Barbarians Campaign: small suggestions for improvement

[Kristin]

First part:
- A notice that one can accelerate the speed by pressing page-up would be nice because there is really not much to do while waiting for the lumberjacks to be built.
- The story texts are very atmospheric, but there presentation is a bit annoying: they interrupt the attempt to play in short intervals. I would prefer these texts in fewer bigger portions.
- Two quarries are a overkill for these 3 stones

Second part:
- There is the objective to build "military buildings like sentries and strongholds" - but strongholds are not yet possible to build (not in the menu)
- why do we have to build a charcoal burner, if shortly after we build a cole mine?

[Hans Joachim Desserud (hjd)]

Regarding page up to increase speed: it is already mentioned in the general tutorial (and in the first Empire campaign map), and since we already have some overlap I'd rather see we didn't add more. (Some overlap is natural since the tutorial was added a long time after the early campaign maps was in place. See also bug 1106132 for more of my thoughts on this)

I agree two quarries are overkill.

I get your point about mentioning military buildings the player cannot build. On the other hand I kind of liked that it let you know there are other buildings and you don't have to build sentries every time you want to expand. The objective text might be the wrong place for that though.

Charcoal burner: demonstrating different ways of producing coal?

Btw, please file separate bug reports another time. It's going to be hard to keep a track of the discussion here, and to decide what to do with the status if one element is fixed, but the others aren't.

[Kristin (ha-kripo)]

page up:
I'm not sure but I think the Barbarian's campaign has to be played before the Empire campaign. But even when some players already heard about accelerating game speed by page up, I think it's better to repeat it than to have players who don't know it, because they would most likely lose fun when they have to look at lumberjacks to be built and have nothing to do for minutes.

[Hans Joachim Desserud (hjd)]

>Barbarian's campaign has to be played before the Empire campaign
Yes, it does. That is a fair point. I think my greatest fear here is that the game keep telling players things they already know over and over, which makes them tune out and miss the rest of the instructions. It should still be possible to repeat things, but I think how it is phrased will be crucial here.

[fuchur (fuchur77)]

Suggestion: the two quarries could be used to introduce the dismantle feature.

Message (something like this): Don't you think one stonemason can handle these stones alone? We could have used the building materials for more important buildings. Try to get back at least some of them by dismantling one of the quarries.

[SirVer (sirver)]

Setting to incomplete for bug sweeping.

[Launchpad Janitor (janitor)]

[Expired for widelands because there has been no activity for 60 days.]

[SirVer (sirver)]

wl-zocker, IIRC you are adressing campaign issues right now, right? Do you want to look into this? If not, feel free to just unassign yourself again.

[GunChleoc (gunchleoc)]

The "strongholds" reference should already be gone, since I did a cleanup on that one a while ago.

[wl-zocker (wl-zocker)]

Actually, I am working on the tutorials, but since there is some overlap with the campaigns, I have had a look at them as well.

The only new thing the first campaign introduces is the forester (and a lot of story). I do not think we have to make the player learn these things twice. I see five possibilities:
1) Remove the first campaign. Tell the story at the beginning of the second campaign (the map would have to be adjusted) and introduce the forester in the tutorial (although that might be too much).
2) As above, but introduce the forester at the beginning of the second campaign (now the first one).
3) Make the first campaign a story-only campaign where the player has to do nothing. That way, he could skip the story part when he is not interested in it. Put the forester a) into the tutorial or b) into the second campaign.
4) Keep everything as it is.

My favorite is 2, because a story-only campaign seems a bit strange to me.

- Dismantling will be explained in the basic tutorial.
- The story texts currently appear after a defined amount of time, no matter what the player does. If we remove the first campaign, they would appear in a block at the beginning of the second campaign.

Actually, I wanted to create a mining tutorial, but the second campaign explains almost everything. So I will add a message box explaining geologists there (they do not anymore appear in the basics tutorial) and be fine with that. I will also note that charcoal burners are ineffictive (if there is no such note).
One more thing I noticed: The text about enhancing mines appears when the worker is not experienced enough and the mine is not empty. Although it mentions that additional workers are required, it would be nice if it came not up so early. Does mine:get_workers("chief-miner") return the current worker so that I can use this?

[GunChleoc (gunchleoc)]

Yes, story only would be weird.

Maybe we can add some of the messages of part 1 as an intro, and tie the others to specific triggers in the scenario? This is the way it has been done for the Atlanteans.

[GunChleoc (gunchleoc)]

Fixed in build19-rc1.