Topic: "Northmen" Tribe Page

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WorldSavior
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Posted at: 2017-07-02, 15:46

Okay, the upgrades could look like this:

Min Attack: 8.5
+ Max Attack: 12

Health: 30

Defense: 15

Combined with the starting values which Nordfriesee suggested, it would lead to this:

vs. bar_10 emp_10 atl_10 fri_10
bar_10 56
emp_10 52
atl_10 55
fri_10 56 57 54 59

By the way, I don't like the idea of a tribe with heroes which are much stronger than atlantean heroes, if you compare that with the difference between atlantean and imperial heroes.

If someone wants to change the statistics nevertheless: It's highly recommended to change evade, defence and lifepoints not at all or only slightly. Changing the attack values would be much better.

In general I can tell that it makes more sense to define the values of the heroes first and then find a balance for the rookies, that's just easier face-wink.png

Edited: 2018-01-31, 13:14

Wanted to save the world, then I got widetracked

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king_of_nowhere
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 Posted at: 2017-07-02, 16:01

WorldSavior wrote:

Just tried it out, it didn't really work. Health per level was 35, by the way, right?

The trick seems to be that barbarian heroes have to kill the new tribe hero wether with n or n+1 hits, but atlantean/imperial with m hits, or the other way around... Because barbarian heroes seem to be weaker than others. They are just specialized against imperials and atlanteans, if I'm not mistaken.

Especially with your new change: It gave the barbarians just 6 lifepoints, but the other received 4.8 attack more face-wink.png

barbarians have more attack than anyone else, enough of it to compensate the lower evade. and if your table is correct, the new values loook fine. there is a lot of difference between attacking first or second, which is expectable because with low evade striking first matters a lot, but it seems those frisian soldiers would have precisely 50% against both barbarians and atlanteans, and 54% against empire. this is just the average between the value for starting first and the value for starting second.

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WorldSavior
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Posted at: 2017-07-02, 18:14

king_of_nowhere wrote:

barbarians have more attack than anyone else, enough of it to compensate the lower evade.

If they need less strikes because of the higher attack, this is true

Wanted to save the world, then I got widetracked

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Nordfriese
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Posted at: 2017-07-02, 18:32

I tested these values with einstein´s program:

vs. bar_00 emp_00 atl_00 fri_00 bar_10 emp_10 atl_10 fri_10
bar_00 59.0% 43.2% 33.2% 56.0% 0.0% 0.0% 0.0% 0.0%
emp_00 69.7% 54.8% 42.2% 62.5% 0.0% 0.0% 0.0% 0.0%
atl_00 79.9% 70.6% 58.3% 68.9% 0.0% 0.0% 0.0% 0.0%
fri_00 57.4% 49.1% 41.9% 54.4% 0.0% 0.0% 0.0% 0.0%
bar_10 100.0% 100.0% 100.0% 100.0% 51.8% 50.7% 50.2% 63.9%
emp_10 100.0% 100.0% 100.0% 100.0% 56.8% 52.3% 48.2% 52.2%
atl_10 100.0% 100.0% 100.0% 100.0% 56.9% 55.8% 51.4% 59.0%
fri_10 100.0% 100.0% 100.0% 100.0% 45.5% 55.5% 49.5% 57.6%

I assumed an increase of attack for Frisians of 1000 per level, because different values for min/max attack increase are not possible (as far as I know). These values look pretty good. Frisian have a clear advantage when attacking first and are disadvantaged when defending, but the difference isn´t too unbalanced. I´ll include these stats in the next review.

By the way: I just noticed that the new farm model looked much better in Blender than in the game… I´ll need to work on it some more before the Frisians get their first own nice building.

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king_of_nowhere
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 Posted at: 2017-07-02, 19:03

WorldSavior wrote:

king_of_nowhere wrote:

barbarians have more attack than anyone else, enough of it to compensate the lower evade.

If they need less strikes because of the higher attack, this is true

roughly half the times they kill in 4 strikes, while other tribes always need 5. it was a balance introduced a couple years ago to give barbarians a better late game, since they already have slower farms and more expensive mines and soldiers.

and looking at the stats, barbarians have a better chance than imperials against frisians despite the lower evade, so they can kill with one hit less the frisians too.

speaking of that, I wonder if it would be a good idea to increase the random factor in attack at higher levels. so far, the only thing mattering is whether they kill in 5 hits or in 4, and a small increase in attack or healt is either indifferent, because it does not change the number of strikes needed, or huge, because it does. with a higher random factor, a small difference would change slightly the chance of killing with one or less hits. it would make balancing more regular.

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hessenfarmer
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Posted at: 2017-07-03, 19:55

hi everybody,

playtested with revision 8390 on the map "schneeschmelze" against barbarian (red) and empire (yellow). here are my (totally subjective) observations.
1. the most annoying thing were the working "animations" of the buildings. the blinking lights might be useful to see at first glance if a building is currently working but this feels unnatural with regard to rest of the game. I think things like smoking chimneys, worker animations or even glowing doors of the mines look like normal, natural activity around a building, and thus the buildings should be animated.
2. this time I did not have any coal issues, partly due to the change in the charcoal kiln partly because I was concentrating my efforts to avoid this. so coal is an issue but with some mines it seems to be manageable.
3. Once I ran nearly out of stone. Which could easily lead to a deadlock, as you need brick for the rock mine as well as for the quarry. as one brick is made of 1 stone 1 clay and half a coal the frisians not even need lots of coal they even need more stone.
4. due to whatever reason empire ai was not finding their way out of their valley and did not improve training of their soldiers so they were a quick swift. other way round with barbarians. as I first met them they had their fortress filled with heros. The fight showed that the result is more impredictable than between other tribes. it mainly depends whether the opponent manages to evade more than once or even twice. so a level 10 hero could be killed from a defender keeping roughly half of his lifepoints. ont he other way even a level 8 or so frisian attacker with only 4 attack could kill a defender bey keeping a third of his life points. So statistics over 100000 fights is not everything in this case because it could really matter if you win or loose especially this one particular fight.
5. As I lost more heros than the babarian due to own misconception and lack of experience he started to attack me and it was really difficult to train new heros, because suddenly I ran out of honeybread which I needed to train my soldiers as well as for operating my deep rock mines. so I needed more bee keepers which needed more berries. and all of them needed brick which I could only produce slowly due to the missing honeybread. it was not quite a deadlock but sseing the barbarian training his military in the stats it felt quite like this. So personally this tribe is definitly for advanced players, cause you need to manage your economy quite well to not running in any shortage of supply. Oh almost forgot to tell that smoked meat and fish were short too, cause they only like smoked fish. meaat is short due to the reindeer farm has 3 production cycles. perhaps the time for skipping could be reduced here a bit.
6. Only wares I had plenty of were berries, fish (even without having an aqua farm) and reed. So I find it really deifficult to built an economy that can sustain a large number of well trained heros.

Perhaps we need a lot of playtesting in addition to mathematics to get a rather good balance. In my opinion frisian heroes are very expensive to train and could be easily lost though they are superior in most cases. this is at least interesting to play with. (I really enjoy the new challenges they put on my somewhat preconditioned gameplay, thanks a lot nordfriese for this.)

Will finish the game now and start a new one on the same map with the latest revision then.

best regards hessenfarmer

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king_of_nowhere
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 Posted at: 2017-07-03, 21:05

hessenfarmer wrote:

  1. Once I ran nearly out of stone. Which could easily lead to a deadlock, as you need brick for the rock mine as well as for the quarry. as one brick is made of 1 stone 1 clay and half a coal the frisians not even need lots of coal they even need more stone.

to avoid deadlocks, i suggest that quarry does not need stone.

So personally this tribe is definitly for advanced players, cause you need to manage your economy quite well to not running in any shortage of supply. Oh almost forgot to tell that smoked meat and fish were short too, cause they only like smoked fish. meaat is short due to the reindeer farm has 3 production cycles. perhaps the time for skipping could be reduced here a bit.

consider though that you know how to pplay the other tribes, due to trial and error. frisians may not be as complicated once you play them a few times.

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Ex-Member
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 Posted at: 2017-07-04, 10:17

I had a problem running 8390 so I tried 8392 and had the same error.

After placing the initial buildings the game crashes with a corotine error, .../scripting/lua_errors.cc:22] attempt to index a nil value.

As other people are running this without this error it must be something I am doing wrong. If I run the game without selecting Frisians as a tribe for any player everything works, it only fails is one or more teams is Frisian. I updated to latest trunk with no change .

For information I am running on Arch linux, the data/tribes folder is in my ~/.widelands override folder.

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Nordfriese
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Posted at: 2017-07-04, 11:37

Thank you, hessenfarmer, for the testing!

1) I only made these "animations" to indicate activity. In longer games, they are really annoying. In those buildings that I copied from other tribes, I can just copy&paste the original animations to replace the lights; for the new buildings, I don´t really want to make nice animations as those buildings will be completely redrawn with frisian architecture anyway. What do you think of an animation like for current aqua farm and armour smithy (a coloured circle slowly rotating)?

3) Every tribe has some wares they can get deadlocked with. I once got deadlocked as barbarians with no granite when I didn´t build granite mines soon enough. Atlanteans have a spidercloth deadlock. So the deadlock possibility isn´t that dangerous – I also got granite-deadlocked during a test game and enjoyed the challenge to break the lock (it is possible, and not even very hard, so the quarry can require bricks as part of its build cost).

4) With the low evade for frisians and high evade for other tribes, the random factor is getting lost. Perhaps higher basic evade and a greater difference between min/max attack would make fights more balanced, but we shouldn´t forget that the statistical chances are important too.

5) In the thread "ideas for new tribes", it was suggested to sort all tribes into categories. Frisians would belong to "advanced tribes" to show that only advanced players should use them – I like this idea and I don´t really see the need to simplify the economy to make Frisians more suited for beginners.

The reindeer farm doesn´t produce meat, only fur and workers. However, meat would be a logical by-product of fur production. This would make the aqua farm superfluous, so I´m not sure if this is desirable (I like the aqua farm better than what would be just a copy of imperial piggery). Every site that uses smoked fish can use smoked meat instead and the other way around, they are identical.

I agree that heroes are expensive. Perhaps a bit too expensive. But I don´t see a way to really reduce the cost. Perhaps we could remove smoked meat/fish from soldier food cost, but I´m not sure if this wouldn´t make it too cheap. By the way, how many berry farms/fruit collectors did you build? I´m usually short of fruit.

@Tinker: I never got this error and I don´t know what causes it. Could you run a debug build in gdb or a similar debugger with the --verbose option to provide a stack trace?

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Ex-Member
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 Posted at: 2017-07-04, 12:24

Nordfriese wrote:

@Tinker: I never got this error and I don´t know what causes it. Could you run a debug build in gdb or a similar debugger with the --verbose option to provide a stack trace?

I could if I knew how to.

As an aside is this tribe based on Friesans from Friesland or the mongrel German ones?

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