Arrakis.py map script discussion

[davidlallen]

Of course, the city might be razed, but even so, this seems like a great candidate for some pre-processing. Any time a tile get's upgraded, put it in a list for possible downgrading, then just check that list.

EDIT: and of course remove it from the list upon downgrading.

Yes, and then pack/save the list upon save game, unpack or rebuild upon load, all that fun infrastructure. Good point about razing however.

 

[davidlallen]

I agree. In 1.4.2 I used your harvester concept art to make a button for the harvester build action. This frees up the oil rig icon to use for the Ice Drilling improvement. Do we agree that "+1 water in every city" is the right building to use the resource? Or should it be something like "+2 water in this city"?

Should the archipelago mapscript also be changed so that all this "stone rock" in the polar regions becomes ice? The possible problem with that is some civs may have a starting position far from the ice, and they will be shut out.

I have made some local changes for ice and an ice building.

* Changed archipelago mapscript so that the top and bottom rows are "polar" land terrain with some ice resources. I added polar coast as appropriate but no polar ocean; at least this is a start.
* Removed "stone rock" which clutters up the polar regions of the archipelago mapscript
* Added "ice extractor" improvement, buildable on ice resource, uses vanilla offshore drilling station graphics.
* Added worker action "build ice extractor" under "water transport" tech
* Added Ice Souk building (copy/paste of Water Souk) which requires ice bonus and gives +25% water yield in the city. I can have it give a different bonus, maybe +2 water instead of +25%; the + % seems better since it should help in the midgame where the numbers are larger.

I didn't add a national wonder; you need to build a building in each city to get the benefit. What do you think?

 

[Ahriman]

Seems reasonable.
How about we rename the current Market as Water Souk, and then make this one "Ice Trader"?

We could also consider recreate the water-seller's guild corporation (either as a standard corp or a buildable wonder) that turned excess ice resources into gold. Will depend on how many resources you can feasibly build.
Seems like the ice extractor should also have a decent commerce tile yield bonus?

Did you consider any of the ideas from post 198?

Well, how would you feel about flipping the mapscripts; make the default be a large polar region script with lots of tundra and ice, and then have the vanilla plains and grassland be rugged and badlands, and vanilla tundra and ice be mesa and rock?

So the equator has dunes, badlands and rugged, while the poles have mesa and rock and ice, and tweak the placement scripts so that humans start in either the temperate zones or poles rather than the tropics.

Also: I just started re-reading Dune last night, and they talk about the people of "graben, sink and pan" as opposed to the people of the desert (Fremen). Maybe we should do some renaming of rock/badlands/mesa/rugged?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Graben
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hardpan

 

[davidlallen]

How about we rename the current Market as Water Souk, and then make this one "Ice Trader"?

And then to make the circle complete, we should rename the existing water souk as market, I guess. Do you like "trader" better than "souk"? Or is there some fourth name we could add?

We could also consider recreate the water-seller's guild corporation (either as a standard corp or a buildable wonder) that turned excess ice resources into gold. Will depend on how many resources you can feasibly build. Seems like the ice extractor should also have a decent commerce tile yield bonus?

I was thinking that ice added to your food, not your commerce. When we do more playtesting, perhaps we can decide whether we have too much or too little food and commerce.

We have gotten rid of all the corps for now; is there a strong reason to add back one?

Did you consider any of the ideas from post 198?

I made a hack in the archipelago mapscript to change the top and bottom rows. I don't really understand how it works. You have some good ideas, but I think our long term goal should be to use the arrakis mapscript in this thread, and discard archipelago.

 

[Ahriman]

And then to make the circle complete, we should rename the existing water souk as market, I guess. Do you like "trader" better than "souk"? Or is there some fourth name we could add?

Oh, and I meant drop the current water souk building. Its boring, just a flat gold bonus. The market and bank (rename Guild Bank) already do that.

I was thinking that ice added to your food, not your commerce.

Sure, sounds good.

but I think our long term goal should be to use the arrakis mapscript in this thread, and discard archipelago.

Hmm. Ok.

 

[Deliverator]

I like Water Shipper rather than Trader. Book quote: 'a water-shipper whose summer mansion was near his polar-cap factory'. Ice Souk sounds wrong, because it is water that is sold.

I think rather than doing a water percentage which seems a bit weird, creating a Water Shippers corp would be a good thing. I don't advocate having many corps - perhaps this will be the only non-spice one. Corporate branches would produce a yield of water dependent on the number of a bonus that that city has access to. +1 water per Ice might be a good level. Sid Sushi had +0.75 per seafood, but also produced culture. We could maybe add a small +0.25 gold per Ice too. If we set this up for the Ice Bonuses then grabbing a large number of ice resources will be a strategy for growth. We should probably set iAIObjective = 1 for Ice.

I think water +% buildings should be better water retention and transportation facilities to keep the link between theme and function strong.

 

[Ahriman]

I like water shipper as a name, but I see a problem with it *only* being a corp. Unless you create an individual corp for each faction, then only 1 faction (the founder) will get any benefit at all from the ice resource unless they choose to spread it to other players, which seems weak.

If you do go with a corp, tuning the bonus will need to depend on resource availability. Sid's sushi etc. only gives a bonus for water tiles with a bonus resource (and rice bonus); but if you can get an ice resource from *every single* polar tile then it could be too easy to get a big bonus.

But I see no problem as with a %water bonus Water Shipper Building either, its a good simple way to make sure that everyone who gets some ice can benefit. And I think the theme/function is very direct; if you have polar ice, then then you can import more water for your faction and so have more water income than you would have locally from groundwater/dew collectors/windtraps. If you don't have polar ice, no extra water. You can get more water in a city *either* by being more efficient wi the water you have, or by getting more.
Easy enough to cut the water bonus to say 15% if you think 25% is too strong, or make it say +3 water rather than +%.

 

[davidlallen]

The polar terrain has an ice resource only on certain plots, just like grass has a wheat resource only on certain plots. So a given player might have 1-2 ice resources available. The original goal was to have a very limited number of ice resources in the center of the map, and have players fight over ownership. We will have to see how this actually works on the arrakis map. On the archipelago map, it compensates a little for extreme north or south start positions, which have a lot of rugged terrain.

I agree with Ahriman that setting up N corps, one for each civ, is a little messy, and the benefit of the corp mechanic seems relatively small.

Vanilla has market and grocer at a similar tech level; in 1.4.4 we have market and water souk. I will change market to "water shipper" which requires ice and gives +25% water instead of +25% gold.

 

[Ahriman]

This sounds good to me. I agree that it is going to be difficult to get this to work on the Arrakis script; it seems like it will be too easy for a single player to monopolize all the ice, but its probably good for the Archipleago scripts.

If only some polar tiles have an Ice resource, will at least all polar tiles have some water tile yield? What improvements can be constructed on Polar?

 

[davidlallen]

If only some polar tiles have an Ice resource, will at least all polar tiles have some water tile yield? What improvements can be constructed on Polar?

You can get the mapscript from the first post in the thread and try it out. No coding required. It seems to work pretty well now.

 

[Deliverator]

OK, I'll go with that solution. It would be nice if we could make the bonus scale with the amount of ice you control like corporations, but that would need some custom code. As it is you only need a single ice resource.

Polar terrain had +2 water last time I checked - it is the equivalent of grassland. I think all improvements should be buildable on Polar. On Arrakis, the polar terrain is much more tolerable than the rest of the planet.

 

[davidlallen]

@ Cephalo, I think we have gotten very close to a "production" version of the mapscript. There is one big problem, one enhancement, and one preference.

DA52. The big problem is with start positions too close together. You have improved this a little, but it still happens often that I start within 4-5 squares of another civ. This is not fatal, like it used to be when my settler and his soldier overlapped, but it does make for a very difficult start. Can you make sure the starting locations are further apart?

DA53. The enhancement is for a shield wall. Maybe this is not necessary, but I think if most readers think of important geographical features of Dune, this is one of the first to come to mind.

DA54. The preference is that I feel the maps are *too* large. On the large setting, a normal map is 64x104, and your map is 128x128. This is almost 2.5x the area. If there were a lot of interesting things to explore, that would be one thing; but Dune does not have much geographical variety. So I would prefer to make the maps smaller. Say, 104x104 for large.

(EDIT: retrofitting bug report numbers for tracking)

 

[cephalo]

@ Cephalo, I think we have gotten very close to a "production" version of the mapscript. There is one big problem, one enhancement, and one preference.

The big problem is with start positions too close together. You have improved this a little, but it still happens often that I start within 4-5 squares of another civ. This is not fatal, like it used to be when my settler and his soldier overlapped, but it does make for a very difficult start. Can you make sure the starting locations are further apart?

The enhancement is for a shield wall. Maybe this is not necessary, but I think if most readers think of important geographical features of Dune, this is one of the first to come to mind.

The preference is that I feel the maps are *too* large. On the large setting, a normal map is 64x104, and your map is 128x128. This is almost 2.5x the area. If there were a lot of interesting things to explore, that would be one thing; but Dune does not have much geographical variety. So I would prefer to make the maps smaller. Say, 104x104 for large.

Ok, I'm glad you guys had a chance to play around with it for a bit. The shield wall is no problem, I was just waiting to see what else needed to be changed so I wouldn't have to tear it down again in case it wasn't compatible.

As for the starts, this will require a trade off. I'm currently using a midpoint displacement technique to generate landforms. This makes for very natural looking forms, but it is impossible to fully control. You end up with some large islands and a bunch of very small ones. When several civs are placed on one continent, it's because they actually get more value this way than they would otherwise starting on some distant tiny island.

On the stock archipelago, I beleive the different islands have a similar size. I can make that happen but it won't likely look natural. It may be good enough though, and if it helps the gameplay then it's worth it. Doing it this way might also make it easier to shrink the map some.

I'll need some time to work on this, I'm in the middle of some other RL projects.

 

[Ahriman]

I think more similar size islands is important.

By a shield wall, do you just mean a chain of peaks along the outside of one of the larger islands?

 

[Deliverator]

I'd also vote for making this mapscript slightly more similar to Archipelago in terms of the regularity of the islands.

 

[cephalo]

By a shield wall, do you just mean a chain of peaks along the outside of one of the larger islands?

Before I was just drawing a broken, wiggly circle of peaks.

 

[Deliverator]

While we're talking about peaks, it would be good to make them more desirable in this mod. Does our modcomp stack include this one? I like the idea of giving them a beefier defence bonus.

 

[Ahriman]

I think rather than giving even more bonus to peaks, it would be better to make them impassable to more unit types.

Basically, I see only thopters, guardsmen and melee as being able to enter peak tiles. Vehicles and suspensors shouldn't be able to get through them.

 

[cephalo]

Ok, hopefully I'll have a couple of days to work on this. Is there anything new regarding maps that I need to know about? Do we still have the land transport problem?

 

[koma13]

Ok, hopefully I'll have a couple of days to work on this. Is there anything new regarding maps that I need to know about? Do we still have the land transport problem?

Generating starting positions often fails with your map script. And there is no shield wall. Another complaint was that map size is too large.