Comment 8 for bug 730178

(Uhm, this got a lot longer than I had expected)

First of all, Astuur: thanks for your kind words. :) I'm not sure how good it would fit for newcomers, I rather see it as something experienced/veteran players can use to sharpen their skills. Throwing it at people who have only completed a couple of tutorials will probably be too tough. It is interesting though, because it forces you to reconsider your build order and get a better grasp on how things are connected. I even picked up a few details I had missed earlier doing this.

That said I would be against including them in the game at this stage. The AI will clearly have trouble playing with the starting conditions, and playing Hardcore against AI starting with normal HQ is probably impossible. (Though please prove me wrong, and attach a replay :p) I don't mind it if games are hard, but it should be fair and the player should have an actual chance. Presently, I doubt Hardcore is fair compared to the other starting conditions.

Somewhat off-topic, but I actually wonder how this could be used to tweak the AI to make it better at dealing with limited resources. From time to time it keeps building military buildings which are never finished which indicates some problems with supply of certain wares or priorities. Though I guess the AI coders know this better than me (any comments?). Might be worth a consideration.

As for basing a tutorial on it, I don't know. In the current state it might be a bit too strict and limiting (if you mess up the intended build order, you are basically stuck). So it should probably be tweaked to be a bit less unforgiving. Secondly, I mainly prefer tutorials where the relevant buildings are made available as they are needed. Though I'll be open to any ideas people have.

Due to popular demand, I have now created similar starting conditions for Empire and Atlanteans. Initial comments from testing: Empire needs a LOT of marble. I mainly tested on the map Impact since the HQ is placed close to both coal and iron, and I exhausted both of the two nearest stone quarries and was into the third by the time I got a working toolsmithy. I think the Atlanteans take even more time, as I was overrun and my HQ destroyed after I had produced a couple of new tools.

I have pushed the Hardcore starting conditions to a branch I will attach to this bug. The branch is owned by widelands-dev if anyone wants to do something with it or develop it further. Should be easy enough to browse the code and get the files from tribes/[tribename]/scripting/sc02_hardcore.lua . Those who compile Widelands themselves can merge the changes via bzr merge.

I mainly created the first starting condition to demonstrate how easy it is. Like SirVer says in comment #3, just copy one of the existing starting conditions, rename it and start editing. Some of the lines, I'm not exactly sure what they do, but the important thing is the lists of workers and wares. They should be pretty easy to edit and get started, even for non-programmers.

As for the comments in #6:
1) I think you can sort of do this with the configure economy, but that might not be the best tool for the job. Also note that these starting conditions have cleaned out the HQ, so you will need to produce a lot of things which you normally have.
2) I have noticed this before, but I can unfortunately not answer your question.
3) Yes, just report it and I (or someone else) will mark it Wishlist.