Era of Explicit Economy

[Morath]

This topic is to announce that Era of Explicit Economy is now available on the add-ons server. This era attempts to add a bit more depth to Wesnoth economy. Instead of villages providing (usually) 2 income per turn, "A New Land"-type economy is used. In addition to providing income, villages act as economical focal points and must be owned to perform any economic operations in the vicinity. Also, instead of castle tiles allowing recruitment of units by your faction, they allow recruitment of units for which you have built the requisite structure. Here is a list of current unit-producing structures:

• Barracks
• Armory
• Mage Tower
• Stables
• Merman Barracks
• Dwarf Warren
• Elf Hostel
• Orc Tent

To facilitate use of villages' workable areas, a context menu item exists that displays your workable area. Take note that while workable area indicators are useful and you will probably need to use them to see where your peasants can build, they take time to calculate and you may want to use them sparingly unless you have a fast computer.

There is also a version of this era where corruption and vitalization of the land exist. Corrupted tiles cannot be used by peasants and vitalization can turn corrupted tiles back into useable land.

Feel free to discuss this era, including bug reports, here.

[AlaskanAvenger]

Played around with it a little bit, nice concept, one annoying point was the lag time after you build something, which might get rather annoying in a multiplayer game. Also, have you tried out Gambciv? It has a detailed economy and is by far the best building mod imo.

[Morath]

Thanks. Yes, I have tried GambCiv. In fact, I looked through some of its code and used some of it in this era. Specifically; corruption and vitalization of the land is similar to the seasons in GambCiv. I am sorry about the lag... Believe it or not, the code went through a couple incarnations balancing function and efficiency before getting to how "efficient" it is now. Without getting into too many (of the few) specifics I understand, what I've done is written all in WML (perhaps this isn't the fastest for execution) and as far as I can tell there is no way to use multi-dimensional arrays (which might help) as well as some stuff that you would expect to just work (like owner_side attributes) doesn't seem to.

Edit:
I noticed that workable areas were being recalculated for every village capture instead of only for events that alter the workable areas. This is fixed in version 0.2 and you should notice that village captures work faster. Building and destroying villages will still have a similar amount of lag but thanks again for pointing that out.

[Kernigh]

I have a few issues with Era of Explicit Economy 0.2.0.1.

If I set any side to Empty, there is an error message at beginning of turn 1: RCA AI 2 Could not find a unit at starting position 2,15; an Era of Explicit Economy game on this map may not work. Then all the keeps change into villages, so no one can recruit.

If I build an Orc Tent, there is an error message: <Invalid WML found> [else] not supported, and I cannot recruit any orcs.

Standard error contains many warnings like, warning engine: variable_info: retrieving member of non-existent WML container, unit_on_tile.side, but these warnings seem to be harmless.

I also reported bug #19783 [Gna.org] in the Wesnoth engine:

A player, who is fast with a mouse, can click a WML menu item, and then click a WML menu item, such that the second action interrupts the first action. This glitches the first action....

You can also reproduce this bug with add-ons from the add-on server. I first encountered this bug with Era of Explicit Economy. In version 0.2.0.1, if I "Show workable area", there is enough lag to trigger this bug. Then I can order two peasants to "Get to Work!", so the second peasant interrupts the first peasant. The first peasant glitches and works the wrong hex.

[Morath]

Thanks for finding these bugs Kernigh. Version 0.2.0.2 (which is on the add-ons server) should fix the Orc Tent problem and the empty side problem. If anybody finds any more bugs, please let me know.