Randomizer settings

[LPhillips]

Hi, would you guys mind giving us a run-down of the poor/normal/good/powerful city production settings? I don't know what to expect, and testing has really thrown me off. Maybe you could also open the matter for discussion? I doubt anyone expects to set "Powerful" production and see Heavy Cavalry in the city, nor to set "Normal" and find one player's cities full of scouts and crows. Thanks in advance!

[SnotlinG]

Sure

This has been changed between each version of the game to make it easier to understand, so it doesnt sound good if it makes no sense at all now

Anyway, you have like this:
poor = level 1 unit
normal = level 1-2 unit
good = level 2-3 unit
powerful = level 3-4 unit

Level is more or less how many turns it will take to build a unit. So a heavy cav is a level 2 unit.

[LPhillips]

Maybe you could change it to take ranges of units on the list, instead of their production times?

For example, I don't think it is debatable that "level 1" units vary wildly. No one would argue that a Scout and a Wood-Elf are interchangable here. In fact, 6 3-turn units are listed lower than the 2-turn Wizard.

This is my proposal: Set the units for each category specifically. I'm just ranking them by cost here, but if you adjust costs later then any cost-based secondary programming may produce errors at that time. That is why I suggest adding them manually, and then later any adjustments can be made manually as needed.

Poor: Scout>Crow
Normal: Orc>Wood Elf
Good: Eagle>Battering Ram
Very Good: Scorpion>Sandworm
Powerful: Elemental>Archon.
Very Powerful: Demon>Dragon.

The extra categories would give mapmakers a lot of control over what we're looking for in a city. More importantly, the unit-specific settings will eliminate our current problems. The current system is unusable for mapmaking. It's simply a game breaker when one person pulls Catapults and another pulls Demons. It's equally bad when one person gets 3 cities full of scouts and crows, while another is lucky enough to get useful combat units.

Beyond all of this, I'd suggest giving players the option to set a "unit pool" for a city, where they select a few units (say 10) for random production to pull from. But this would just be a fun extra, not a priority in my opinion.

[SnotlinG]

YEs good idea, maybe it is too wide gap in the randomization as it is currently.
It is not strictly by production time though, but by an internal level value. But maybe it is better to change it to go by cost instead.Will think about this

Beyond all of this, I'd suggest giving players the option to set a "unit pool" for a city, where they select a few units (say 10) for random production to pull from. But this would just be a fun extra, not a priority in my opinion.

This is almost implemented already, you can limit a cityproduction now in the mapeditor, and it will then only pick production from those when generated at the gamestart (still taking consideration to poor, normal etc though)

[LPhillips]

YEs good idea, maybe it is too wide gap in the randomization as it is currently.
This is almost implemented already, you can limit a cityproduction now in the mapeditor, and it will then only pick production from those when generated at the gamestart (still taking consideration to poor, normal etc though)

That is true, but the important distinction is that the player is also only free to buy those units. If the randomizer were a bit less random as discussed, then one could do exactly as you say with no worries.

[KGB]

Thanks for this updated information. I'm finishing up the 0.8 version of Bullrun and I will want to review all the settings for all the cities.

I like LPhillips suggestion of using gold ranges rather than turn ranges since the difference between a Scout and a Dwarf is so much money and yet both are 1 turn units.

KGB

[SnotlinG]

What gold ranges would you suggest for:
Poor:
Normal:
Good:
Powerful:

I do not think I will be adding extra categories. Changing from turn to gold-range is a small change, Adding extra categories are a lot of work...

[KGB]

SnotlinG,

How about

Poor: 0-200 (1 max unit, total 200)
Normal: 200-550 (2 max units, total 700)
Good: 551-1050 (3 max units, total 1200)
Powerful:1051+ (4 max units, total 2400)

You'll note that 200 is included in 2 categories. Thus a Hv Inf can be in a Poor or Normal city. Seems reasonable I don't think the Hv Inf unit is that big of a key unit and it makes tougher neutrals since it does defend well.

The Total value is the sum of all units in the city since sometimes you'll include more than 1 unit (normal/good/powerful).

I made normal range as high as 550 (Ram) because I consider the 2 turn units less than 600 to be specialized terrain units (Serpent in water, Giant in hills, Ram in City, Hv Calv in Open, WolfRider in woods/swamp) and thus more normal than good. This also helps keep the pillage values relatively in line between the best/worst in that category and in the good category. If someone wants to argue the Scorpion belongs in the specialized terrain units and this is more normal than good you won't get a big argument from me but I rarely pillage Scorpions and often pillage the other 2 turn units I put in the normal range.

I restricted Powerful to be Unicorn and above which are basically strong stack bonus units or good meat units for hero stacks. These are the most important units in the game so it's important they are in their own category so that a city marked as powerful means you know you are getting something worthwhile. Again if someone wants to argue that Red Dragons/Devils/Grand Archons should not appear in Powerful (and thus must be manually placed by a map maker) you won't get a big argument from me.

KGB

P.S. It would also be nice if the code could try and get the values of gold for every city in a category to be roughly equal. For example the total gold value for a good city is 1200. Then the game would place at least 1 good unit in the city then fill some other slots with lower value units until it gets within 100 gold of 1200. So for example if it placed an 800 gold spider it could also add a 300 gold elf to reach 1100. Or a 1050 Elemental could also have a 100 gold Lt Infantry or a 600 gold scorpion could have a 425 gold Dwarf and a 100 gold Crow.

[Moonknight]

KGB, I like those ranges, i would maybe even make the poor range only go to 100, narrowing it down to just Crow, Scout, and Lt Infantry (versus those 3 + Orcs and Heavy Infantry).

As you stated yourself, neutral Heavy Infantry are no push overs in castles, especially with any kind of wall defense in play.

[SnotlinG]

To make it easy and quick to implement its better that units are not shared in the categories.

So I think:
Poor: 0- 100 goldcost
Normal: 101-550
Good 551 - 1050
Powerful 1051-1500 (excluding Dragons, Devil & Grand archon)

Poor would get 1 unit from poor category
Normal would get 1 unit from poor category + 1 unit from normal category
Good would get 1 unit from poor category + 1 unit from good category
Powerful would get 1 unit from normal category + 1 unit from powerful category
This would mean its not as good to plunder good/powerful cities anymore, since they wont have 3-4 units, but a max of 2 units...

I think that would be not too much work for a pretty good change. What do you think?