that one dies.

 

[davidlallen]

Nuts, I forgot to undo one key change in the offworld trade mechanism. To make local playtesting faster, I reduced the cost of the Trade Port from 80 to 8. So you will find it is ridiculously cheap.

 

[Deliverator]

We will eventually have more civs and a fuller tech tree in the future. I think that slowly and steadily adding stuff and checking how each new addition works in the game is important and the right way to do it. It is almost a complete redesign in effect, but it will be worth it in the long run I think.

Adding a lot of units all at once would just put us back in the situation we have been in, where we can't see the wood for the trees. We should try and make sure everything we add has a functional purpose and good flavour. It's better to grow the mod in this more steady and controlled way, playtesting each thing that is added.

I still think it will take more than just one unique ability per faction to make them play differently. It needs to be a combination of functional and flavourful things - all working together. I wouldn't say that the existing abilities for Harkonnen, Ordos and BG really make them that distinctive. The Civ Specific Tech Trees could be interesting. I would have the majority of the tech tree the same for everyone, but one distinct channel for each civ. However, before we did this we need to have good ideas for the units, buildings, wonders, promotions that are going to be enabled by the civ specific tech tree channel. Also, the modcomp is not yet updated to BTS 3.19.

We could call this 1.4 a redesign/rebuild phase and then build up to an official 1.5 release. I think there's no rush, and if you do it right then people who try the mod are more likely to stick with it.

 

[keldath]

Lord Tirian,
im more then willing to be patient, and more over to work on this, casue im not disappointed by davids work....not at all, its just that.....i like units...


***
david,
yeah perhaps i can do the promotions, i can set for each unit class their own balanced promotions.

the civics, well..im not so good on those...i would trust me to make something good with it if i were you

***
ive gone through the tech tree and the units, here's my impressions:

the tech tree is too dense with units (cant believe im saying this...), what i mean is, that you need to have enough time to utelize al the units you have - look here, you have medium thoper, but you can barley build some and bang, two and the half techs later - you can build heavy thopters,
i think we need to extend the life spend of the various unit classes.
this can be done bya few means :
1. cut sown more the unit classes of each type a bit more
2. re position units to be further from one another
3. add some more techs between the unit tiers, jus to create a mechanism that a player will be able to play with unit classes a bit more before they get obselete.

- i think we can let go of either tactical bomb or icbm.

- some minor bugs need to be attended - theres a tech ontop of tech
- the uu for corinno isnt set right.

- perhaps some moving and re arranging the tech tree to have a bit more aesthetic tree , this could be nice.


i will do the promotions on the weekend.



*****
deliverator,

yeah i agree, taking it slow step by step is good.

the specifick tech tree is on my list, im gonna try and merge it on the weekend to the sdk, ive looked through the code a few days ago, and it seems to be an easy merge.
we can do great things with this.

i think that before we go with this as a 1.4, we need to finish its first phase, we need to optimize it and close all the bugs and such, think f it as a new mod, we shouldnt get a half baked mod.
so when we go up with 1.4 w e go p in a bang.
maybe we can keep it here for now and develop it more and more over time.

also, the current unique civ abilities - i think we need more stuff to differentiate between civs, if you ever played starcraft - think of zerg and terran - they are completely different... i wannna play with the fremen - knowing they are very different from another civ to another - its much more fun, dont you think?