Topic: "Northmen" Tribe Page

I want to take this opportunity to thank Nordfriese for creating this tribe, it would be a great pity if he was the only one to be able to play them. I have had more pleasure playing them, through all the changes, than I have had with the other tribes.

I completely agree that starting conditions are not the way to make the tribe easier or harder to play, I usually play them on Village or hardcore starts, if I have any opponents they are or tradepost or fortified village. My start does not make Frisians harder or easier, basically just slower. It can take 30 minutes for any tribe to build a military site, and any tribe about 2 hours to get to the point of beginning to recruit and train soldiers, at this point they are just about as strong, economically, as any opponent.

@WorldSavior as you should know Sachsen is a third world country, perhaps with exception of parts of some cities.

Top

Quote

Nordfriese wrote:

That's why I suggested that stuff with the starting conditions. It can bring more variety. A starting condition between headquarter and hardcore could maybe replace the demand for a challenge tribe? And every tribe could be played as a challenge tribe.

A starting condition can give you a hard start, which can turn any tribe into a challenge on small maps. On a large map however, the starting condition becomes insignificant soon.

I'd not be so sure about that. If you play the hardcore starting condition, you'll have more problems if you want to survive long enough, no matter how big the map is. (Given that the AI doesn't play pathetically.) For example I'd rather like to play on Ice Wars with Frisians/Headquarters than with barbarians/hardcore.

The 'characteristics' of a truly challenging tribe include slower, less efficient buildings, and this is something that cannot be influenced by the starting condition. It could make gameplay harder by for example taking away every third sword that is produced, but that wouldn´t be a challenge, just plain annoying.

Or you could let the trainers consume sometimes two swords instead of one

So how do you intend to turn a not-disadvantaged and well-balanced tribe into a challenge on big maps by changing only a starting condition?

With the hardcore starting condition for example. I would not be surprised if the effort to play with that is even higher than to play with frisians.

(@WorldSavior: If your large armour smithies are too slow, why don´t you just build one or two more? That´s what I do, and it never seems like a problem to me )

I'm doing that already. But it's annoying that frisians need two or three times more smithies than other tribes. The fact that this also valid for other types of buildings is a reason for the fact that frisians are weaker than other tribes.

I never found this annoying, it just means you need a bit more space, more building materials, and a very good infrastructure.

Rather much more space, much more building materials, and you have in general to do much more. With that effort you could achieve much more with other tribes.

Playtesting, I never found frisians significantly weaker than other tribes (in terms of how easily I swept through the AI as frisians and as some other tribe)

But do you know as much about Widelands gameplay as I do? I guess not.

What about simply splitting the tribe up into two tribes? One where you can completely live out all of your wishes without caring about any other persons (it could be named "Northern Frisians" for example) and one which is balanced. Then someone could implement next to "random tribe choice" a "random tribe choice except for Northern Frisians", tag Northern Frisians as challenge tribe and everyone is happy, right? Maybe here could be a consensus?

If I just wanted to "completely live out all of my wishes without caring about any other persons" I´d have scripted a tribe for myself and kept it on my computer without ever uploading, mentioning or showing it to the community.

Maybe you want to be the only one who makes the fourth official tribe in Widelands, who knows...

That would have saved me a lot of time discussing whether a tribe is unbalanced if the tower´s healing rate is 70/s too high, and whether frisian fortresses are cheaper than atlantean castles, and whether a tribe that is called challenging should be more challenging than others.

You don't really have a reason to complain: You said first of all - and almost the whole time - that the tribe should be balanced before suddenly stating now that you'd prefer the frisians as a disadvantaged tribe.

And if you try to make the frisians balanced and don't success, it's your fault if you don't ask other people to help you before, isn't it?

And I do have the impression that there just might be several players here who wouldn´t exactly mind if the Frisians were not significantly improved further, whereas you are the only one so far who still wants great improvements…

There are clearly further people which want that the tribes are balanced, they just didn't write here during the last days.

Why not instead tag the Frisians as a challenge tribe, and add "any random tribe", "random challenge tribe" and "random non-challenge tribe" to the tribe selection menu?

Why not stopping being cynical?

If you want to play a better balanced = less challenging version of the Frisians, you could modify your local copy of them…

It matters for me what is part of the official game.

watchcat wrote:

watchcat wrote:

I personally like the idea of having a challenging tribe, one you can choose to have it not too easy against the AI.

You like the idea even more than to have another challenging starting condition? I think this would make more sense, as every tribe could be challenging. And anyway, headquarters, villages and even fortified villages are already challenging starting conditions, if the opponent(s) has got better starting conditions.

Jup. i like it more, because I like having a new tribe that I don't know in and out already and who do have other challenges than the others.

Maybe I didn't write precisely enough. I meant: What would you like more - adding the current, bad working frisians to the official game or adding a balanced version of frisians to the game plus such a new starting condition?

But maybe the question is pointless. The more important question is: What do you think about my idea to split frisians up into a Nordfriese-version and a balanced version?

In regards to multiplayer: there are already some maps that disadvantage some tribes, i.e. fire games would be quite a challenge to play as an Atlantean against another tribe,

Are you sure? I've never played on that map, but it looks for me as it would be pretty good for atlanteans...

Sure? With that one lousy fish pond on the whole isle? I guess I could squash you as Empire and might even succed as Barbarian playing red.

Ooooooh... You are an extremely courageous kitty cat

At least I'm sure enough to accept the challenge.

Tinker wrote:

I cannot play online due to living in a third world country where internet access is bad

Germany is a third world country?

At least when it comes to bandwidth in rural areas. When it's Saturday evening I'm having similar rates to Tinker...

hessenfarmer wrote:

Nordfriese wrote:

In my opinion, the tribe should remain as it now is, no further balancing needed…

see above. I think finally the Frisians should be a balanced tribe, which is just more difficult to handle.

Why is it so difficult in your opinion?

@ world_savior: Although I appreciate the idea of more and different starting conditions. But to add difficulty this does not the same trick than having a complicated and difficult tribe.

And what about splitting Frisians up into a balanced and into a challenging tribe? Wouldn't that reduce frustration&pain a lot?

Tinker wrote:

It can take 30 minutes for any tribe to build a military site, and any tribe about 2 hours to get to the point of beginning to recruit and train soldiers, at this point they are just about as strong, economically, as any opponent.

2 hours are a very long time, I play usually much faster.

@WorldSavior as you should know Sachsen is a third world country, perhaps with exception of parts of some cities.

It's not a third world country, but I can totally imagine why you say "with exception of parts of some cities"...

Nordfriese wrote:

hessenfarmer wrote:

I fully understand that this discussions could be very frustrating, I really had some similar experiences while doing the final reviews of my scenarios. But I can assure that it is worth the pain because it makes the things better, therefore I should express again a great thank you for the enrichment of widelands while asking you to take the pain of this stage to even improve the tribe for more people. BTW That doesn't mean you have to accept every suggestion. you should keep your point where you deem it necessary and argue for it.

All right then. As far as I can see, there are two major changes still up for discussion now: A cost reduction for fur garments and advanced swords, and a time bonus for (large) armour smithies.

So you would like to balance the tribe now again instead of stating that you don't care about it anymore?

1) Fur garments. I tried it out and played two games on Firetournament against three teamed-up AIs (red atl, yellow emp, green bar). Result: The game with the normal cost was an exciting match, in which I was in real trouble at one point (but won anyway), and I enjoyed the game even though it was almost only fighting. The game where the cost of fur clothes was halved was less enjoyable. I recruited soldiers much more quickly, so the AIs never stood a chance. It was almost boring sweeping through it with large numbers of cheap soldiers. Also, the limiting factor for recruitment speed switched from fur to iron.

Really?

Well, firetournament is a map with huge space problems, which are probably too complicated for the AIs?

Wanted to save the world, then I got widetracked

Top

Quote

Just to add some constructivism to that discussion:
I tested the first scenario again (did not use your latest fix from today cause i Started yesterday). It works fine now although the weaving mill and the shipyard didn't appear immediately after being told to build a ship for whatever reason. I had a look in the script and could not find a reason for that everything looked fine so maybe just a glitch in my system. I really like the ship design from the front (gioing in southwards direction) but the shadows on the sails when looking from behind didn't look that good. As far as I could have seen all buildings worked well except for the shipyard where there was some mistake in animating giving a "blinking" look. The player coloured windows look a bit like they are coming out of the wall but that is not really a problem. For some buildings you added playercolours to additional surfaces (for example the roofs of the oven of the smokery and the brick burner) that doesn't look that good. I would prefer just to have doors and windows coloured an the rest beeing normally coloured. I will have alook into the images of all buildings to identify the buildings which could need some improvement (edit: additionally only I would not use PC for the sails of the ships in the shipyard). The "Warft" design of some buildings really fits nicely to the tribe. But the 3 rings of colours would look nicer if just one textured colour would be used or if they would blend better into each other.
For the next days until Tuesday I will not be able to playtest, however we should be not in a hurry. I definitly will test scenario 2 again. And after that I'd like to test how they perform on a free single player map. Hopefully other players and devs will test it as well to make the tribe even better as it is now. Again many thanks for the great work done.

Top

Quote

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. I did have something of a similar message from the tavern yesterday but cannot repeat it today, it seems a strange message is displayed with certain input queues being empty but this one corrects as soon as conditions change. Correction the condition arrived as I was writing this.. The message is'Skipped preparing only 1 ration because the building has the following wares: Fruit and Bread and the building has the following wares: Smoked fish and Smoked meat.' At the time the building had 4 fruit and 4 Smoked meat, no bread or fish. Then it used a fruit and meat to make 2 rations.

Played an 8 hour game yesterday on Ice wars with seven opponents playing a mixture of the other tribes. I used village start and let then use headquarters which gave them an advantage. I noticed no problems with balance, food and drink production was good enough for 7 mines and 2 training sites, without trying to hard I had soldiers recruiting and promoting within 2 hours. Checking statistics showed I was the second largest territory after 3 hours and my military was 3 times bigger than the best AI, at about this time they started fighting among themselves which only improved my position.

Top

Quote

Nordfriese wrote:

The 'characteristics' of a truly challenging tribe include slower, less efficient buildings, and this is something that cannot be influenced by the starting condition. It could make gameplay harder by for example taking away every third sword that is produced, but that wouldn´t be a challenge, just plain annoying.

Or you could let the trainers consume sometimes two swords instead of one

Write me a starting condition script that achieves this and I´ll believe you Such scripts are not as powerful as you think…

I meant that in fact frisians are like you take away every third sword and replace it by nothing. Or even more disadvantaged concerning swords...

Why not instead tag the Frisians as a challenge tribe, and add "any random tribe", "random challenge tribe" and "random non-challenge tribe" to the tribe selection menu?

Why not stopping being cynical?

This sentence isn´t meant any more cynical than your suggestion that I should add my very own personal tribe to the game in addition to balanced Frisians

That was not cynical. I just recognized that the widelands development team could learn something from the game 'Age of Mythology - The Titans'. There are 4 cultures (atlanteans, greek, vikings and egyptians), but you don't choose the culture, but the so called main gods. Every culture has got three of them, so you can choose one of 4*3=12 "tribes" - and the difference between the main gods of one culture is not that huge in comparison to the diffrences between the cultures.

So the developers of that game increased the variety of it greatly by an easy method (copying each "tribe" three times and implementing smaller - but interesting - differences here).

The widelands development team could do something similar, especially as some people want that the classical tribes stay like they are while other people want changes everywhere.

And concerning your suggestion: As soon as there would be a second challenge tribe in the game, your different "random tribe phrases" make actually sense. Implementing "random challenge tribe" doesn't make that much sense as long there would be only one of them, that's why this sounds so cynical.

What would you like more - adding the current, bad working frisians to the official game or adding a balanced version of frisians to the game plus such a new starting condition?

They´re not bad-working, it´s only a bit of minor finetuning now. As for the starting condition – see above…

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.

What about the aim that frisians should be good at the late game?

And if you try to make the frisians balanced and don't success, it's your fault if you don't ask other people to help you before, isn't it?

I did, and you replied:

I don't agree, because I think that it's very improbable that they are balanced already, without a lot of playtesting and so on. But right now I'm not motivated to give any more examples. I've already contributed a lot in the discussion about the frisians, but now I don't have that much motivation any more

page 22, post 220

…

That was already after you had designed the complete tribe mainly alone.

So you would like to balance the tribe now again instead of stating that you don't care about it anymore?

You are the one who is demanding fixes for all (real or supposed) balancing problems. Instead of asking questions like this one, you should be glad I´m trying to fix the 'issues' you mention.

Why should I be glad about that?

And my question seemed to be necessary. 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.

Two direct questions to you:

• 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

Nordfriese wrote:

Tinker 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.

I noticed no problems with balance, food and drink production was good enough for 7 mines and 2 training sites, without trying to hard I had soldiers recruiting and promoting within 2 hours. Checking statistics showed I was the second largest territory after 3 hours and my military was 3 times bigger than the best AI

@WorldSavior: This is similar to my own experience when playing frisians. I´m trying not to sound sarcastic, but are you really sure you´re not seeing a balance problem only because you didn´t play frisians very often yet?

Yes, I'm sure. Has anyone else already beaten a team of 6 or 7 trading-outpost non-frisian AI's on the Nile, with frisians/headquarters, autocrat? (I did that before speed of barley farms was increased by 50% and so on)

Wanted to save the world, then I got widetracked

Top

Quote