Topic: "Northmen" Tribe Page

@ WorldSavior:
Thanks for the method how you did the measurement. I rethought my values for the farms and with the times for walking to the spots your measurements are in a region what could be expected from the lua files I guess. So the basic algorithms are working as expected as I hope.
@all:
Unfortunately I think a long game on a big map would be necessary to get a proper balancing. So a 12h game with frisians on the Nile would be very helpful. Of course you can't win the tournament with them but still you could help the community a lot by using them to have a benchmark. for the benchmarking issue I would prefer a long replay or a snapshot every hour.
reason is that frisians should be better in late game and not to bad in early game. so it is helpful to see how an economy develops.
currently i have identified following issues as candidates for improvement:
advantages of the tribe:
- needs less iron due to the ability to recycle
- charcoal kilns are more effective which gives an advanteage on maps with few coal.
disadvantages:
- needs a lot of grain which is produced very slowly. This is mainly due to barley is necessary to produce fur which is necessary for every soldier training recruitment.
- needs a lot of building materials which are very expensive.
- basic soldier training needs the same ressources as the advanced training. Micromanagement is more difficult. Even basic training is delayed due to the needed weapons from upgraded smithies.

Any other candidate observations? Happy to discuss these issues before starting to change anything.

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I am restarting the Nile map, actually paying attention to the game this time.

For the balancing comments, Charcoal kilns do require clay so while more efficient they do rob some building materials, which can be in short supply. The recycling of wares from training is a great advantage, if my recycling branch gets finished it will close the gap slightly (other tribes are not as efficient) but perhaps the Frisians should be slightly less efficient, I think they are 100% efficient currently, only needing coal, 70 - 80% efficient might be better. I always seem to be short of either long swords or curved swords and have not found a way to even the supply of both without micromanaging the smithies.

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WorldSavior wrote:

king_of_nowhere wrote:

But I believe in order to work effectively frisian farms should be somewhat more efficient than those of other tribes, if given the extra space required. I think "needs 6 fields to work at 100% but makes one barley in 70 seconds " (it's 4 fields and 80 seconds for other tribes, 100 for barbarians) would be a good target

Imo this idea aims in a good direction. But a farm which uses more than 5 fields could be a little bit annoying for the players which use your rhombus street system, because they'd have to cut some roads if they place many farms next to each other

Yes, it would be annoying for me and for anyone using my street system, but that would be kinds the whole point of it: you could not fit as many farms in the same space. If I can keep making farms as I use to, then it's not really a penalty. I have to leave more space, which compensates for greater speed. Only if I can use the bad scraps of terrain to my advantage, have a farm plant fields where I could not build other stuff anyway, then I can get an advantage. For example, in my nile run I made all the farms in the strip of land between the mountains, because that way most fields were planted on mountain terrain where they would not interfere with anything - especially since atlantean mines have huge radius and so are not disturbed by a few fields. that would be very effective with frisians too

In general, I am ill at ease with the tribe because there are so many buildings requiring space, and that messes up my roads.

stuff about balance

I also get the impression that frisians so far are at a severe disadvantage. I don't have any idea on how to make a fully promoted soldier before 90 minutes of game, at best, while I can manage 60 minutes with atlanteans and worldsavior shaved it down to 35. efficient charcoal kiln are good, but mines are still more effective, so it does not matter. high building cost means expansion is slow. Maybe once your recycling sets in frisians are good, but in 90% of practical situation you'll be killed first. And the cost of extracting coal or iron is around the same, so if advanced soldiers cost plenty of coal it offsets the benefits of recycling.

I've been away from widelands for a while, but I want to go look in deeper detail.

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WorldSavior wrote:

Imo this idea aims in a good direction. But a farm which uses more than 5 fields could be a little bit annoying for the players which use your rhombus street system, because they'd have to cut some roads if they place many farms next to each other

Ok probably that would be a pain somebody playing the frisians could accept.

Well... Such a match is very extreme...

well basically it is not a match I meant a single player game as in einsteins tournament. However we can postpone this most probably as from our recent calculations and research in the lua files it became very apparently we should first fix some things before playtesting.

Well... They need iron ore for every trainings step. And a top soldier requires 11.5 iron ores, while an atlantean one requires 11, imperial 13, barbarian 16. So it looks for me as it wouldn't be a frisian advantage, but a barbarian (and imperial) disadvantage to need more iron ore for top soldiers.

ok I checked your values and I count 9,5 ores after subtracting the return from recycling but that doesn't matter as it is very time consuming in my calculations they consume 25 ores for a full trained soldier and get back 15,5. So I agree it is a great disadvantage due to the necesary coal and working time. we need to work this out in a direction that recycling is developing an advantage in late game.
As for other issues my current plan is to create a bug and link some excel files to it in which we could analyze the values in the scripts compare them between the tribes and doing some mind experiments to tweak the values there. Would this be acceptable?

• charcoal kilns are more effective which gives an advanteage on maps with few coal.

This advantage is also not big. Every frisian trainings step requires coal, and a top soldier requires 44 coal. But Atl: 25, Emp: 28, Bar: 33. So the advantage to require only 50% of wood for charcoal is not that big. And you need charcoal burners only in corner cases anyway...

agreed about the cornercase. At least this could be some advantage to compensate for other disadvantages. Especially if we can reduce the need for coal in training together with the need for iron.

disadvantages: - needs a lot of grain which is produced very slowly. This is mainly due to barley is necessary to produce fur which is necessary for every soldier training recruitment. - needs a lot of building materials which are very expensive.

They probably need a lot building materials because they need so many buildings. I've got somehow not the impression that their building materials are very expensive. But bricks are not cheap, that's true. Though I bet that marble columns are much more expensive...

bricks are really expensive cause they need coal (like the grout for the barbarians) and they are used massively. However I already started an excel containing only all buildings necessary for training a soldier. Although I just took one of each building for each tribe they need more buildings and a lot of upgrades as well, so they need about 33% more than the other tribes for their economy. especially I splitted the refined material into their components where it comes even more apparent. Will upload this for discussion as well as soon it is finished. Military buildings use same amount of wares but after the split into basic materials it is more than the other tribes as well. And time for refining the material isn't calculated already. so this is a nother big issue we need to work on.

I've already pointed out a lot of disadvantages of the Frisians... Here in this thread.

Again a summary would be helpful but if not I will take the pain to dig through this thread over the 40 pages or so. It just will take some time.

I am restarting the Nile map, actually paying attention to the game this time.

For the balancing comments, Charcoal kilns do require clay so while more efficient they do rob some building materials, which can be in short supply. The recycling of wares from training is a great advantage,

clay supply for charcoal kilns isn't a problem in my opinion as you need some working clay pits for the aqua farms. So currently I use the charcoal production to keep them working.

Nah, next to the required iron ore (see above) frisian top soldiers need 8.5 gold ores, while others need only 4 or 3.

yes as pointed out above values look very high they need to be compared and then adjusted. so the advantage currently is only virtual it is a disadvantage currently.

bad news is that i got another task from our chieftain to finish first so I can't start this soon. If anybody would start the work this would be welcome. For example creating a complete excel about the needed wares for training for every tribe. creating an excel listing the times needed for the creation of the wares needed for training or even better all of the tribes wares.

So my current list of issues is the following:
- working times of production buildings especially the farms
- basic mining ressources neede for training a soldier
- build costs (and times) adjusted for the economy and for the military seperatly

What do you think?

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Maybe it's time to open up new threads, to make things easier to find? Like separate threads for Frisian balancing, Frisian graphics, Frisian scenarios?

ETA: I have set them up.

Busy indexing nil values

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