Brewery should also produce light beer

[Martin Quinson]

The big inn can still produce the output of the inn and of the tavern, but the brewery cannot produce what the micro-brewery does.

This is rather annoying since it requests the player to keep some micro-brewery somewhere on the map, even if he is past this point of development already.

[Nasenbaer (nasenbaer)]

I vote against this idea. Actually the current way is intended to add some borders to the barbarian economy. Unfortunally it seems the idea of making every building backward compatible is coming up every few years. We can of course restart the discussion - I am quite sure, there will be - as the last few times - people sharing your opinion as well as people sharing my opinion. ;)

Basically a change to make every building backward compatible would lead to a different playing strategy:

-> At the moment you have to check the economy for whether one or the other ware is needed and take care to upgrade buildings resp. to build up new buildings to always have the correct amount of each productionsite. The leveling of the workers is just one minor part of this, but the main focus is on monitoring the economy for a good balance of productionsites.

-> With only backward compatible buildings, this interesting part of the game would be lost. Than the play would just upgrade the building as soon as the worker has reached the next level.

For me Widelands is about economy balancing and monitoring - this is what makes the game fun, so my vote against this change as against all other backward compatiblity changes,

[SirVer (sirver)]

I agree with Nasenbaer. More specifically aboout the brewery, I enjoy that you have to keep them balanced with your extending of the mines. You'll need less and less beer and more and more strongbeer, but it is actually hard to always have the correct amount of breweries of the correct sort.

Also, I am still very sad that we made the inns backwards compatible... I feel we lost something for the game in the process.

+1 for wontfix.

[Martin Quinson (mquinson)]

I fully understand your arguments, and kinda agree on them for myself. But I opened the bug because my 8-old boy was struggling with the game and I though we could make it easier for him.

Could we think of a difficulty level or something, so that the game balance can be made interesting for hardcore gamers as well as for kids, maybe?

[SirVer (sirver)]

mmh, that is really hard. games suitable for kids usually do not have a lot of breadth, but can still can have a lot of depth to it. Think angry bird - simple mechanics, easy to understand, fun to play for a novice. But the skill in the game seems to be ever increasing.

Widelands has a lot of breath and a lot of depth - I think you can start out just playing casually, but the game punishes you really quickly: you run out of some stuff or you get lots of traffic jams. The player adapts and learns - acquiring some more breath, but in the same time going deeper into the game. I think this is pretty fundamental for Widelands, I would not know how to simplify this process.

One possibility could be to introduce a simple tribe, with few buildings and less dependencies. But this tribe would be very easy....

For now, the best I can say is: Play atlanteans - they are the easiest tribe to play casually... When in doubt, build more farms.

[Launchpad Janitor (janitor)]

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

[SirVer (sirver)]

Do not think we can do something about this without deluting the game.