Dune Wars 1.4.6 feedback

[davidlallen]

This is a huge patch with many changes. I have not done very much playtesting. I have done a number of autoplays to ensure there are no crashes. For an overview of all the features, new and old, please see the "Dune Wars Concepts" tab in the civilopedia. The patch will apply over any version of 1.4; the original release of 1.4 is at this post.

Please put feedback for this version here.

Major changes
* Brand new tech tree from this thread.
* Brand new civics from this thread.
* Two civs have new unique abilities, Tleilaxu and Ix; details below
* Roads are gone again but new promotions should compensate; details below
* Homeworld Reinforcement screen by koma13, first version; details at this post and subsequent posts in that thread.

Civilization special abilities
* Any unit at war with Tleilax, which either wins a combat or ends the turn in the same square as a Tleilax spy, will contract a tailored plague. The plague may be passed onto any other unit in the same square, and causes a -25% strength penalty. If any unit in a city has the plague, the city suffers -2 unhappiness. A hospital or Suk Academy cures all plagued units.
* Tleilaxu units built in a city with an Axlotl tank will inherit all but one of the promotions, of the best living unit of their same unit type. This represents cloning the commander of a veteran unit.
* Added Thinking Machine Factory, which requires the Ixian unique bonus and provides "power" for factories. "Power" provides hammer bonuses for the factory buildings. For other civs, using Thinking Machines is possible but causes unhappiness due to the risk of a Second Butlerian Jihad. Ixian cities will have a significant hammer advantage in the later part of the game.

Units and Civilizations
* Automatic +1 movement for a ground unit which starts the turn inside its own cultural borders. Shown in game as a Home Ground promotion.
* Suspensor units now move 2, but get 2x on desert; destroyer, frigate move 3. Shown in game as automatic Suspensor Movement promotion.
* Removed Spacer Guild and leader Pilru, added (re-added) House Ecaz and leader Duke Prad Vidal
* Fedaykin and Worm Rider units can now move on all terrains
* Added Fremen UU for scout and soldier which can move on all terrains
* Removed -200% combat strength of worms against thopters (Falcon thopters could easily kill them)
* Added new soldier unit art from Deliverator

Terrain, Bonuses, Improvements
* Increased groundwater appearance a little (iTilesPer 16->12)
* Added new spice harvester unit art from Deliverator
* Deleted stone rock feature
* Deleted iron ore bonus
* Deleted mining station, move uranium to regular mines
* Added stone and marble bonuses; stone on map, marble contract (infinite)
* Added one row of polar terrain to north and south of archipelago map
* Added polar terrains to tech tradeable list
* Added Ice Drilling improvement on ice

Buildings, Projects
* Changed market to Water Seller, requires ice, gives +25% water yield
* Changed all wonders to have appropriate double build speed bonus
* Removed health penalty on Science Lab
* Removed +water yield on weather scanner
* Added help for Reservoir of Liet, and three "owned" unique bonuses
* Renamed Mihna (not Mihna Challenge) to Baraka Monastery
* Removed "space race" victory from building seven temples
* Changed many buttons, added a few; now "fewer" duplicate buttons

Other changes
* Sandstorms now behave differently. They can move over cities and units and can cross the Great Wall ("Advanced Defense Grid"). They now only come in one size instead of 4, and have much less chance of crossing hills or peaks. When they are over a unit or a stack, including a city, units may be destroyed or damaged a random large amount. If this causes too much damage we can decrease the number of storms, or the percent of them doing damage. As of today, the sandstorm leaves a "ghost" when it moves which lasts up to 10 seconds.
* Made revolutions related game options invisible, too many players are getting crashes when they accidentally turn these on. As additional security, I changed the sXML... values in the revolutions python code so at least they point to something useful instead of generating errors. Even though the options are gone, it is still possible for them to get turned on again. I don't know how. If it happens to you, the only way to turn them off again is to edit your CivilizationIV.ini file. Search for the line matching "GameOptions = ". This has bunch of zeroes and then, when you are having this problem, four 1's at the end. Change the four 1's to 0's.

You can download it from this link (14 MB).

 

[davidlallen]

Here are some known bugs as of 1.4.6. If you have found a bug and it is not already fixed in 1.4.6, nor listed in this post, please repost. To avoid losing feedback among all the other posts, it is helpful to use a four character unique ID: your initials, and a sequence number. So "AH23" below is the 23rd feedback from Ahriman. Mine are "DA".

AH23. Remove "world is round" bonus

DA41. All terrain transports allow unload, pillage, reload, move, repeat. We need an sdk change so that loading or unloading can only happen once. This may be less important now that suspensor units have fewer moves on land.

DA42. All the buttons should be moved around. Especially in the tech tree, the button which appears for a tech is pretty random. The buildings are not so bad; the units mostly use the generic yellow buttons.

DA43. The building art contains a lot of duplicates. It may be a fun project for somebody to go track down new building art and change the artdefines file. Each art should only be used once, and it should match the function of the building.

DA44. The religion system from this thread has not yet been incorporated.

DA45. The tech quotes submitted by Sword Of Justice have not yet been incorporated.

DA46. Sandstorms leave a "ghost" when they move. The ghost disappears after 10 seconds.

DA47. The only mapscripts which are supported are Archipelago and Arrakis. The others should be removed from the release.

DA48. Especially for the buildings, there are a lot of "TXT_KEY_..." messages which show up. These should be replaced at least to show a clean "Stub text" instead of a missing TXT_KEY.

DA49. Some vanilla text strings need to be updated: "Allows working water tiles" in the exploration tech, "Village provided a warrior" from goody huts

DA50. The flavors in the tech tree and corresponding flavors in the leaderheads file should be updated so that each leader researches the appropriate techs. For example, Ordos should have a high weight for espionage related techs.

 

[Ahriman]

Awesome!

Thoughts:
(skipping some numbers, I forget where I left off)
AH35
Deathstills might need to be at a slightly higher tech, it is very powerful so early.

AH36
Monument gives +1 happy. Intended?
*edit* Working as intended (charismatic trait).

AH37
Slavery was intended to give +1 unhappy in all cities. If this is impossible, it probably needs some other penalty.

Arrakis habitation could also probably use a beaker cost increase if it gives slavery.

AH38
Scout thopter being replaced by Fremen scout is cool, but creates a transport problem.
My starting island was exactly 23 tiles, 5 of which were Dunes, and no scout thopter to transport a settler elsewhere.
So, Fremen need a UU settler that can cross desert tiles.

 

[Ahriman]

AH39
No improvements (other than the drilling rig on ice) can be built on polar.
Since polar is near a ton of rugged, and rugged is the most useless type in the game, you need to either be able to build some improvements on polar, OR on rugged.

Probably best is to allow cottage/quanat/turbines to be built on polar.

AH40
Maybe spice should be unable to spawn on polar desert waste? Since it gives water yield.
Similarly, make sandworms unable to enter (too much moisture).

AH41
Trade on deep desert and desert waste should be at dune topography, not desert engineering, as should map trading.

AH42
Desert survival seems very bland. Was intended to reveal the various plantation resources, or allow the desert hawks/hares (since removed, which is fine with me). If you don't like that, maybe it can do something else too?

AH43
Sandrider trait could also give a +20% deep desert/desert waste strength?

 

[Ahriman]

AH38b
Move scout thopter to exploration tech, not no-tech requirement, to make this tech more valuable.

AH37b
Monument *was* giving me +1 happy as Fremen, but isn't as Ix.

AH44
Beaker costs are not what they were in the design doc. For example, Theocracy is 1000 beakers, design doc had 400 beakers.
If this is known/intended, np.
If not, let me know and I can go through and double check them.

AH35b
Death stills should probably be +2 water instead of +25%. Or make them +10%.
+% water bonuses are so strong that its kinda imba for one faction to get such a huge bonus.

AH45
Turbines should be buildable on any flatland terrain.

AH47
We need a civic or tech that boosts turbine yields. Or we could just add +1 commerce to all the turbine yields.

 

[Ahriman]

AH46
Weather scanner seems to be only buildable in some cities, not others?
It *seems* like it is only buildable in coastal cities? Perhaps something to do with having the Great Lighthouse picture? The art for it can only display on ocean tiles?
Which is strange, because I thought there were no coastal cities left in the mod.

If there are coastal cities, then this brings back the possibility of sandworm transport units?

It also could be because the inland city that *can't* build it is on a "freshwater lake" tile.
No idea why lakes are still being generated (with rock over the top of them).

 

[Deliverator]

Excellent work David. The short-animation Sandstorm and Cloud is the next thing I'll look at. Shouldn't take long.

 

[Ahriman]

AH48
I like Ore as a resource better than stone. Stone doesn't make much sense to me. Ore could still have the same effect of boosting some wonder production.
Marble doesn't really make much sense either, its not like they're going to be short on building materials given the high tech level.

 

[Deliverator]

You could use Greenstone for something more exotic sounding. I think that is what the steps in Alia's temple is made of. Something slightly more flavourful that just Stone and Marble would be good.

 

[Ahriman]

AH49
Faufreluches civic is supposed to be at Caste System tech, not social mobility tech. Faufreluches *is* a caste system.

Meritocracy civic should be moved to Social Mobility tech, instead of Benevolence. My error in the design doc, sorry.

AH50
You can't convert to any of the (placeholder) religions. Intended?

AH51
Fanaticism gives +1 unhappy. I don't see any reason for this, I don't like disincentives to ressearch techs.

AH52
Desert rovers tech should be an AND requirement for suspensor devices (my error in design doc).

AH53
The Tleilaxu plague is really annoying. I think either the probability of infection should be toned down, and/or there should be a % chance of recovery each turn.
It also seems to spread like crazy somehow.
There were 2 Tleilaxu suspensors next to my city, I attacked them and killed them, and now every single unit that was in that city are infected.
Maybe you should only be infected by infantry, and/or only the unit that actually kills the Tl unit gets infected, not their whole stack.
Or only infantry units should become infected.

AH54
The well improvement seems to increase the movement cost of moving onto a tile. This seems illogical.

AH55
Homeland improvement is working well, nice job.
Ixian walker units does't seem to get it though, though the cymek does.

AH56
Turbines improvement can't be built on grassland (didn't check plains).
Particularly problematic since the intention was to encourage turbines for terraforming civs (no water penalty) and solar farms for others.
Idea was that terraforming makes clouds makes solar farms less effective, but wind turbines still work just the same.
Maybe we should make the graphics actually windmill type turbines, rather than just the big blocks?

 

[Ahriman]

AH46b
I have a second city on a "fresh water lake" tile (Titan Xerxes) which is unable to build weather scanner (or landing stage).

Save attached.

 

[keldath]

wow david...do you have a 32 hours day? cause i dont know when where you abke to build 1.4.6 so fast.

dl now.

great work.

 

[davidlallen]

wow david...do you have a 32 hours day? cause i dont know when where you abke to build 1.4.6 so fast.

I had been working on the game changes for the two weeks previous. Once you put up your tech file, there were only three files to change to match: unitinfos, buildinginfos and civicinfos. It took a couple of hours to rewrite civicinfos, but the other ones only needed a few tech names changed to match. Civcheck makes it very easy to catch all the places where a name is used.

 

[keldath]

im starting to like this civcheck of yours...

ok, ive taken a look,

and :

the units needs some work, the powers of each in some parts of the tree are not right,
also, some units might be too close to each other.

we need to give it some thought so we will be able to extend the use of the time use for each unit.


also, i think some costs of the techs should be raised a bit, some of the late techs cost cheaper then previous techs.


homeworld:

why does it all looks black and only a small qubic picture of the guild? i thought the screen was of a heilighner or something?
also - i think if its possible it would be good to set a scroll bar to the queue section - so you can scroll if you order a massive army.

further more = perhaps it would be nicer if theres a small pop up/splash screen that says that the space transport have arrived from the homeworld.
should the delivery take 5-10 turns? in the real time strategy games - it took a few untill you got them...

one more, probably this will be hard/impossible to do, maybe imported troops should have a higher upkeep costs? or , maybe we can do this:

how about we narrow the unit classes a bit, and some will be available only via homeworld? perhaps this will create the hw screen even greater importance.

another - how does the unit costs are determined?

other then that, i can only say, superb work.



**
oh and guys we can remove the unit statistics related pythons...its an old relic.

 

[davidlallen]

we need to give it some thought so we will be able to extend the use of the time use for each unit. ... also, i think some costs of the techs should be raised a bit, some of the late techs cost cheaper then previous techs.

I do not have any plans to work on the xml for the next few days, apart from investigating some of the bugs reported by Ahriman. Please feel free to make any modifications you like, and put together a 1.4.7 patch.

 

[Ahriman]

On tech costs: before making changes, please note comment AH44
Beaker costs currently in the mod do not seem to all be what they were in the design document.

I agree completely though that tech costs and unit strengths will need tweaking to make a better unit progression.

Also we could put the Quad unit back in at sand rovers.

 

[keldath]

sa-bbaba - this is hebrew slang for - cool/great/right on/ more...

that was another fun fact by keldath.

so, sabbaba...ill see what i can do on the weekend.

 

[Ahriman]

Woah, I didn't even notice the Homeworld screen was in this.

Playing as Ix, the screen appeared almost entirely black.
Just missing art?

I was also able to cheaply purchase units like Sardaukar (which I didn't have the resource for), Worm riders and Fedaykin (which I did have the resource for but not the tech) and Lasgun troopers (which I did not have the tech for).

This seems much too strong.

Purchased worm riders and fedaykin didn't start with the Sandrider promotion (they should), and nothing starts with the promotion from Aggressive trait.

Worm riders and Fedaykin aren't usnig the Worm-rider graphic you guys made when on desert tiles (I'm sure you know this already).

AH57
Scout thopter should upgrade to light carryall, not to other combat thopters, so you don't lose the transport capacity.

AH58
Faufreluches tech was intended to give unlimited engineers (we should rename ix techman to just techman, as well as renaming gholas nobles), not unlimited scientists (mentats).
There are already buildings the provide plenty of scientist slots, but very few that provide engineer slots.

May I say as well: I think this mod is getting increasingly awesome. Great work guys.

 

[davidlallen]

Imported from offworld trade thread at this post:

DA32. Please filter out other civs' UU from the list. In 1.4.4, Imperial Militia is one UU; you can test with this.
DA33. Should we filter out units which require unique bonuses? For example, Ginaz Warrior requires Kindjal; should this unit appear in the list if you do, or do not have Kindjal?
DA34. Please show the total cost of the selected units, and the amount of gold I have. As I select or unselect units, these should update.
DA35. I do not think there is a need for the "transit" section. The screen will be simpler if clicking "OK" directly makes the units appear and exits the screen.
DA36. Is it possible to draw the units which I cannot afford, in red color and make them unclickable?
DA37. Is it possible to show the icon of the unit?
DA38. After DA37, is it possible to show the hover help of the unit when I mouseover the icon?
DA39. As requested in an earlier post, is it possible to trigger this screen on a button, which appears in cities that have the spaceport building?
DA40. Is it possible to add an "elite" unit selection which has 1-2 promotions, for 1.5x the cost?

Regarding AH37b, note Stilgar is charismatic, and this trait gives +1 happiness from some buildings including monument. So this is the expected behavior.

 

[Ahriman]

DA32->40 all good ideas.

AH59
Falcon thopters are good vs guardsmen - intended? I thought thopters were anti-melee.

AH60
Units that are anti-thopter (missile trooper, ixian cymek, etc) all need to have intercept chances.
Hornets (and particularly assualt hornets) should have their strength toned down, so that units that intercept hurt them. Light hornets should have either higher base strength than assault hornets or a bonus vs hornets and thopters.

AH61
Shock trooper unit should be ignoring city walls, like all other melee infantry. It isn't.
Neither is Ginaz warrior.

AH62
There is considerable confusion due to "shock trooper" being both a specific unit as well as a unit class.
Recommend we merge the "shock trooper" class into the "melee" class and a few into "guardsman class", this will reduce a lot of the confusion. Then rebalance around this. After all... shock troops *are* melee troops in the Dune world, they're for leading assaults.

So shock troopers are melee (and need a melee model), worm riders, fedaykin, ginaz swordsmen and sardaukar are melee, lasgun soldiers and troopers are guardsmen. Put quads and walkers into the Scorpion class, and rename this, maybe "vehicle" or "armored" or "mechanized".