Topic: "Northmen" Tribe Page

Nordfriese wrote:

Tooltip problems. I noticed that the Fruit Collector and beekeeper display 'can't find any more resources!' constantly. It seems they display it after the message is triggered even though they later find resources

The lumberjacks of all tribes also have that problem, if they once don´t find a resource the tooltip will never go away… So it´s a bug in the game.

I thank that this is not true. The tooltip will be shown if the productivity is below the "treshold number" (as far as I know) and it vanishes again if it's above.

You´re right about the lumberjacks; however, a treshold can be set only if the building has an out_of_resource_notification message defined. Since it is very stupid to build a fruit collector nowhere near a berry farm (and because bushes grow so well everywhere that it shouldn´t be necessary to build extra berry farms for existing collectors) I didn´t define such a notification, it would only spam the inbox with the message. So the bug is that no treshold can be set if no message is defined.

Actually several terrains require extra berry farms

Starting conditions: I repeat, they are not powerful enough. Anything to do with production or consumption of wares, or sleep/work times, cannot be changed by a starting condition in any way.

But playing challenge tribe + headquarter is more difficult than normal tribe + hardcore? Probably not. And theoretically it would be possible to change production by starting conditions.

I think that they don't work well. Like the empire, they are even more disadvantaged if they don't have any more surface mines (working until 50%) and not any more fish/game.

The difference is that piggeries need wheat, which is also needed for beer (which goes to the mines) and bread (mines and soldier training). Aqua farms use fruit, which can other than that be used only for rations, and which is produced faster and with cheaper&smaller buildings than wheat.

Aqua farm fish is not much cheaper than pig meat. But it's much more expensive than just to fish. So this aspect is very similar to the empire.

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@WorldSavior

You didn´t comment on my suggestion for the smithy speedup yet, although this appears to be the most urgent balance issue for you

Balancing only this would be a so called drop in the bucket

If I support you, I cannot take it for granted that this support will not be for nothing. I don't see why I should support you instead of the persons who will decide if your suboptimal tribe will become part of the official game or not.

I am normally an even-tempered person, but you know exactly how to annoy me most. I´ve been fuming more or less silently about your snarky remarks for a long time now. Enough is enough.

Don't mix up appropriate criticism with snarky remarks.

Fine. You are constantly saying that the frisians are so terribly unbalanced, I keep asking you for your opinion on balancing issues and proposed fixes, but instead of ever replying, you keep saying "Oh, I´m not in the mood to say anything constructive, and anyway everything bad is all your own fault" – Fine.

I clearly have given many examples of fixes of balancing problems.

I valued your opinion in the whole balancing discussion highly because you showed your experience in the tournaments.

I've gotten rather the impression that you didn't do that at all.

But you´re not the only person skilled at playing here. Tinker said he sees no balance problems, even if he gives himself a difficult start against many AIs.

They have not even been teamed up - on Ice Wars! Come on, that's super easy. And what does "village" for frisians even mean, it is not implemented.

Even though he isn´t a tournament-champion who likes to write long posts full of criticism, I consider him perfectly experienced enough to be able to judge accurately.

Seriously? Do you really think that it's so easy to recognize if tribes are balanced?

Hessenfarmer has also playtested frisians many times, and I never heard him complain that they are so horribly impaired.

Why should everyone notice what I notice?

If players whom you appear to consider less skilled than yourself think the tribe is not really disadvantaged, you should either admit that you are less experienced than them, or accept that the so-called suboptimal tribe needs no improvements.

I'm probably not less experienced in playing the classical tribes than anyone else, and a lot of my experience is also helpful for playing frisians. So don't expect that I've got less competence with playing frisians than anyone else.

Just let me say this. I have valued your opinion less and less during your argumentative and wearisome debate, and now I am tired of arguing with you further. Say what you will, but don´t believe I care any longer about your ideas of balancing. You leave me with the very strong impression that you either turn half an invented moth into an elephant just so you have something to criticise,

It's not "turning half an invented moth into an elephant". Frisians are seriously disadvantaged and if you don't get that it's your problem. When I asked Tinker how frisians should compensate their disadvantages he just didn't answer, and he thinks that frisians are not disadvantaged just because he can win easy matches with them (opponents with headquarters, not teamed up, no challenge map). And by the way, I don't criticise things only because I want to have something to criticise.

or you want the intended challenge-tribe to be actually super-advantaged so you´ll have a tribe that lets you win even faster in the next tournament.

Gosh! How can someone write such a big amount of nonsense...

I've never even thought about something like this. I don't need any super-advantaged tribes to win tournaments. But probably you would need them. You are the person who implemented first some extremely big advantages for frisians, so I don't wonder that much where your idea for your imputation comes from.

Don´t bother to respond to this. I don´t care.

If you don't want to get a response, don't write public posts but a private message.

hessenfarmer wrote:

@Nordfriese: I tried to build a bridge to not loose any experience and constructive input that might be available. Anyhow as not everybody was willing to go over this bridge (and it was definitly not you) I fully understand your position. I can't say that the frisians could not have some improvements. And I really want to test it more intensively when I am back at my normal machine. At least I will definitly give it an approval comment because it is already of an quality that is really remarkable. I suggest we continue this discussion on launchpad, so we don't need to bother about the unconstructive criticism here on the page.

Not only Nordfriese is ungrateful, but you as well, hessenfarmer. You asked me to add some knowledge of Widelands to the development of frisians, which I did. And now you say that I should be excluded from the discussion.

As somebody said elsewhere Widelands is Kind of a doocracy and I fully appreciate this.

If you like the "doocracy" so much, don't complain about me - because I can/could do what I want.

I repeat that "doocracy" sounds for me more like donarchy or do-ctatorship. Or do-talitarianism.

Wanted to save the world, then I got widetracked

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Sorry to see that there was a bit of fighting going on in my absence. Everybody, please take a deep breath and step away for a bit? Looks like WorldSavor didn't mean to be cynical, but that his posts were perceived as such. This can happen in online communication - try to cut each other some slack and accept that was other people perceive isn't always the way you meant it. Maybe you can sort it out in an IRC chat?

2 technical comments - please let me know if there is anything that I have missed.

• Do not change the UI background at this time, I already have a branch that will make it darker. I'll finish it up and put it up for review soonish.

• I can take care of the conversion to the new font renderer, or maybe Hessenfarmer would like to do it, since he knows how? The documentation is spread out over 2 wiki pages at the moment: https://wl.widelands.org/docs/wl/autogen_auxiliary_richtext/ https://wl.widelands.org/docs/wl/autogen_auxiliary_richtext_scenarios/ Including richtext_scenarios.lua will include richtext.lua too. Another change is that you don't need to call paragraphdivider() before lists any more, and that rt() can be called only once. There are also some new convenience functions available.

Busy indexing nil values

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hessenfarmer wrote:

Ideally every tribe should be rather balanced to each other tribe in terms of final effectiveness in producing military power.

Why?

I see no benefit in all tribes being equal. If one of the tribes is more difficult to play with, then it will not be voluntarily picked in tournament. That empties my list of obvious drawbacks.

We have unbalanced maps. If Widelands receives a fourth tribe, which is a greater challenge to play with, I cannot see why that would be a reason to mourn. Especially so, if Nordfriese is okay with the way things are.

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teppo wrote:

hessenfarmer wrote:

Ideally every tribe should be rather balanced to each other tribe in terms of final effectiveness in producing military power.

Why?

Because otherwise it wouldn't make sense to pick disadvantaged tribes, so they are completely useless in many situations.

I see no benefit in all tribes being equal.

Maybe now? And what about the idea to create a balanced version of the frisians and another one?

If one of the tribes is more difficult to play with, then it will not be voluntarily picked in tournament. That empties my list of obvious drawbacks.

How do you mean that?

We have unbalanced maps. If Widelands receives a fourth tribe, which is a greater challenge to play with, I cannot see why that would be a reason to mourn.

They reason to mourn is that it had been the aim - all of the time - that the tribe should be balanced. And as I said, a disadvantaged tribe would be mainly useless...

king_of_nowhere and me and maybe some others invested time in achieving that the frisians could be balanced...

Wanted to save the world, then I got widetracked

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Hm I don't think that the Barley is an issue. You get used to that and yes frisians need a lot of barley farms but there is plenty of space on Langeneß. Although I agree you should move your wares towards the final port, which can be very frustrating as it leads to jams. So reducing the flood speed a bit would be a good idea.
Just took the frisians for the easter tournament. So if somebody could do so as well and other well experienced players could choose a standard tribe I Hope to get some benchmarks for them. I have done a lot of experiments and I think one way to get a better balance might be the build costs. I had reduced them for some of the buildings in a test branch and this showed very promising results. reason is it is not so much about cost it is about time to build the buildings if there is too much materials that need to be used for the building.
Perhaps after having some benchmarks with the current implementation we could test some values in this direction.

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