Topic: Seafaring

Nasenbaer wrote: Hi DaggeTeo

I read your post yesterday evening and wanted to thought about these points before answering. The general idea sounds interesting, but from my point of view those ideas are only interesting in the later part of the game (more than two ports, a lot of ships and thus a very big economy). But that's exactly the point of the game where there is no time left for micromanagement (and that's exactly what it is). This is especially a matter of design. The way the ships are integrated in the economy is similar to the way roads + carrier work. With a "dedicated ships" feature Widelands would calculate the shortest path a ware can take from A to B as before, but would need to special case for every ware to check, whether there is at least one ship that could carry it. But in later game state your idea of what is important to transport might change over seconds - just take into account that you suddenly encounter a nearby enemy... A similar problem is with ports that get destroyed by an attack of an enemy - normally you will try to defend your empire and not spend time in giving ships a new "dedication". So the cases when you have to change the "dedication" of ships would roughly be the moments when you don't have any time for micromanagement.

I am not suggesting that all ships needs be dedicated but merely that there should be an option do so if you so would chose. I enjoy expanding my empire and use certain areas for production of food wares. For instance I have 2-3 farms, a mill, a bakery and a well at one spot with only a port connection. Now what I want to do is transport only the bread and/or flour from that port, not the wheat or the water. I also want to decide at which port those pieces of bread should be delivered. Now let's say that I chose to build a lumberjack in connection to the bread-port. Well then one of the "free"-ships will take care of that particular transportation need. That is an example of how I would use the suggested feature.

However I see the point, that it would be useful to influence the transportation somehow. How about the following two features:

General setting of ware priority (so you can say transport shields and axes faster than trunks) - but per economy or even completely global A menu that gives you the ability to define the importance of a shiping route - so if all ship are working nonestop and there is a route between two absolutely save ports that exchange wares only from time to time, you could set that route to be less important than others and the ships will first try to transport wares for the other routes before taking a task for the other route. But globally not per ship.

however I am not even sure whether those two features would make things better in long games - and as I said, that's the point where these features would be interesting from my point of view.

I like the suggestion regarding the transportation priority, however I would like to see that in addition to my suggestion and not instead of. I have to add that I am not a good programmer so I don't know how much work this would require, all I know is that this is something that I'm missing.

Regarding the point of this being in the later stages of the game. I take it you are assuming that there is no teamplay. This could be very useful even early in the game if you are transporting goods between yourself and your allies. Then there could be three or more ports much earlier with a dedication need.

Sounds like a good idea. This could be bundled together in a seafaring menu, that as well includes a list of ships with task, start and destination for each Yes, exactly something like that. Perhaps even some statistics over the most commonly transported ware.

Please take a look at my comment in the newspost -> http://wl.widelands.org/news/2012/04/3/build-17-release-candidate-available/ - in case it is a new bug, please open a bug report.

Posted bugreport https://bugs.launchpad.net/widelands/+bug/975091

Thanks for the feedback Nasenbaer

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DaggeTeo wrote: Regarding the point of this being in the later stages of the game. I take it you are assuming that there is no teamplay. This could be very useful even early in the game if you are transporting goods between yourself and your allies. Then there could be three or more ports much earlier with a dedication need.

This is something different. Trade between two different players will most likely be implemented as micromanaged feature - so both players have to agree on a number of wares to trade ("I give you xyz and you give me abc...") and this will be handled seperately from the normal port to port transportation.

fuchur wrote: When watching the shipwright building a ship I wondered if it would be possible to display the progress of the current ship in percent. Of course there is a percentage shown at the shipyard, but I think if the second ship is built immediately after the first one this will always be at 100 %.

Good idea. We plan to implement a "custom ship name" feature, showing a name for every ship, that can be changed by it's owner... somehow unrelated, but still it's about text shown over the ship / ship constructionsite

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renke wrote:

SirVer wrote: 5) Press play and enjoy.

okay, and now?

most likely PEBKAC, but my shipyard claims only "no use for ships on this map". I'm missing something, though I have no clue what exactly...

That means that the map doesn't have any port spots. Go to the editor and add some ports. Make sure that buildable land is adjacent to the water and that it is sufficient space for a big building. When you click the port-placement tool you will see a green castle when you can place a port there. Once placed it will be blue.

Good luck!

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I've been playing around with the seafaring capabilities a bit more and I have some additional ideas/wishes.

I noticed that at a certain point some wares were laying in wait for a long time, ie buildings weren't built and things weren't happening as they were supposed to. The cause of this was multiple ports and to few ships. Here I'm thinking of two solutions:

1) the previously mentioned dedicated route, hehe yes I can't let it go

2) Some kind of warning or indication that you have to few ships. Each time a ware is sent to the port for ship transport it could have a timestamp and when that timestamp exceeds a certain amount of time give the player a message that wares are waiting a long time in the ports and that the player should consider building additional ships. This timestamp could be useful in the boat statistics window to see the average waittime at each harbor.

Regarding how the wares being transported I think that instead of showing each ware seperatly that they could be grouped. Example A coal icon X 10 or whatever ware/worker it may be. Or maybe you are working on something already. As it is right now is not very informative.

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DaggeTeo wrote: Another thing I have noticed with the seafaring that I would like to get an overlook is an ability turn certain wares in a port to non transportable, either sending, receiving or even both. For instance I had a bakery center that was connected with the rest of the world with only a port. All I want that port to deliver is bread and bread only. Instead it kept sending and receiving water this was because I had told the local warehouse to that port to prefer water and apparently it was the only warehouse with that preferal. So now the other parts of my system were losing water. Then I had to click each individual warehouse were I wanted to keep water and set it to prefer water.

Hey yeah that is a good idea. So each ware in each port would have four options: "default" (no icon), "do not receive", "do not send", "no exchange at all"

As far as I can see this includes your dedicated routes feature in a much smarter way, as you can't just control what is transported on the route, but even what can be send and received.

I created a wishlist item at launchpad for this feature ((see here)[https://bugs.launchpad.net/widelands/+bug/986546]) . Do you agree, that this invalidates your dedicated routes feature?

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