Topic: "Northmen" Tribe Page

Nordfriese wrote:

I uploaded a new revision earlier. The tannery is now called smokery and smokes 2 fish/meat with 1 log.

nice

WorldSavior wrote:

hessenfarmer wrote:

Regarding the deadlocks it is of utmost importance to first build a basic building material supply. Which consists from my experience of (at least) 2 claypit, 2 well, 5 woodcutter, 5-6 forresters, 1 charcoal kiln, 1 brickburner, 1 quarry or 2 stonemines, 2 reed farm. I agree that this is an awful lot of basic buildings needed, but thats the fun.

For me that doesn't sound like more basic buildings than for the empire, but like fewer! And I think that a charcoal kiln is very far from being a basic building.

I don´t build an early charcoal kiln if there are mountains nearby, but they are very important if there aren´t. Otherwise you´ll get deadlocked very soon with no bricks and no coal mine/charcoal burner.

On almost every map, mountains are nearby, and they very often contain coal

Nevertheless frisians are the brick and reed tribe. Therefore brick and reed should be the main building materials except where there is a logic for other materials.

I wonder if it makes sense if they use much more reed than the barbarians.

Have you ever seen real frisian buildings?

Yes

The roofs are enormous, they must be set at steep angles; sometimes the roof is several times as high as the walls.

Okay. So I don't wonder anymore

king_of_nowhere wrote:

did anyone try to use this tribe competitively, as in, try to get a fully promoted soldier as soon as possible, and then follow with as many as possible?

Maybe I would do this, but installing seems to be complicated.

Not at all: Just download the files from launchpad, unpack them, copy&paste the directory "data" over the one from your copy of recent trunk, and you can start playing.

Didn't work, but no problem.

hessenfarmer wrote:

As for the discussions regarding the strength of the soldiers they aren't that overwhelming strong currently. Especially when attacked they are vulnerable cause of their lack of evade. That makes the battles more unforeseeable because the result depends on how often the opponent manages to evade.

No, actually the opposite is the case: It makes battles more foreseeable.

I don't understand please explain. I made the experience that in almost every specific fighting situation it could happen that even a less trained enemy could kill a better trained frisian if the algorithm let him evade more than 2 or 3 times. from a frisian point of view you can't exactly plan a sweep cause you never know how many of your soldiers will survive.

If frisians would have a high evade percentage, they could be killed even more probable by a weaker opponent: They would not be killed only if the opponent manages to evade often, but also if they fail to evade often enough.

Another topic to be discussed is that the frisians need massive amounts of log. (Ok in my tactics they need even more due to my building material chain depends on charcoal to be independent from mountains)

I think that this is no serious strategy

why is avoiding deadlock not serious?

You can also avoid them by coalmines. Normally building a coal burner immediately is a bad strategy in widelands. If the coal burners of the frisians are very different, this is a problem of the balancing.

Why don't you include the suggested building cost values of king_of_nowhere in your table, for comparison?

because I was to lazy to do so sorry for that

No need to apologize... No big problem, of course

king_of_nowhere wrote:

did anyone try to use this tribe competitively, as in, try to get a fully promoted soldier as soon as possible, and then follow with as many as possible?

Maybe I would do this, but installing seems to be complicated.

Does this mean you haven't played the frisians yet?

Yes

"not installing" the tribe isn't complicated or hard to do, cause you don't need to install just download the data directory and use it. for this you can use the copy option or the data dir option. in the beginning I used the copy option but then I had no clean install of my version of trunk anymore. Now I'm using the --datadir option. As I am on windows I just copied the shortccut for widelands and added --datadir=D:\development\widelands\frisians\data after the .exe in the properties of the shortcut, whixh is the exact path to the data folder of my frisians branch downloaded with bazaar explorer.

regards hessenfarmer

Well, I would have to install bazaar/launchpad/whatever first and so on...

king_of_nowhere wrote:

WorldSavior wrote:

I think that Widelands is a little bit different to other strategy games, it gives stronger soldiers these advantages: They cannot be surrounded by enemies who hit them all at the same time, they can retreat easier and they can be healed much faster.

That's why I wonder if it would be fair if a tribe would have much stronger/weaker heroes.

perfectly reasonable concern, but in this case for "weak heroes" I'm talking about a win chance of at least 35%. So, significantly weaker, and you can expect greater losses that you'll have to replensih with your lower costs, but nothing like one-sided fights.

okay... But keep in mind that the weak soldiers are disadvantaged at terrain where you cannot place a lot of military buildings... And 35% means almost that you might loose twice as much heroes as the opponent...

hessenfarmer wrote:

Regarding the deadlocks it is of utmost importance to first build a basic building material supply. Which consists from my experience of (at least) 2 claypit, 2 well, 5 woodcutter, 5-6 forresters, 1 charcoal kiln, 1 brickburner, 1 quarry or 2 stonemines, 2 reed farm. I agree that this is an awful lot of basic buildings needed, but thats the fun.

For me that doesn't sound like more basic buildings than for the empire, but like fewer! And I think that a charcoal kiln is very far from being a basic building.

let's see. for empiire, basic buildings are 4 woodcutters 4 foresters 1 stonecutter 1 wineyard 1 winery 1 tavern 1 fishery 1 marble mine. 14 buildings to get reasonable supplies of building materials. In a large map you want more, but in a small map that's what you make before you start making soldiers. For frisians as suggested above, I count 21.

Reasonable, really? Sounds more like a weak supply

I would say, when we can do it in two hours, the tribe will be reasonaby balanced. we can expect that we won't play it as well as the others, so if we make it in two hours it probably can be done in less time.

Two hours? Well... Sounds like too much time, to be honest

two hours is too much, but if we can do it in two hours at the third or fourth try, we can certainly do it faster with more experience. say we can do it in 90-100 minutes, which would be a reasonable result compared to other tribes. we'd only need to start training soldiers in half an hour, as other tribes are capable of just that with evade, and evading soldiers against unpromoted soldiers is a one-sided fight.

If you say so... If the time will be too long, the frisians might be changend again in the future...

Wanted to save the world, then I got widetracked

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I have been testin a few things in the old version.

The small wooden tower used to be cheap and useful, in the last upgrade it became usless, it costs more in wares and therefore takes longer to build and while the extra view distance is useful only having one soldier is not. I changed it back to the old setting but made it upgrafable to a wooden tower, cost 2 logs and 1 reed. The upgraded biulding has the increase in view distance and room for 2 soldiers. \I also made the sentinal upgradable for 1 btick, 1 log and 1 reed, the upgraded building has room for 3 soldiers as the sentinal used to.

The big training holdup is fur, as this relies on a reindeer farm not producing a carrier and needs 2 barley farms to run it fur takes a long time to produce. Just upgrading your starting troops requires 90 fur clothes which cost 180 fur to make, at one a minute that is three hours. I then though of the recycling centre and added wares, used fur clothes and used iron studded fur clothes, these are produced by training sites on upgrading and 3 used fur clothes produce 1 fur, then 3 iron studded clothes produce 1 fur and 1 scrap metal iron. This eases the supply slightly without making life to easy.

I was also wondering about hunters, most of their catches are animals with fur, perhaps add anoer work cycle to them after they delver meat they then spend time cleaning the skin and produce fur? As this reduces their productivty perhaps the reindeer far could also produce meat when they produce fur. If this production method is added the recyle rate should be reduced to keep fur difficult to manage.

Starting wares are way to high, I can usually build a basic builing supply chain, food proction chain and 3 or 4 military sites just using the starting wares, except for reed which always runs low unless your have at least one reed yard operating from the beginning. I tried a game with starting logs and granite reduced by 10 and all other wares reduced by 40 to 50% and had no problem beating the current ai on several maps. Some do need a bit of planning to avoid deadlocks but is more a problem with the maps than with the frisians.

Fruit are honey are cheap and easy, just stick a fruit farmer ibn a quiet corner, add a fruit picker and beekeeper nearby and forget them. By the time I am getting around to adding a tavern I usuall have 150 to 200 fruit in stock, running a dozen basic mines for 5 or 6 hours is no problem. What about replacing the barley in mead with fruit? When I make mead it contains water, fruit, bee spit and yeast, I have never made it with grain, even the yeast is optional as the natural yeast on fruit will cause fermentation.

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I must agree, anything against the current AI is unimpresive but as it is all I can play against then it will have to do, for now.

Obviously I am doing something wrong with fur, I will need to rethink my stategy. With 12 farms supplying 2 reindeer farms, a bakery and brewery, all metal was available for the seamstress' and after 3 hours only half my soldiers had defence 1, I had 6 golden furs so if I built a large training ground then they would soon be used to upgrade but of course barley would be needed for honeybread and mead, implying a need for 18 farms which could be a problem on small maps.

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1:1 might prove to be a bit generous, I initially tried it at 5:2 but reduced it to 2:1, testing would help settle the ratio.

Agreed meat is only a by product of fur production, I am not sure about the hunter producing fur for the reasons you give, I was thinking of 2 hunting work cycles then one fur production to simulate not all animals being furry. I did not see an easy way to determine what was hunted.

I agree fruit is cheap, I was mainly thinking another consumer for fruit from mid game on might need a player to adjust the fruit production buildings, removing the need for 2 or 3 farms per mead brewery was a bonus. Recycling fur achieves a similar reduction.

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Tinker wrote:

Obviously I am doing something wrong with fur, I will need to rethink my stategy. With 12 farms supplying 2 reindeer farms, a bakery and brewery, all metal was available for the seamstress' and after 3 hours only half my soldiers had defence 1, I had 6 golden furs so if I built a large training ground then they would soon be used to upgrade but of course barley would be needed for honeybread and mead, implying a need for 18 farms which could be a problem on small maps.

I think what you did wrong was trying to upgrade defence for all your starting soldiers. We already established it's fairly weak; why would you sink so many resources in it, talking as if you needed to upgrade defence for all your soldiers?

Attack is the most important promotion, at least for low levels; once you reach the higher attack levels, another level may not do much, while defence will significantly improve survivability; but never, ever give a soldier the defence promotion if it doesn't have at least two attack levels already.

More specifically, the best strategy with soldiers is:

1) try to rush the infrastucture to get the attack 1 promotion; it's cheap and strong, and it brings your soldiers on equal footing with the evade 2 of other tribes. You can do it in half an hour. No or minimal fur needed.

2) start training as many soldiers as possible in attack 1; it's also needed to promote your blacksmith. You also need to get some promoted brewers and bakers. Again, no fur needed. You will need to get a master seamstress, though; fur needed there.

3) Once you have all those advanced workers, go for the advanced buildings and get a fully stocked advanced training camp.

4) now train as many fully promoted soliders, one at a time. only a few furs needed there.

I was able to produce a fully promoted soldier after 2 hours, with 5 or 6 farms. And all the barley cost was upgrading the baker and brewer. that was before those costs were reduced. I'm fairly sure I could bring the time down to 100 minutes with some trial and error.

So, the reason you had troubles supplying fur is that you thought you needed much more than you actually needed, because you were using a lot of furs for tasks that were unnecessary and suboptimal.

Really, fur economy is fine. Consider how much barley it takes to make the fur to train a fully promoted soldier, and compare it with how much barley it takes to make the honeybread and mead and bread and beer to train the same soldier in all ten levels. It doesn't compare. You only need a very small amount of furs.

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