Cities of the Frontier - now for BfW 1.11

Discussion and development of scenarios and campaigns for the game.

Moderator: Forum Moderators

Post Reply
vghetto
Posts: 755
Joined: November 2nd, 2019, 5:12 pm

Re: Cities of the Frontier - now for BfW 1.11

Post by vghetto »

Enclave was gracious enough to send me the pbl for CotF. Thank you!

I guess that makes me the new maintainer of this project.
I will upload the fixes without any extra gameplay additions. For those changes use Wild Frontiers instead.

The branch for the CotF bugfixes can be seen under the branch called esci-bugfix.
https://github.com/virtualghetto/Wild_F ... sci-bugfix

The master branch of that repo is WF.
Argothair
Posts: 53
Joined: May 10th, 2014, 12:01 am

Re: Cities of the Frontier - now for BfW 1.11

Post by Argothair »

Well, after about six tries, I finally got through this campaign on the easiest level. As other commenters suggested, it's better to start with bowmen and/or cavalry and save spearmen for later (or skip them altogether). Cavalry are crucial for mobility, especially on frozen ground, because you can't afford to have a level 1 unit sitting in each village over the winter, and peasants aren't strong enough to hold villages by themselves. Cavalry also do just fine against most undead types (resistant to impact from the walking dead; resistant to cold from dark adepts; their swords work ok against both skeletons and ghouls). Bowmen are cheap and effective against most of the outlaws you encounter; they work well against bandits, which have no ranged attack, and they do fine against outlaws and poachers as well. It's really unclear why you would ever want to pay 75 gold and wait 6 turns to get spearmen when you could play 40 gold and wait 4 turns to get bowmen. I think the bowmen are actually *more* effective; you'll mostly be attacking the enemies, rather than passively holding ground (because if you sit still for too long the enemies will go through or around your ranks and kill your peasants or burn your production buildings, plus a new wave of enemies will be generated every several turns or so). Because you're on offense, and because most of the enemies you face are melee-oriented, you want mostly ranged units so that you can attack them where they're weak.

I enjoyed the game but I felt the difficulty was too hard and too concentrated in the winter and in the first year; once you get your first 'professional' army up and running, you're never really in danger of being militarily overwhelmed, but it's easy to get to a point where you lose enough farms that you can't support that army over the winter and you lose due to either lack of cash or due to being forced to disband your last few units in order to avoid bankruptcy.

I also really wish there was something more you could do with your economy beyond just build farms. I spent a fair amount of time building roads, stone keeps, etc. for better defense and I'm not sure it actually paid for itself; most of the time, I either was defending well outside my city limits (further toward the edge of the map than my castles) because I had a mobile reserve and wanted to kill enemies quickly before the next wave appeared, or I was defending well *inside* my city limits because I didn't have enough units left to staff all of my villages plus all of my castles. There are so many enemy skirmishers (thieves, ghosts, etc.) and so many fast enemies that are randomly generated (wolves, bats, etc.) that I really can't leave even interior villages unguarded, so that means I'm lucky if I have a peasant to shove in every village and a couple of peasants to guard my workshops, let alone spare peasants to sit on border keeps. Even when I did have a peasant handy, it frequently died to a level 2 / level 3 enemy without slowing that enemy down more than half a turn or so. The enemies aren't smart enough to maneuver for the best terrain, so even if the dead peasant preserved a nice keep hex for me to move into and fight from, I could often get similarly good advantages just by waiting for the right moment to attack.

I'm potentially interested in developing a fork of this campaign that would have a few more features -- lumberjacks, mines, fishing nets, and maybe very slightly smaller farms so that it's possible to run a road right up to the village. The goal would be to find a compromise between the laser-focused grimdark feel of Cities of the Frontier and the wild, anything-goes, roleplaying-with-quests sandbox that is Wild Frontiers. Is that something that anyone would have any interest in playing and/or testing? Does anyone have thoughts about exactly which features should go into something like that?
vghetto
Posts: 755
Joined: November 2nd, 2019, 5:12 pm

Re: Cities of the Frontier - now for BfW 1.11

Post by vghetto »

Hi,
Instead of forking CotF, would you like to maintain it and improve it going from there?
I wasn't planning on uploading CotF to 1.16.
I'll send you the pbl if you want it.

Edit: I uploaded CotF 0.6.1-6. This has a couple of old bugfixes that were already on github but I forgot to upload them to the addons server.

Personally I think it would be easier for you if you forked Wild Frontiers and clamped it down to make it more challenging.
Code-wise WF is more flexible to work with than CotF. It is compatible with 1.16 and you'd mostly need to delete/comment out/disable segments of code. CotF is more hardcoded in places, WF is more modularized.
Your call.
Argothair
Posts: 53
Joined: May 10th, 2014, 12:01 am

Re: Cities of the Frontier - now for BfW 1.11

Post by Argothair »

Maybe! What an interesting offer; thank you. I haven't been following along with the 1.16 announcements...what kinds of incompatibilities are we expecting for CotF and 1.16? Aside from incompatibilities, are there any known bugs that need fixing? I'm reasonably comfortable with WML, but I don't know any LUA and don't particularly want to learn.
vghetto
Posts: 755
Joined: November 2nd, 2019, 5:12 pm

Re: Cities of the Frontier - now for BfW 1.11

Post by vghetto »

Well, I just tried loading CotF on 1.16 and it didn't load. So you have that.
From the console messages it didn't seem like a big deal. It can be easily fixed.
Getting beyond that point, I couldn't really say what you might come up against. I don't think there will be anything major.
As for CotF on 1.14, did you experience any bugs? I think I ironed out all of the bugs that I could find.
There might be some small thing here or there that I might have missed. Let me know about them and I'll fix them.
CotF doesn't have much lua to worry about, most of that stuff is in WF.
Argothair
Posts: 53
Joined: May 10th, 2014, 12:01 am

Re: Cities of the Frontier - now for BfW 1.11

Post by Argothair »

All right, well, I can certainly give it a try. Since you weren't planning to do it anyway, and this thread has been silent for 18 months, I'm guessing I don't have a ton of rivals for the job. Send me whatever you think would be useful, and I'll do my best! Oh, and no bugs on 1.14 -- thanks for your hard work in bringing that up to speed. The only thing that might be a bug was I didn't see anything on the map that could have been the "Friends" player from the Status Table, but maybe that's not so much a bug as an unfinished feature.
vghetto
Posts: 755
Joined: November 2nd, 2019, 5:12 pm

Re: Cities of the Frontier - now for BfW 1.11

Post by vghetto »

Correct. Friends side was never fully implemented in CotF. I added them to WF.
There were other intended features by esci that weren't completed in CotF. They got done in WF. One such example is the winter calamity.
One more thing, CotF AI might behave differently in 1.16 than 1.14.
I'll PM you the pbl.
Good luck.

Edit:
This is the latest _server.pbl used for 1.14
Just fill in the passphrase that is shown in the PM and put in your email.
Either clone the branch esci-bugfix or use the latest upload CotF on the 1.14 add-ons server as your launchpad.
And you're set to go!
Argothair
Posts: 53
Joined: May 10th, 2014, 12:01 am

Re: Cities of the Frontier - now for BfW 1.11

Post by Argothair »

Thanks! I'm assuming that when you say "1.16," that's shorthand for "1.15.4, which will behave in much the same way as 1.16 once it's actually released." I don't actually see anywhere to download 1.16 yet.

I downloaded 1.15, and I saw the console errors you were talking about. I was able to fix them pretty quickly, and now the campaign at least loads, and most of the basic features seemed to work OK, although when I killed a rat I got the defeat message, so obviously some troubleshooting to do on the implementation of the victory/defeat conditions. Probably other bugs as well. But it's running -- so that's a start!

I think I will wait to use the .pbl or post my changes on github or anything like that until the campaign seems at least playable. I don't mind if people run into minor bugs and want to help me test them, but it seems silly to bother the community with a campaign that ends after the first combat or what have you. If that's strongly against Wesnoth etiquette, let me know.
vghetto
Posts: 755
Joined: November 2nd, 2019, 5:12 pm

Re: Cities of the Frontier - now for BfW 1.11

Post by vghetto »

Yeah currently 1.16 is 1.15.15.
Argothair wrote: July 28th, 2021, 2:32 am .. although when I killed a rat I got the defeat message ..
Did you update to my latest version of CotF or use my github repo? That bug was already fixed in 0.6.1-6 which I uploaded yesterday but not in 0.6.1-5 which you played and based your review on.
Argothair
Posts: 53
Joined: May 10th, 2014, 12:01 am

Re: Cities of the Frontier - now for BfW 1.11

Post by Argothair »

I'm not sure which version I was running yesterday, but I went to your repo tonight and downloaded the esci-bugfix code and it had "speaker=Hero" in the victory.cfg util. I don't believe this is correct; unless something very strange is supposed to be happening, then the code should just be "id=Hero". Speaker is for dialogue; id is for identifying which unit the filter should be searching for when determining whether the player is defeated when the die event is triggered.

Maybe you knew all that already and the two of us are just confused about version control.

Anyway, I changed speaker back to id, and now I'm getting the proper behavior. I didn't have permission to edit your repo, so I forked it to my own account on github at https://github.com/JGreenLowe/Cities_of_the_Frontier.

One more issue I noticed while checking for bugs is that it seems like the wild animals are way more aggressive and numerous in the early turns than I remember from my playtests. I guess it could be a coincidence, but I thought I'd check with you and see if you're aware of any code changes that could be influencing animal behavior.
vghetto
Posts: 755
Joined: November 2nd, 2019, 5:12 pm

Re: Cities of the Frontier - now for BfW 1.11

Post by vghetto »

I think I know what happened, your commit reversed some of the bugfixes that I had.

I'm still not sure how you managed to do that, but anyway your copy reversed the following changes due to your commit above.

0fb82373ae0b1d220469e38c977c190235414fff
79de5326c2abcbb3a75f3ea82ab3e02dfc25ba42
f2c6e8ab836eea4796c31b7aa0c7809ca3c164f8
ce7e7b18162eccab85cbe917f3bce30f4b3f5f83


bd744db222a122b736752b41a7ebbbffb44c0a57
Was the speaker/id change commited on 20th September 2020 which you reversed above and then brought back with your latest commit.
Prior to 1.15 speaker was allowed to be used as an alias for id and it got deprecated. That's why it worked on 1.14 but not on 1.16.

About animal aggression, the numbers didn't change, but I did say the AI behavior might be different on 1.16.
I'm using a different approach for AI in WF. I haven't tested CotF AI on 1.16 to see how much it differs.
Are all the animals attacking you as if it's winter, or are they standing still in place?

Edit:
Apply attached diff to make your repo up to date with the latest bug fixes so you can get on with implementing your new features :)
Attachments
changes.diff
(1.59 KiB) Downloaded 54 times
Argothair
Posts: 53
Joined: May 10th, 2014, 12:01 am

Re: Cities of the Frontier - now for BfW 1.11

Post by Argothair »

Oh, interesting! Yeah, it's probably the same number of animals, but they're all attacking me immediately, like winter or maybe even worse. I'll look into the ai settings and see what I can do. Thanks for the diff! :)
Argothair
Posts: 53
Joined: May 10th, 2014, 12:01 am

Re: Cities of the Frontier - now for BfW 1.11

Post by Argothair »

OK, looks like a new Candidate Action was added to the AI's list of choices in 1.15, and in the absence of any better options, it was instructing the animals to move toward the nearest enemy, which is always you on turn 1.

To fix it, I gave all the animals a lurker microAI that tells them to hang around in their favorite habitat (forests for wolves and spiders, water for serpents, hills for bats, grass for rats) and only attack you if you walk right up to the edge of their territory or go inside it. This seems to be working fine. The animals wind up very slightly more aggressive in the spring/summer/fall, but they're also more predictable; if you don't want to fight wolves, just stay away from the forests. I'll add some notes to the tutorial dialogue accordingly.

Then, in the winter, I tell them to ignore this behavior; hopefully they'll attack as normal then. Haven't had a chance to test that yet.

I also updated your relic names and images and so on per the diff.
shevegen
Posts: 497
Joined: June 3rd, 2004, 4:35 pm

Re: Cities of the Frontier - now for BfW 1.11

Post by shevegen »

But bats prefer caves!!!

Animal centric campaigns would be quite a lot of fun.
Argothair
Posts: 53
Joined: May 10th, 2014, 12:01 am

Re: Cities of the Frontier - now for BfW 1.11

Post by Argothair »

I mean, you're not wrong, but Cities of the Frontier doesn't have any caves, at least not that I know of. You might enjoy A New Land (which definitely has caves, as well as a similar city-building theme) or suggest to vghetto that they add caves to Wild Frontiers.

While you're here, is there anything else you'd like to see in the new version of Cities of the Frontier? I'll be adding a couple of small features and tweaking the costs of units and buildings and things.
Post Reply