Here's my update for today.
Ocean model vs land model
There is some discussion on tweaking the AI, to make hovers work in the "ocean model". See
this thread. Jdog5000 is the key guy for "better AI", so I think something will happen. We will need an sdk person (koma? johny?) to try out the changes suggested by jdog. I recommend trying them out on a vanilla revdcm to see if they work, before trying on the complex sdk of dune wars itself.
On the other hand, there is silence on my threads in a few places to get people interested in land transport. So now I am leaning towards the "ocean model" instead of the "land model". It is too soon to decide which model will work. Either way, if koma13 is still working on new textures, that will be great and we can definitely use them.
New issues
I played through an entire game on small map, Prince difficulty, regular speed, patch 5, archipelago mapscript. I was pretty happy with the gameplay. I had a *lot* of money trouble. Distance cost was part of it; unit support cost was part of it. By about turn 150, when I started attacking, I had to turn research down to zero to concentrate on gold. Even so, I was burning through the pillage bonus from each city so fast I had to rush to get to the next pillage.
I used capitulation to win. Each civ I hit followed a similar pattern: I captured one city, barely captured (or destroyed) a second city, and then they capitulated. Each capitulation netted me 2-3 new techs, which is good since my research stalled. I actually liberated their cities after they capitulated, to avoid the distance cost. I can easily see Irulan, or any of the characters, having a formal ceremony to surrender instead of getting killed, and being allowed to run one small leftover city.
The game was over by around turn 225. I never made it to the deep desert techs, I stalled on researching desert pathfinding. I used the hover transport to run around with grenade troopers and maula mortars. (See item 75. If you don't agree, then attacking a fortified distant city is impossible until deep desert techs make the sand apc available.)
Here are some issues I ran into.
70. Just to assign a number, I made some changes to TerrainTrades as described in an
earlier post. This seems to work well in either model. It removes roads altogether, which seems worthwhile for Dune.
71. Just to assign a number, RevDCM is deleting my windtrap feature. This is blocking me from adding the windtrap code, which works in a vanilla game. jdog said he would look at it, I hope he will find the reason.
72. Just to assign a number, the AI does not know when to use thumpers. I don't know what to do about this so I will ignore it for a while.
73. I suggest you rename Irrigation to Desert Farming or Drip Farming, maybe. Some messages are confusing when real irrigation is used. My windtrap mod will use real irrigation.
74. To prevent the AI from going crazy building Sand APC: remove iAIWeight 15 (search, this is also on one other unit). I also moved it one later in the tech ttree, Desert Power instead of Desert Pathfinding, and increased the cost from 65 to 90. But this is debatable.
75. Maula Mortar has a foot soldier unit graphic, but it has SPECIALUNIT_ARMORUNITS, which means it cannot be loaded onto the hover transport. That means any real assault must wait for desert pathfinding (or desert power, see previous item). I changed it to SPECIALUNIT_PEOPLE.
76. On the other hand, the Strider unit is a Burseg, and it should have SPECIALUNIT_ARMORUNITS. I did see a Smuggler Strider; I am not sure if that is on purpose. Probably it is just missing from the exclude list in civilizationinfos.
77. I found that putting workboats on sandtrout is highly effective. I am a little surprised that sandtrout give you 5 food. I don't even think sandtrout are edible in the books. It may have been an unusual coincidence, but one of the AI civs had three sandtrout by his home city and got a big start with 15 food.
78. I have listed a couple of issues about the workboat. It is cheap, it has move 2, and it is at the start of the tech tree. You can run a bunch of them around coasts until you map almost everything. I had suggested to rename it "deep harvester" or something so it does not use "hover" in the name. Instead, maybe the right solution is to leave the unit called "hover former", but actually move it to hovering tech. This prevents early game scouting. This may be better than reducing it to move speed 1.