Go in Wesnoth

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Hammerfritz
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Go in Wesnoth

Post by Hammerfritz »

Greetings, People of Wesnoth!

Time has come for me to publish another piece of UMC, the "WesGo" Era. WesGo aims at approximating the strategy classic Go (囲碁 / 圍棋 / 바둑), introducing a few different types of recruitable pieces and terrains as well as hex field gameplay, under the theme of lords rivaling for land. Includes era and mp-mod for playing on common wesnoth maps, and a custom scenario ’Goban’ for rather classical Go (no terrain-, piece- and income variations) on hex fields. Player and piece balancing is incomplete, I am grateful for feedback!

EDIT: Addressed the problems found by joo and Aumpa
Last edited by Hammerfritz on May 9th, 2018, 7:49 pm, edited 3 times in total.
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Transfermium
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Re: Go in Wesnoth

Post by Transfermium »

Seems interesting.
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Hammerfritz
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Re: Go in Wesnoth

Post by Hammerfritz »

I just updated WesGo, tweaking the balancing and decreasing the lag that occurs when high numbers of pieces are present on the board.
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joo
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Re: Go in Wesnoth

Post by joo »

This is an interesting idea. While playing, I found two issues with the current implementation:

Firstly, on maps such as Fallenstar Lake which have terrain hexes beyond the playable area of the map, pieces on the map edge bordering those unplayable hexes become automatically alive, because it seems the same hexes count as liberties. For example, in the situation below, the Red town is not captured even when surrounded by Blue forts (even after Blue's turn ends):

Image

Is this intended behaviour? If so, I would suggest that it is not optimal, as it makes it trivial for a group to live just by touching the edge, unlike how Go usually works.

Secondly, when the game ends, it appears that all players receive a victory message even when they have fewer points than another player. For example, in the following game:

Image
Image
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Both test cases used WesGo 1.1.0 on BfW 1.12.6.
Aumpa
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Re: Go in Wesnoth

Post by Aumpa »

Thanks for making this, Hammerfritz.

joo and I have enjoyed playing both Wesnoth and go against each other, so it was fun discover WesGo. We played a game using the custom Goban map for a nice game of hex-go, and then we tried a game on Isar's Cross using 2 moves per turn.

Image

It was our fault for choosing white and black team colors. They don't have very good visibility on the terrain of Isar's Cross. Visual clarity was a little challenging besides that, though. With two unit types per team, and the various terrain types, it felt like a bit of a strain to look over the whole board to assess the position, especially in the later game. I feel like WesGo has more potential for repeated play if it could be simplified for visual clarity. I might make a variation of the Goban map by adding just a few mountains and forests.
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Hammerfritz
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Re: Go in Wesnoth

Post by Hammerfritz »

Firstly, thank you so much for both of your elaborate comments and kind words on WesGo!
joo wrote: Firstly, on maps such as Fallenstar Lake which have terrain hexes beyond the playable area of the map, pieces on the map edge bordering those unplayable hexes become automatically alive, because it seems the same hexes count as liberties.
Regarding the first issue: Indeed, this is not how Go works and I should fix this! As you might have guessed from me not answering right away, I wasn't that active recently, so I might need a while if I don't find a quick solution.
EDIT: Experimented with one or two possibilities, but none were actually working. I understand however that in 1.13.xx there seems to be an easy solution to this problem already. Regardless of this, I uploaded a new version addressing the other two issues.
joo wrote: Secondly, when the game ends, it appears that all players receive a victory message even when they have fewer points than another player. For example, in the following game:
Ew...I actually noticed that, but due to it not changing the game itself, it was at the bottom of my priority list, and eventually I forgot again. But since it's a bit embarrassing, I'll see what I can do :D
EDIT: I went for a quick and dirty solution on this, since again, there seems to be something easier in 1.13.xx. Currently, only the player with the fewest points is shown the defeat window, which is totally fine in 1vs1, but might seem odd with more players.
Aumpa wrote: Visual clarity was a little challenging besides that, though. With two unit types per team, and the various terrain types, it felt like a bit of a strain to look over the whole board to assess the position, especially in the later game. I feel like WesGo has more potential for repeated play if it could be simplified for visual clarity. I might make a variation of the Goban map by adding just a few mountains and forests.
I opted for the small villages and forts since larger pieces just made the board look ugly and kind of blocked the view on the map itself. But making them and their team-color portions larger is easily done, I'll get to work on that too.
EDIT: Changed the sprites to something else, hope this makes playing more comfortable.

Also, if you have good ideas for Goban variations, I'd be happy to include them into the package!

Greez!
In general, speaking is a free action that you can perform even when it isn’t your turn.

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