Bonus Resources and Bonus Placement

[davidlallen]

@ Deliverator: in your bonus rebalancing, please bump up the likelihood of Little Maker. This is needed to build Reverend Mothers. (The BUILD_FISHING_BOATS action is also missing from unitinfos, worker, buildinfos; but I can do that in "my" next patch.) In several maps I generated as tests, there were no LM at all. The sandtrout resource appears occasionally, but it is not used for anything right now. LM is needed for Water of Life and to build RM.

 

[Deliverator]

No problem, I'll take that into account.

 

[keldath]

hey guys,
i wanna bring up two mods that maybe we can make use of:

vicinity mod,

this mod will allow us to limit units/buildings to bonuses, that are only located within the city borders,

perhaps this can add some intrest to the bonus importance and use - think of this like:
say uranium is needed for a nuke, so if set, a nuke can only be built where there's a city that has uranium in its borders, it doesnt matter if you have it in your empire.

and the second corp,
that i guess most of you wont like,
is a population limit,
you can limit a city to grow up to a certain size,
and after it it will only grow if you either build buildings that increase size, or via tech.
its like in civ 2 where you had to have aqueduct to pass size 7.

what do you think?

 

[Ahriman]

I think the movement away from aqueducts towards health was a great design decision, I'd hate to go back to the old aqueduct system.

I also don't see why it wouldn't be pretty easy to move some uranium around to wherever you need to build Nukes; it also would mean that you can't trade for a strategic resource that you don't possess, and that you're vulnerable to whatever fickle resource placement exists in your game (what if the uranium near you was 1 tile outside your BFC?).

I can't think of anything where you'd really need the resource to be provided locally.

 

[Shoju Genji]

As a small note, after looking up fremen agriculture in the Dune Encyclopedia, apparently they were rather keen on Coffee and Taburroot (a form of sweetened tuber rather akin to a sweet potatoe). it might make some moding easier if the coffee graphic is used.

 

[Deliverator]

We have Coffee as a bonus now. Taburroot sounds quite interesting.

 

[Shoju Genji]

some more food type information

Other staples on Dune were Butter, Cheese, Milk, and Kvetch (clabbered Milk Drink). Fruist consisted of Dates, Figs, Apricots, with the occasional Portygul or Imported Caladan Melon, as well as rice when the Fremen Found out about it. Vegetables were almost unheard of, with the exception of the Tabarroot (earlier misspell on my part). Meats consisted of Hare and Chukka (a fowl) that was roasted typically into a ste. Breads consisted ofa spice laden bread worked into various forms (pitas, torillas, loaves, etc).

 

[keldath]

hey guys,

how about - removing the gold bonus from lands - only tiles with a bonus will have gold to it - most lands will be hammers and water.

?

 

[Ahriman]

Why?

The big water yields from some tiles already drives you towards a specialist economy, away from a cottage economy. Reducing the tile yields of worked tiles will only encourage this further.

I vote no.

 

[keldath]

ok just a thought

 

[Deliverator]

Here's a spreadsheet in Excel and OpenOffice format for tuning the balance of resources.

The aim of the game is to change iTilesPer (corresponding to the tag of the same name in Civ4BonusInfos.xml) so that the Fullness of Map value stays close to 1 and you have the proportion of each bonus that you want to achieve. You can then update the iTilesPer values in Civ4BonusInfos.xml to correspond to the spreadsheet values.

If people think there is too much of this or too little of that, then they can use this to change things.

 

[keldath]

hey deliverator, thanks,

i am not so good at understanding the xml tags that control the resources appearance.

anyway, wee need to fix the bonuses that does not appear on the map.

 

[davidlallen]

This is a little confusing but it works OK. The confusing part is that all of the insect bonuses start out invisible. I assume this is by accident, but the Desert Plantation tech is required to even see these bonuses.

As part of the "Dune Wars Reduced" project, I have deleted "meagre" and "plentiful" groundwater, and the hare and hawk bonuses. I have also made the insect bonuses visible by default. Without making any other changes, this seems to generate a much better spread of bonuses. Each starting area has a few groundwaters and a few other resources around.

 

[Greeneyedzombie]

It seems I dont have the Civ4BonusInfos.xml.
Or is it hidden somewhere else?

Nvm... was looking in the wrong file.

 

[Greeneyedzombie]

This is a little confusing but it works OK. The confusing part is that all of the insect bonuses start out invisible. I assume this is by accident, but the Desert Plantation tech is required to even see these bonuses.

As part of the "Dune Wars Reduced" project, I have deleted "meagre" and "plentiful" groundwater, and the hare and hawk bonuses. I have also made the insect bonuses visible by default. Without making any other changes, this seems to generate a much better spread of bonuses. Each starting area has a few groundwaters and a few other resources around.

Did you manage to get the insect resources to appear? after changing some things I do get the plantation resources, (although it remains rare) but the insect ones still don't show up. Even after changing their appearences to really high.

 

[davidlallen]

You have changed some stuff, I have changed some different stuff, but here's a screenshot. The three insect ones are baradye (lower left), spice honey (lower right), etching resin (upper right). You have looked using world builder or ctrl-z, right? If you scroll around in normal mode and you don't have Desert Plantation tech, they are all hidden.

EDIT: uh, when you say you changed the frequency to "really high", you do know that this means a *low* iTilesPer, right? If you keep making iTilesPer higher, then it becomes much less likely to appear.

 

[Greeneyedzombie]

You have changed some stuff, I have changed some different stuff, but here's a screenshot. The three insect ones are baradye (lower left), spice honey (lower right), etching resin (upper right). You have looked using world builder or ctrl-z, right? If you scroll around in normal mode and you don't have Desert Plantation tech, they are all hidden.

EDIT: uh, when you say you changed the frequency to "really high", you do know that this means a *low* iTilesPer, right? If you keep making iTilesPer higher, then it becomes much less likely to appear.

changing to really high, I meant setting it to 1.
Ill try some more editing, without removing any resources, and see if I can get it to appear.

 

[Deliverator]

I assume this is by accident, but the Desert Plantation tech is required to even see these bonuses

Partly accident, partly bad idea by me. I was trying to replicate vanilla in the way certain bonuses are initially hidden.

It's strange that people are saying that some bonuses don't appear. When balancing the resources I always used the chipotle cheatcode and Ctrl-Z to check that all the bonuses are appearing somewhere.

This detailed guide of vanilla bonuses is useful, particularly the section headed Resource Improvements. It would be good to produce a list similar to that format for Dune Wars.

It should be noted that we actually have *less* land based resources than vanilla in 1.3.9b. On an Archipelago map there is less land, so I suppose that is fair.

The major difference is that we have one bonus that is of vital importance to the game in Groundwater. Groundwater is essentially a different thing from all the other bonuses because of its special role. What would be ideal would be if we could get around the rule that no two bonuses of different kinds may be adjacent. If we could place the Groundwater down and then have everything else placed free from this restriction, that would be ideal. I know you can handle Bonus placement in the mapscript - that might be the only way to do this.

With Strategic resources you can switch iNormalize on to have extra instances of the bonus placed around start locations. For example, we might want to do this for Crystal seeing as it is a requirement for the midgame suspensor craft - and as Ahriman noted not having it really hampers you at the moment.

Also, to see the impact of changing the bonuses you really have to run a few Autoplays.

 

[davidlallen]

What would be ideal would be if we could get around the rule that no two bonuses of different kinds may be adjacent. If we could place the Groundwater down and then have everything else placed free from this restriction, that would be ideal. I know you can handle Bonus placement in the mapscript - that might be the only way to do this.

So, removing the other two groundwater resources (meagre and plentiful) frees up a lot of space on the map for other resources. That may be the key difference in my local change.

 

[Deliverator]

Actually, reducing the proportion of the three Groundwaters would have had the same effect as removing the two other kinds. The reason is that all three Groundwaters have iUnique set to 1, meaning that no two instances can be adjacent. This is why Groundwater gobbles up the available space so much, but it is desirable to avoid clumping of Groundwater which wasn't popular. So there is a balancing act: too much Groundwater leaves too little space for anything else; too little means some really bad/challenging start positions and more variation between Civ's growth/performance.