Shouldn't a STONE CASTLE provide more defense than a wooden palisade?

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TrashMan
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Shouldn't a STONE CASTLE provide more defense than a wooden palisade?

Post by TrashMan »

AS the thread name implies.
I find it odd they have the exact same defense values
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Re: Shouldn't a STONE CASTLE provide more defense than a wooden palisade?

Post by Konrad2 »

Easy explanation, build them in a way that one is not superior to the other. 'Stone caste' and 'wooden palisade' does not include how they are made.
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Re: Shouldn't a STONE CASTLE provide more defense than a wooden palisade?

Post by Iris »

Game abstractions (also known as WINR). You'll find this kind of thing in pretty much every strategy game.
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Re: Shouldn't a STONE CASTLE provide more defense than a wooden palisade?

Post by gnombat »

I think (this was long before I started playing the game) in the beginning all castles were stone, and then some of them were changed to different materials as people created new graphics.

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Re: Shouldn't a STONE CASTLE provide more defense than a wooden palisade?

Post by Sadaharu »

TrashMan wrote: February 28th, 2019, 5:08 pm AS the thread name implies.
I find it odd they have the exact same defense values
Defence just implies the chance to hit somebody. It's not armour.
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Re: Shouldn't a STONE CASTLE provide more defense than a wooden palisade?

Post by TheGreatRings »

I wouldn't mind giving stone castles greater defensive advantages over wooden ones (sort of like hills and mountains have different defensive values IIRC). But I don't think its essential.

By necessity, the game simplifies/abstracts some things, as noted above. Also, a wooden vs stone castle will probably provide equal amounts of cover against an archer or a charging knight. The difference would only be significant, I would guess, against fire or heavy artillery in real life. That and stone, while being harder to build with, will last longer in the long term.
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Re: Shouldn't a STONE CASTLE provide more defense than a wooden palisade?

Post by Dixie »

Well seriously for there to be any sort of difference for stone vs wood, destroying castles would have to be a mechanic in the game. Or infiltration maybe. And you might not be able to fight someone in the castle in melee from outside the wall (and vice-versa). And being in the castle might give a bonus to ranged accuracy, and, and, and... and then castles are so complex and intricate that it actually deteriorates the gaming experience.
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Re: Shouldn't a STONE CASTLE provide more defense than a wooden palisade?

Post by josteph »

Bonus to ranged accuracy sounds like it could fit right in: most existing factions get a terrain defense bonus on hills/castles, some new faction could receive from those terrains an accuracy boost instead of a defense boost. For example, maybe that faction would have 30% defense everywhere, but would have magical while in castles or mountains and marksman while on hills. Could work...
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Re: Shouldn't a STONE CASTLE provide more defense than a wooden palisade?

Post by Sadaharu »

josteph: where would it end? Because if you do that for one terrain you have to do it for all terrains. And how would the different types of terrain the attacker and defender are on interact with each other? It's the sort of thing that fits in better in a real-time game than in a turn-based one, I think.

And it'd be such a major change it'd simply take Wesnoth at least into 1.16 straightaway.
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Re: Shouldn't a STONE CASTLE provide more defense than a wooden palisade?

Post by Iris »

The gameplay rules are supposed to be simple. The existence of hybrid terrains with different bonuses/penalties to stats depending on worst/best terrain in the same hex (e.g. snowy hills forest) is already such a stretch for the system, complicating things further by altering weapon specials depending on where the unit is sitting on would really take things to a wholly different level.

It's a fun idea for UMC for sure, but for mainline it'd be best left as a possibility for 2.0 with some more thought put into it to make it more intuitive and consistent across the board.
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Re: Shouldn't a STONE CASTLE provide more defense than a wooden palisade?

Post by josteph »

Yes, as shadowm says, I was thinking of this as an idea for UMC, not for mainline. I don't think this idea should be retrofitted into the existing factions; I just think it could be interesting to design a new (UMC) faction that would have the same terrain defense everywhere but different damage points on its attacks depending on terrain. This way, that faction will buffed on castles/mountains not by reducing the amount of damage it incurs but by increasing the amount of damage it deals, without making the rules too different from what they are now.

I hope it's clearer now what I have in mind, but if not, never mind. It's just an idea. :)
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Re: Shouldn't a STONE CASTLE provide more defense than a wooden palisade?

Post by shevegen »

> You'll find this kind of thing in pretty much every strategy game.

The problem is not choosing things because they are simple, but making decisions that are not making a lot of sense.

An example I can give is that wesnoth does not handle ammunition, e. g. archers having infinite arrows. While I
understand that this simplifies the game, I just don't think it is realistic in any way.

And here I also agree with TrashMan - in reallife steel should be stronger than wood. A game should ideally try
to respect simple rules of physics and material sciences; otherwise it becomes implausible and not realistic.

You can, by the way, still find simple and simplistic rules without making the game more complicated. It just is
odd if the explanation decouples itself from physics completely.

> The gameplay rules are supposed to be simple. The existence of hybrid terrains with different
> bonuses/penalties to stats depending on worst/best terrain in the same hex (e.g. snowy hills
> forest) is already such a stretch for the system, complicating things further by altering weapon
> specials depending on where the unit is sitting on would really take things to a wholly different level.

IMO I don't think it would be a huge problem. You could add simple terrain modifiers for example. I have
no problem if the game remains simple, but it still creates strange situations that do not make a whole
lot of sense to me either.

> I don't think this idea should be retrofitted into the existing factions; I just think it could be interesting to
> design a new (UMC) faction

Actually it would confuse me even more than different terrains. ;)

I did however had prefer the somewhat more complicated add-ons, in particular skill trees and hero
branching where we can pick between different paths for these units. These were fun, and were not
available in mainline wesnoth, which made the mainline less interesting (to me) than these add-ons.
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Re: Shouldn't a STONE CASTLE provide more defense than a wooden palisade?

Post by Tad_Carlucci »

If you think it should be easy, then put together a changset and submit a PR. You might find it easier for your changes be accepted into the core/mainline game if you get a few years experience on the idea as UMC.

Wesnoth is a tile-based strategy game. If you want realism, you should look at a 3D shooter or a simulator. Do you write letters to Sid Meier about how non-sensical and artificial his technology tree is? Have you gotten FreeCiv to fix it?

Units in Wesnoth are an abstract thing. For story purposes, while often treated as comodities, a unit can be a unique individual. But in game-play, it's best to think of a unit as representative of a military unit (brigade, division, squad, ...).

Consider a single unit, a company of 100 archers, which sets upon a single unit, a 6-man squad armed with assault rifles. My bet is, unless the terrain is against them, the archers will win every time.
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Re: Shouldn't a STONE CASTLE provide more defense than a wooden palisade?

Post by Iris »

Tad_Carlucci wrote: March 9th, 2019, 3:31 pm If you think it should be easy, then put together a changset and submit a PR. You might find it easier for your changes be accepted into the core/mainline game if you get a few years experience on the idea as UMC.
To clarify, there’s basically no chance gameplay-impacting changes of that magnitude would ever be accepted as a PR unless expressly requested by the development team as part of a preexisting agreement to make such a change. The community should always be the first to test out this kind of thing since there’s very few developers left anymore who have an in-depth understanding of the game’s design philosophy (as a game in the general sense, not as a piece of software that also happens to be a videogame) and they simply don’t have the time to test changes to a system that took literally years to consolidate into the game you know today.

On that note...
shevegen wrote: March 9th, 2019, 1:36 pm IMO I don't think it would be a huge problem. You could add simple terrain modifiers for example. I have no problem if the game remains simple, but it still creates strange situations that do not make a whole lot of sense to me either.
The person who posted screenshots of Wesnoth 0.1 above is correct to point out that terrains were reskinned over time. Back when Wesnoth started out there was exactly one version of each base terrain type with no graphical variations, so there wasn't such a thing as a difference between a beach and a desert or a tropical forest and a pine forest. These things came up later on organically as part of an effort to make the game more aesthetically pleasing, not more strategically varied. You’ll find that the amount of graphical variations has become so huge over time, it’s also becoming hard (especially for people with different vision/perception) to keep track of what is what, and several have suggested implementing a “strategic view” of sorts to solve that problem. Increasing the number of possible terrain modifiers instead of decreasing it is definitely not a step in the right direction.
shevegen wrote: March 9th, 2019, 1:36 pmI did however had prefer the somewhat more complicated add-ons, in particular skill trees and hero branching where we can pick between different paths for these units. These were fun, and were not available in mainline wesnoth, which made the mainline less interesting (to me) than these add-ons.
If you think certain Wesnoth add-ons are more fun than the core game then that’s your opinion, but if people keep finding these add-ons despite Wesnoth being so niche and obscure in the first place (and its add-ons exponentially so), then I reckon the dev team must have done something right with the current design even if you personally feel it doesn’t make sense.

Anyway, this thread is now becoming a rehash of past discussions we’ve had in the Ideas forum (especially about these), which is a bit disappointing.
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Re: Shouldn't a STONE CASTLE provide more defense than a wooden palisade?

Post by otzenpunk »

TrashMan wrote: February 28th, 2019, 5:08 pm AS the thread name implies.
I find it odd they have the exact same defense values
What about villages? Shouldn't "dwarven-style" stone villages get better protection than ordinary wooden villages? And shouldn't villages with straw roofs be especially vulnerable to fire attacks? Of course, they could. But they don't necessarily have to. I'm perfectly fine with having just one type of castle terrain in the rules.
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