GambCiv • A civ-like Wesnoth add-on

[AlaskanAvenger]

ya, I had updated, but when I just when back and retested, it worked just fine. No idea what was going on.

[vodot]

Hey Gambit, just letting you know your add-on is getting props elsewhere on the web: http://www.bay12forums.com/smf/index.ph ... msg2808188

Nice work!

[Gambit]

Big update folks. Some of these changes fundamentally affect gameplay. I anticipate some negative feedback, but I think I have good reasons for doing everything. I've highlighted the major changes. If you want to know more about the reasoning behind some of the big changes, fire ask away.

version 0.9 (beta) aka "The New Years Update" aka "The Day GambCiv was Ruined FOREVER"
Changes:

• Gambciv is now mostly translatable thanks to the great good work by Espreon
• Tips are now displayed every 5 turns
• You can now right click on any terrain and ask "What is this?". This feature should be really helpful for new players. If you find anything I missed, please let me know!
• Because of how expensive they are, universities that teach black magic now give access to level 2 undead... and a surprise
• Battleship cannons now have sounds.
• Ships and bridges can be built on swamps
• The costs of transforming peasants into elves has been reduced
• Woses now plant trees whenever they step on plantable terrain
• New building: Archery Towers. They let you do 100% accurate lawful pierce damage (12 damage) to any unit within three hexes of them. Great for beefing up security at key areas. They haven't got much testing, so I am very open to suggestions for balancing their cost and damage if you provide good explanations.
• Recruiters no longer work if an enemy unit (non-level-0) is within three hexes of the peasant. This forces you to have defenses further away, and gives a slight advantage to attackers. Universities that teach green magic are not affected, so this makes them slightly more useful.
• Units recruited from special buildings (taverns, drake villages, huts, and so on) now get one movement point, but no "attacks_left".
• Recruiters care about whether or not the peasants can attack. Not whether or not they can move.
• "Slaughter rules" (kill all enemy units to win) now functions properly in all cases.
• You cannot use castles for recruiting anymore after turn one. You must use huts. This causes players to build multiple settlements instead of all clustering around their starting castle. I suspect many of you will dislike this change at first. But hopefully you will come to see that it makes the game more fun and unique. The cost of recruiting from huts has been adjusted accordingly.
• "Classic rules" (kill the enemy leader to win) is now the default.

[lesy]

i finally got to check out your add-on and here are my notes/ideas after first run trough:

- the game didn't really end when i killed enemy leaders (classic conditions) - i don't know if this is intentional

- while i like the recruiting in huts, now the keep tile seems to be useless after the first turn? - maybe let people recruit there but for much higher costs?

- could the recommended setting on civ-maps be 0 gold per village? when every building is in fact a wesnoth village, you generate substantial income just by owning them - which imo decreases the importance of gathering resources

- i desperately missed visible action points counter and perhaps some keyboard shortcuts for the most used actions (don't know if this is possible to implement at all)

- the costs of some units and buildings seem off, and why does everything cost exactly 1 action (except road) particularly the railroad felt a bit overpowered to me (for the price)

generally i really liked it and can't wait to playtest it some more, possibly against a human opponent? anyone?

[Gambit]

Ah I forgot to remove "victory_when_enemies_defeated=no" from the scenarios shipped with the add-on. The special GambCiv maps won't properly trigger victory until the next version.

I'm going to try to find a way to make castles more useful (perhaps they will boost defense even more than they do by default).

I'm okay with people still getting gold from villages.

Keyboard shortcuts aren't possible, but I'll try to add a constantly visible resource counter by using immutable labels.

Roads don't cost action points because they aren't worth an action point. They don't really do anything except serve as a way to make railroads take longer to build. Well, and they're cheap paths in the winter.

[lesy]

thanks for the reply

i actually agree on the road costing no action (just railroads could be more expensive) but i'd love to see even more diversity in action costs - i doubt that planting a field with wheat or recruiting a peasant requires same amount of work as building a complex structure such as a university. i could see dividing the "build something" button into two categories, where you would have to in the first turn build foundations for more complex structures (it would also make the building menu shorter). other and simpler way would be just to make the buildings cost more action points to build.

as for the castle/keep issue - how about you would first build a palisade with basic 60% defense with possible upgrade to castle with 65-70 and keep with 70 or something like that.

[Gambit]

The problem with making things cost multiple action points, and getting too crazy with upgrades is that it slows the game down. The game can already take several hours to play. And I have to put gameplay over flavor.

It's one thing to have upgrades that make something more useful. But I don't want to have lots of things that you build a foundation and then have to wait a turn to actually the building you want, and then wait another turn before you can use it. Roads/Tracks were a special case. There isn't a delay between when you build a track and when you can use it. I wanted to slow it down a little bit on most maps (Though some maps already have roads which I consider a special terrain feature just like the placement of mountains or deep water).

One idea that I had a few minutes ago is first: seeing how advanced I can get with the new lua dialog stuff (radio buttons? sliders?) and then allowing the first player much more control over game setup. There are a lot of things I could turn into variables and let people adjust.

[Rigor]

memo: a different 2v2 map which is smaller and could serve to make battle much earlier, if it pleases you.

[AlaskanAvenger]

How does this one look?

(before spring)

Spoiler:

and after

Spoiler:

4p Pyramid Island.rar

4p Pyramid Island (2v2 or FFA)

(884 Bytes) Downloaded 263 times

[Rigor]

looks fantastic, thanks!

[AlaskanAvenger]

A few notes on the dark universities and their "surprise"
First, the idea of allowing anything to straight out recruit level two units is rather alarming as it drastically reduces the amount of action points required to get powerful units, especially in the case of shadows which can be easily used to assassinate an enemy chief when not using slaughter mode (I've done so before vs an excellent player who was doing better on most fronts, and that was when I had to recruit them as ghosts and then level them at the uni).
Second, and pertaining to the first point, the only thing these level two units require to recruit is a large amount of gold and 1 action point, and at least in the games I have played, gold has never really been a problem.
Last of all, I am not sure why the undead university was not worth its cost before. It isn't much to upgrade a university to dark magic (1 ap, and 50 gold), and the access to undead units alone, especially the ghosts, seems more then a just compensation. After all, almost everyone will get a university or two at some point. As for the upgrading a university to green magic, this is now much too under powered in my opinion. The units from it cost 2 AP to make (one to recruit the peasant, 1 to transform) and although the amount of forest on a map is a nice bonus for the elves, the opportunity cost of loosing access to level 2 units seems heavy indeed. I think just giving the dark universities access to dark adepts would be a big enough bonus on its own.

As for the "surprise" I am even more concerned about it.
First, it poses the same problems as mentioned before, 100 gold and 1 AP for a level 4 unit. To get the necessary gold for that you would have to mine 5 mines or plant 9 plantations. This would result in roughly 6 action points total to get this unit, not counting the cost of the university which I assume would be bought already. To go even farther, on an advanced game, it is not uncommon to have players with an income of well over 50 gpt (I've seen it over 200 on an extremely long one) and this could potentially reduce the AP necessary to get such a unit even farther. If, on the other hand you were to make a unit of equal level to combat this, namely a great mage, you would have to expend over 30 AP just to train it at the university, and if you were to go with a shock trooper instead, it would still take between 12-15 action points to make plus 19 gold to recruit. In addition to this, the aforementioned unit has excellent resists to almost all attacks, with its only negative resists being -20 to impact, and coupled with 50% defense and 1 move on all relevant terrain, is a very difficult unit to kill. This is especially true during the winter when it would be almost impossible to detect this unit in time if the attacker was playing wisely.
In short, I fear that the game will simply become a race for a university, ending in a single unit spam, unless the unit in question receives a serious increase in cost (maybe even 250+ gold) or complete removal from the game, along with the rest of the level 2 undead units from the university.

[Gambit]

It doesn't cost an AP to transform units at green magic universities. They're basically the same as recruiters.


Also everything you say about black magic universities seems valid. Especially with skeletal dragons not being balanced for MP (I went with the cost from its unit file...). I'm not sure why I didn't originally allow dark adepts. I think I had some plans for converting mages into them, but that seems like a pretty crappy idea to me now. I'll revert dark universities to giving level ones + dark adepts.

[AlaskanAvenger]

Just a replay I thought I'd post of a rather good game PetePorty and I played.

AA_vs_Pete.gz

(61.85 KiB) Downloaded 275 times

[PeterPorty]

My manly manliness manhood is severely scarred because of that game... Plus the other two that ended up similar right before that one. ;_;

But yeah, it was a good game. (The transport and the peasant are totally overpowered though.)

[AlaskanAvenger]

- I think that transports period, not just the peasant/transport combo is overpowered. It is true that it allows for extremely rapid expansion which is rather fun and the ability to strike from afar, forcing people to keep a navy ready, but at the same time the fact that you only need one peasant to deal unlimited damage in a vast area, including capturing villages up to 3 hexes inland that would be unaccessable otherwise, and then destroying the said area and jumping back on the ship and escaping seems a bit ridiculous... especially when you can make a canal inland with the same peasant to increase your strike zone.
In addition to this, you can pick up any unit that has already attacked, with a nearby transport, allowing you to attack the same hex an unlimited amount of times as long as you have troops left to access it on their own, simply by picking each unit after it attacked and dropping it behind the lines, and then after the unit defending the tile in question has been killed, the transport can drop a peasant or any other unit into it, allowing the attacker to destroy or capture the offending hut and anything around it.
- Perhaps if the distance a unit could embark from a ship or board a ship was decreased to 2, and a unit was required to have at least 1 move left to board it would be balance it out, as there main purpose, namely getting troops to a designated area would still be available. For that matter, I think it would be nice if the range was decreased to one and the units dropped off were able to attack after landing, as this would greatly decrease their vulnerability and boost the usefulness of transports even further, while at the same time removing some of the current odd quirks.
- Overall, I think that decreasing the range a unit can embark or disembark from a transport to 1 and allowing it to attack upon disembarking would greatly improve the over all feel of the the transport as then the transport would have to either coast along the shore, dropping units one or two at a time (and and under most circumstances this would be in the sand) or drop a peasant at first who could dig a little harbor, allowing the transport to drop units all in one area. Also if this was happening in the middle of a battle, the landing troops could join immediately, but at the same time be prevented from inflicting too much damage on their first turn and giving their enemy a time to react. This would also prevent someone from dropping troops from a transport directly into a hut unless the person in question was foolish enough to leave a water tile right next to the hut, and in the case of a watch tower, it would keep disembarking troops from even attacking the watchtower unless the player in question had a moat within the protection range of the tower.