Topic: Initial musings of a total noob.

Friends, Romans, countrymen, lend me your ears,

some days ago I finally took the time to finish the tutorial maps, and I'm now in the process of learning what strategies and tactics to use to successfully get a healthy economy going, so I won't get wiped out by the first AI that gets a whiff of my existence.

As I've played other strategy games before (Civ CTP, Sid Meier's Alpha Centauri, FreeCol), rather than reading any manual I just dived right in, but did do the Tutorial campaigns first. And I must say: "Impressive." Wonderful graphics, sound, interface, game concept. But rather than spend 100,000 words on all the things that are good or better, I'm going to point out a few possible improvements I can think of.

Firstly, I missed the possibility to pin the various pop-up windows I prefer to have during a game: the messages, the stock statistics, and the buildings list. With pinning I mean preventing an usually accidental right mouse-click closing them. It would also be nice to have a playing config file, in which showing these windowlets by default each game could be turned on, as well as their placements. One might also save having build-help, building names and statistics turned on by default.

The second thing I had a minor puzzlement about was the centre of the mapview: when you get an alert about something, and use 'g' to go there, the location is put in centre view, but on a large screen like mine, it's hard to figure what the exact middle is, unless I use a tape measure or mark my monitor in some way. Would it be possible to make a 't' key, to activate a crosshairs like targeter, with two thin lines dividing the screen in half horizontally and vertically, leaving just the centre clear, where perhaps a circle could be drawn around the centre tile?

Which brings me to the third thing: geologists. When they find a resource, they send a message for the first of that kind and put up a marker, but if the location is where you can build a mine, it disappears under the mine icon. (But you can turn off build-help with a single simple keypress, Loki, you dummy! Oops!) I do find it annoying, however, that geologist just stupidly wander around looking for resources, and do not, for instance, keep to the terrain: when the flag is in the mountains, stay in the mountains, the (wo-)man wants ores, otherwise (s)he's looking for water, so stay out of the mountains. But maybe that's just me.

Finally, I was thinking I miss some sort of indicator of difficulty for the various maps, and I've even thought up a method of determining a good system to create one. But before I lay out the details, I'd have to know, if there is significant difference in playing a map as barbarians, Empire or Atlanteans? I have as yet no idea how great a difference in crucial resource usage there is, e.g. if gold is absent from a map, will barbarians wipe the floor with the other two, or something like that?

Anyway, those are just some initial suggestions that sprang to mind, feel free to tear me limb from limb, as long as you do it with a touch of kindness, please.

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Quarries and Stone mines are a bit different for the three tribes. All of them get raw stone, but Empire sometimes gets marble, while Atlanteans sometimes get quartz or diamond.

* Barbarian mines will need more upgrading than the other two tribes.
* Empire needs marble for a bunch of buildings, and marble columns for several; in particular, quarries require marble and stonemasons require marble columns, so don't accidentally hose yourself!
* Atlantean bread requires two types of farming (corn and blackroot), not one. As a reuslt, they need more land for farmign than the other two tribes.

Also, I should add that Empire's renewable meat comes from pig farms (as opposed to Barbarians' hunters and Atlanteans' fishers).

...there are also a bunch of other, smaller differences (e.g. Atlantean military buildings tend to hold more soldiers than the other tribes' equivalents), but the major ones are above.

RANDOM TIP: The signs placed by geologists eventually disappear over time, which can be annoying. As a result, I have them look at a section of mountain, then put the appropriate mine (gold mine if they found gold, etc.), but don't connect it to my roads. That way, it'll mark the area to me without vanishing or using any materials.

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Can I ask which version you are playing? The granite references in the Atlantean campaign will be fixed in the next release, but in Build 18 the strings are still a mess. Also, the help system is pretty much non-existent there - we have more in-game help available in the current development builds.

Construction sites have clear wares queues with the missing wares having a lighter color than the present wares.

Busy indexing nil values

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The following install.sh script seems to get just about everything needed, it seems so far, except the build number not showing up in the window title:

#!/bin/sh
umask 022
INSTALLDIR=/usr/local/games/widelands
echo Copying data files.
cp -r ./data $INSTALLDIR
rm $INSTALLDIR/data/locale
cd build
cp -r ./locale $INSTALLDIR/data
cd ..
install -cpvm 644 ./ChangeLog $INSTALLDIR/data
install -cpvm 644 ./CREDITS $INSTALLDIR/data
install -cpvm 644 ./COPYING $INSTALLDIR/data
install -cpvm 644 ./VERSION $INSTALLDIR/data
install -cpv ./widelands $INSTALLDIR
if [ -d /usr/local/bin ]; then
ln -s $INSTALLDIR/widelands /usr/local/bin/widelands
fi

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In order to install Widelands to the default dir, all you need to do after compiling is:

cd build
sudo make install

Enter your password, done.

You can also run Widelands without installing by typing

./widelands

In the directory where you ran compile.sh.

If you want a different install dir, edit CMakeLists.txt and look for the line wl_set_if_unset(WL_INSTALL_BASEDIR ".")

Busy indexing nil values

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