New convert

Well, we want the spice to be the primary source of commerce, but clearly there is some balancing required.

Spice as *a* major source of commerce is a cool mechanic (makes the mod different, adds flavor), but the problem is how it all gets concentrated into a single city, and so building a ton of % bonuses in that city skyrockets your economy insanely.
Maybe try to find some way of spreading the wealth through multiple cities? Cut down the bonus per spice resource, but make the corporation spreadable (or automatically spread) through all your cities?

@david
Make soil enrichers buildable only on bonus resource, so the AI doesn't build them uselessly to spread fresh water.
Make the drip farm require fresh water to be build (or bonus resource), like farms in vanilla.
Put mines back to +1 hammers, deep mines to +2 hammers, so mines built on hills give a hammer boost, OR make them buildable only on bonus resources, to make sure that the AI builds windtraps on hills and so gets fresh water for their farms.
Strongly recommend: make the spice guild require the palace, to make sure that the AI builds it in its capital.

Consider: removing fresh water spread from drip farms.

But also: what matters is not AI commerce relative to vanilla, what matters is AI commerce relative to human player commerce.
If the human player can easily exploit the system to gain an advantage over the AI, then thats what makes the mod too easy and breaks the system.

If the human and AI economy growth are similar, but lower than vanilla, you could easily fix this by lowering or removing inflation.
I hate inflation in civ; its just a drain on your resources, and there is absolutely nothing you can do about it. I was finding by turn ~200-250 that inflation was getting near 100%. Ie all unit and civic and city upkeep costs were doubled. Thats a huge economy drag.

In your simulations, try to note what turn number the AI builds its spice guild - it should be recorded in the noteworthy events log (cities built, wonders built, corporations and religions founded, etc), right?
 
Spice as *a* major source of commerce is a cool mechanic [...] Maybe try to find some way of spreading the wealth through multiple cities?

I will try some experiments to see how the commerce bonus gets allocated among multiple corporation buildings. If each building gets the closest ones, then having the buildings automatically appear in every city will distribute the wealth. At least that will defeat the strategy of filling one city with +% bonuses.

Make soil enrichers buildable only on bonus resource, so the AI doesn't build them uselessly to spread fresh water. Make the drip farm require fresh water to be build (or bonus resource), like farms in vanilla. Put mines back to +1 hammers, deep mines to +2 hammers, so mines built on hills give a hammer boost. Consider: removing fresh water spread from drip farms.

Soil enrichers buildable anywhere is a bug, which I did not intend. I will make the above changes.

But also: what matters is not AI commerce relative to vanilla, what matters is AI commerce relative to human player commerce. If the human player can easily exploit the system to gain an advantage over the AI, then thats what makes the mod too easy and breaks the system.

I agree. The measurement I described is one I can get easily by letting my computer autoplay several games while I do other things. Your measurement requires me to play the game carefully, which is more time consuming. Getting this information from playtesters via suggestions is also helpful, of course, but this loop is also time consuming.

I hate inflation in civ; its just a drain on your resources, and there is absolutely nothing you can do about it. I was finding by turn ~200-250 that inflation was getting near 100%. Ie all unit and civic and city upkeep costs were doubled. Thats a huge economy drag.

I never understood the motivation for this either. But as far as I know, the game engine does not expose any "hooks" to allow changing this. At least it is the same drag on AI players as human players.
 
Agree that corporation mechanics need testing, I don't know what the formula for corp maintenance is or how it works. But definitely spreading the bonus would be very useful.

Understood that automated testing is much easier, and it tests at least some of what you want. It definitely helps test the effects of various design changes; run 10 games with one set of terrain improvements, implement some changes (like tweaking farm values), run 10 more games.

Re: inflation
I know its possible to eliminate entirely; FFH (or Fall Further at least?) has a game option that sets an inflation multiplier to zero somewhere.

Also, I know that in the Warhammer mod and in FFH there are some events that reduce the current inflation multiplier for your civ.
So in a worst-case fudge you could at least make an event that occurred every x turns that reduced inflation by y%. Hardly optimal though.
The other thing I hate about inflation is that it disguises the true impacts on gold from various things; if you have a city with an upkeep cost of 6 and are considering building a structure that reduces city maintenance by 50%, the player normally evaluates the value of that building by thinking that it will save 3 gold per turn. But if inflation is at 100%, the building will actually save you 6 gold per turn.
Similarly for civic upkeep costs and unit maintenance costs. It messes up evaluating the value of different options.
 
BTS 3.19 and DW 1.2.x

CvPlayer::calculateInflationRate() now returns always 0. I hope this is enough to disable it. I didn't touched the inflation offset.
 
(I hope it is ok to hijack this old feedback thread, as I don't have seen one especially dedicated to give feedback for patch 1.3)

First of all I want to say that I enjoyed my first game of Dune Wars a lot :) The grphics do a nice job of capturing the atmosphere of a desert planet and I like the differences to the vanilla game - like a spice based economy.

I haven't got a real feeling for the mod yet, so I don't have a feeling for balance yet, but here are some (mostly cosmetic) issues I discovered during my first 100 turns:

- Right at the beginning I get notified that the altroot.py is in the wrong direction (I still have it copied over in the BTS directory from my attempt to play with Dune wars 1.2)
- I found the groundwater ressource nearly impossible to spot without the ressource overlay
- Some events behave weird. Often the choice you got offered consist only of a single word, which is the same for all. Then one time my scout passed a desert and caused the "found black oil" event - but the second option of paying 10G for discovering all spice wasn't available (despite having enough Gold). Perhaps the save helps to track that issue down (if it is one)
- Since that event I get the two python errors every few turns (see pics)
- You still get "Gold" (isn't the currency on Arrakis "Solarii"?) from tribal huts, also a computer opponent "circumnavigated the globe"
- The hoover help for the Space Port tech talks of improving chop yield by 50% - is there anything left to chop after the removal of tubers?
- The tech Xeno Botany allows "Desalinating a Salt Pan" - is that just a worker command for clearing tiles covered with the feature "Salt"?
 

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Hi Pfeffersack. Glad you had fun with your first game, and thanks for the great feedback. I can't comment on all of these issues, but I can tell you that I am working on a 3d graphic for groundwater right now. At the moment, it is literally invisible so there is no wonder you can't see it!

I'll probably be doing a graphics only patch at some point this weekend.
 
@ Deliverator, thanks for creating the feedback thread, you beat me by a few minutes.

@ Pfeffersack, please see my replies (in a few minutes) on that feedback thread.
 
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