New terrain system

[zookeeper]

This is a suggestion that would take a long time and a lot of work to be implemented. Nevertheless, I think it's a good idea.

The idea is to remove the current base terrains, and replace them with more generic types or "adjectives". I feel that it's not good to have a set number of base terrains every new custom terrain has to be an alias of. Instead, a number of base "types" would be given, from which the different terrains would be created by combining them. They describe what the terrain is like, instead of the old system where, for example, a road is "Grassland", which makes no real sense. In my system, both grassland and road would become "Level", which they are. Normal forests would be "Wooded, Level", since the trees are mostly on level ground.

Defense would always be the best of the given types, and movement would be the worst. This, in my opinion, makes sense in pretty much every way, and it's surely KISS enough. You could create a forest canyon, which would be impassable to non-flying units (because it's "Abyssal"), but which would give the defense values of forest to flying units. So the exact terrain (as in "Forest" or "Swamp") would become irrelevant and only the base types or "adjectives" would matter.

My suggestions for the base types:

Level
Undulating
Rugged
Fortified
Wooded
Snowy
Abyssal
Enclosed
Sinking
Water
Impassable

...and some examples of how the current base terrains would map onto these:

Grassland: Level
Hills: Undulating
Mountains: Rugged
Castle: Fortified
Forest: Wooded, Level
Forested Hills: Wooded, Undulating
Snow: Snowy, Level
Snow Hills: Snowy, Undulating
Snow Forest: Snowy, Wooded
Canyon: Abyssal, Rugged
Sand: Sinking
Swamp: Sinking, Water
Cave: Enclosed, Rugged
Cave Wall: Impassable
Village: Enclosed,Level

Feel free to think how this idea could be improved and post your thoughts on that. Note that, as you might notice, I haven't completely figured out how to handle shallow and deep water under this system. Note also that I am very aware that this would require revising the defense and movement for every unit in the game, and since the old system wouldn't map perfectly onto the new one, some rebalancing would be needed.

EDIT: Perhaps this should have been posted to the ideas forum, so move this there if you deem it appropriate.

[deserter]

http://www.wesnoth.org/forum/viewtopic. ... highlight=

I remembered that eleazar had this thread some tima ago about the same thing I think. (I haven't read it though)

[Dacyn]

I feel that it's not good to have a set number of base terrains every new custom terrain has to be an alias of.

Actually, a custom terrain can be an alias of two different terrains... IIRC both movement and defense are the best of the given types...

some examples of how the current base terrains would map onto these

"Forested Hills", "Snow Hills" and "Snow Forest" are not base terrains...

Cave: Enclosed, Rugged

Village: Enclosed,Level

So units would generally have better defense on cave than on village? Why?

[Ranger M]

you could have fortified for villages and castles, and enclosed for caves

[turin]

Currently, there are (IIRC) 13 base terrains, and all other terrains are aliases of 1-2 of them. So, our current system seems basically identical to your proposed system, except yours requires that all terrains be aliases of two of the base terrains. I don't quite see the point.

[Eleazar]

Zookeeper, i think you are trying to address actual real issues with the game as it it, but i think your solution would cause about as much trouble as it fixes, and would take a lot of work to implement.

http://www.wesnoth.org/forum/viewtopic. ... highlight=
I remembered that eleazar had this thread some tima ago about the same thing I think. (I haven't read it though)

Zookeeper's idea overlaps with mine, but includes a lot of material i'm not supportive of. (FYI, i'm not entirely happy with the KISSness of the way we currently have a few hybrid terrains)

We agree that the game should simply list the qualities of the terrain, not it's specific name. (i.e. savanah, grassland, and road would all be verbally described by the game simply as "flat") This much is very KISS.

In general making common types of terrain a combination of 2 qualities tends to makes things more confusing. I assume his intention is to allow the addition of various new kinds of terrain, without need of updating a units moves or defences. However its seems that a lot of these would be gibberish. "Water, Rugged" and "Sinking, Rugged"? It would also seem harder to assign sensible values to defence and movement when it would be hard to predict what terrains would have which combination of qualities.

I think a better proposal along these line (not that i exactly support it) was to have a few "terrain modifiers" like "frozen" and "forested" that could be combined with the normal base terrains to produce things like, "flat+frozen"=current tundra, "flat+forested"=current forest or "hilly+frozen+forested"=a currently non-existant snowy forested hill. At least here the combinations are fewer and more obvious.

[zookeeper]

Zookeeper, i think you are trying to address actual real issues with the game as it it, but i think your solution would cause about as much trouble as it fixes, and would take a lot of work to implement.

I don't deny that it wouldn't take a lot of work, but what new problems would it introduce not counting players having to deal with a major change (and ones not discussed already)?

We agree that the game should simply list the qualities of the terrain, not it's specific name. (i.e. savanah, grassland, and road would all be verbally described by the game simply as "flat") This much is very KISS.

Just renaming the base terrains to "flat" etc., and converting existing base terrain terrains to be aliases of those would be a slight improvement. Only a cosmetic one of course, but still something.

In general making common types of terrain a combination of 2 qualities tends to makes things more confusing. I assume his intention is to allow the addition of various new kinds of terrain, without need of updating a units moves or defences. However its seems that a lot of these would be gibberish. "Water, Rugged" and "Sinking, Rugged"?

A river running through mountains would make sense to be "Water, Rugged". "Sinking, Rugged" would probably be gibberish. I think that terrain qualities are much less confusing than the odd base terrains and their aliases are now. Also, there would be less qualities than there are base terrains now (ok, a few less, but still). They might even be more intuitive than base terrains and aliases. In the current system you can't add new terrains, period. You can just create new graphics and names for them. In my system, you could create new terrain that also behaves differently from the others. There isn't an unlimited number of potential terrain quality combinations (and the number and behaviour of individual qualities would still be limited), but quite a few still. Also, not all terrains would need to consist of two or more qualities (although most probably would).

It would also seem harder to assign sensible values to defence and movement when it would be hard to predict what terrains would have which combination of qualities.

While I haven't done an extensive test, but more like bounced a few examples around in my head, it would seem that more often than not the defense and movement a particular unit would have on a random hybrid terrain would "make sense" and not be very necessary to predict accurately. In case of the new "base terrains" (like the new "Level,Wooded" forest), yes, for the sake of balance they would need to be considered, hence the need for rebalancing everything a bit.

I think a better proposal along these line (not that i exactly support it) was to have a few "terrain modifiers" like "frozen" and "forested" that could be combined with the normal base terrains to produce things like, "flat+frozen"=current tundra, "flat+forested"=current forest or "hilly+frozen+forested"=a currently non-existant snowy forested hill. At least here the combinations are fewer and more obvious.

I think this would just be more complicated because there would be both "base terrains" and these modifiers, instead of just "terrain qualities". At least if I understood right.

[scott]

I'm usually not as critical on ideas as some people *cough Turin* but this isn't the ideas forum and I am not on board with this one.

As I understand it, the only reason we need this is so that roads are not called aliases of grassland.

Otherwise, the new abstraction you propose is basically the same as the old one, except the new abstraction is less intuitive. While you're right about roads being strange when described as grassland, I don't think undulating is better than hills. You can tell you came up with new basic types with the current basic types in mind.

The next part, the 2-part formula idea, is ok, except you don't require every terrain to have a 2-type recipe. Thus it's not much different than what we have now. You use some 2-part formulas to show some new possibilities, but these can also be created. A more interesting possibility is 3- and 4-part formulas (snowy hill forest village?).

Your proposal for how to determine movement and defense is sound. However, the river ford violates this. A nice upgrade to either the current or the proposed system would be the ability to specify whether you want the best or worst for both movement and defense.

In summary, I think this idea
- is unoriginal in that it only trades one abstraction for one that is nearly identical
- trades intuitiveness for generality - and that's supposed to be the benefit. I understand how the more general system is sometimes more intuitive (i.e. your example), but on the whole it is not. A player can instantly understand a swamp. He will say, "WTF is 'undulating sinking' and why is my unit so fast/slow in it?" It's like trading Arabic letters for Chinese pictoglyphs. Sure the second type may be a more logical way to express ideas, but no matter what, players need to base their mental model of the terrain's behavior on symbols. I do not think it is attractive to get rid of less logical but more familiar symbols for more logical and less familiar symbols.
- provides nothing new in terms of functionality
- proposes to completely overhaul in code what is currently a functioning system. Someone can correct me, but codewise this is almost suicidal.

[Eleazar]

Edit: note: started posting before Scott's showed up.

Zookeeper, i think you are trying to address actual real issues with the game as it it, but i think your solution would cause about as much trouble as it fixes, and would take a lot of work to implement.

I don't deny that it wouldn't take a lot of work, but what new problems would it introduce not counting players having to deal with a major change (and ones not discussed already)?

1) significantly more abstract names for each of the terrain qualities, whose connection to actual terrains is not neccessarily obvious. 2) More data to sort through before you can remember what defense or Mv a unit gets on a particular hex. Perhaps not fatal flaws, but it's up to you to convince us that it is an overall advantage to your proposal.

You admit that it will take a lot of work to implement this, that is true, though i think you greatly underestimate how true it is. To undertake a change like this, the developers (or at least the one who would code it) would need to see a compelling advantage. From your posts, i can see you claim only 2 basic advantages:

Remembering the move and def for a dozen terrain "qualities" is simpler than remembering which terrain names map to which terrain aliases.

Possibly. Your terrain qualities have the dissadvantage of being more abstract, than the concrete descriptive names currently used. But some may find it simpler. However, IMHOmy proposal solves this problem in a simpler way.

I think (to you) the bigger advantage is the ability to create new types of terrain, more easily.

A good question is do we really lots of new kinds of terrains? And how effective would this proposal be at creating new terrains? In my experience few terrains are proposed that don't work as aliases (or else need new hooks into the engine, (like terrains that deal damage to certain types of units.)

One recently proposed terrain that can't just be an alias, is the Kelp Forest. It's supposed to provide additional defense for Merfolk, but no advantage for land=walkers. With Zookeeper's system we could obviously create it as "Water, Wooded" but would this work? Elves would have 60-70% defense in it, while Merfolk would have their normal defense, but could only move through it at 5 MP per hex. Niether of these results is very Kelpy. It's possible that 2 of qualities could be found to do what we want with a Kelp Forest, but they wouldn't be the expected qualities.

I really don't see the point to making these changes, even if they were easy to implement. Please don't see this as an attack, Zookeeper. I'm aware that you've made other contributions in other areas.

[Dave]

I think the game works similiar to what you propose already, as others have observed.

One of the main motivating reasons cited for your change is that 'road' is an alias of 'grassland', which as you say doesn't seem to make much sense. However this is more a terminology issue than anything: it might make sense for us to change things around a little so that we call it 'flatland' instead of 'grassland', but this is a minor issue.

We also do allow terrains to be a combination of various terrains. However we make it choose both the best movement and the best defense. I agree that worst movement would seem to make sense in most cases, though there is a clear exception to this rule: bridges.

We might just make it choose the worst movement anyway, or we might make it so there is a choice when creating terrain aliases of 'choose best movement' vs 'choose worst movement'.

David

[JW]

or we might make it so there is a choice when creating terrain aliases of 'choose best movement' vs 'choose worst movement'.

I think this would be optimal.