natural disasters

[Peter John Hartman]

this is a wishlist entry.

motivation. i often find the world to be a little to safe and sound, especially when playing against the computer ai. what would liven things up a bit would be natural disasters, e.g.

* volcanic eruptions
* floods
* droughts
* barbarian hordes (ok not natural, but a disaster)
* tornados

natural disasters would require you to keep an eye on your home territory, fix broken roads, and so forth; you can't rest on your laurels.

along with natural disasters, we could have natural fortunes, e.g.,

* finding lost treasure in the mountains
* fertile year for crops
* fertile year for fish

and so on.

[Astuur (wolfsteinmetz)]

I'd like to support this and have also thought along that lines many times.
There will be more urgent things that need looking after for quite some time, I'm afraid, but in principle
I like the idea. --
Some disasters should apply to all the map, but adding some unpredictably moving pests (like locusts or tornados) might also be nice.
This feature should be a toggle -- I wouldn't really want any of this in a multiplayer game.

[Nicolai Hähnle (nha)]

Not to spoil too much or anything, but take a look at the new atlantean campaign...

For "free games" (both singleplayer and multiplayer) I am squarely opposed to any such feature, because it's just silly to have a totally random game-changing element in a game where the typical session takes quite long. Only carefully constructed scenarios should have such disasters (though it is of course conceivable to have multiplayer scenarios as well, either coop or human vs. human).

[Nicolai Hähnle (nha)]

I would like to add that yes, playing against the computer feels a bit too safe these days, but the correct way to fix that problem is to improve the computer player's AI.

[Peter John Hartman (peterjohnhartman)]

On Fri, Mar 11, 2011 at 08:20:06AM -0000, Nicolai Hähnle wrote:
> Not to spoil too much or anything, but take a look at the new atlantean
> campaign...
>
> For "free games" (both singleplayer and multiplayer) I am squarely
> opposed to any such feature, because it's just silly to have a totally
> random game-changing element in a game where the typical session takes
> quite long. Only carefully constructed scenarios should have such
> disasters (though it is of course conceivable to have multiplayer
> scenarios as well, either coop or human vs. human).
>

I'm not so sure it needs to be looked at this way. one thing an economy
should be able to do is recover from disasters and an economy that recovers
from disasters in a better way than another economy will be a better economy.
hence, a disaster is, although probabilistic, not completely foreign to the
idea of building a decent economy. it might also encourage us to think
about other kinds of building types, e.g., a road re-builder, a fire dept,
etc.

peter

--
sic dicit magister P
PhD Candidate
Collaborative Programme in Ancient and Medieval Philosophy
University of Toronto
http://individual.utoronto.ca/peterjh

[Nicolai Hähnle (nha)]

The point is that disasters would be perceived as highly unfair, unless they affect all players equally. Things like floods, volcanoes, tornadoes, etc. would affect the player closest to the event disproportionately, and would thus be considered unfair (even if, in principle, the probability of being hit by them is equal for all players). Something like a drought could be applied equally throughout the world, but then again, its "Wow factor" is pretty much non-existent, so why bother.

If you have a disaster, it should be spectacular in some way. Not like those "UFO disasters" in Transport Tycoon Deluxe, for example. Those are pretty ridiculous. Spectacular disasters are cool, but they only make sense in scenarios. Again, I point you to the new campaign of the atlanteans.

[Astuur (wolfsteinmetz)]

From #2

>For "free games" (both singleplayer and multiplayer) I am squarely opposed to any such feature,
>because it's just silly to have a totally random game-changing element in a game where the typical session >takes quite long.

I can't follow you here, Nicolai.
Especially for singleplayer it would be nice to have.
And the reason is exaclty that a typical session takes quite long.
So a little disturbance is quite welcome.
The AI won't grunt about "unfair" -- and if the players does, he ought to switch it off. :)

Besides -- Disaster don't have to be totally random.
Fires could punish those, that have built their houses too close to each other and too few wells.
Pests could stop, when they no longer can jump from farm to farm,
Poor harvests could be caused by fumes from smelters and smithies too close.
Crowds of rats plundering the warehouse stocks could form if you have too much food lying around at your flags -- and so on.

Finally,
Not all players play WL to "win"!
I sometimes play as single player and don't even enable any AI -- just trying to find the "ideal"
setup for an economy (numeric relation of production sites, vicinity, road system) ----
or simply to look at the li'l chaps and smile.
Putting some thoughts into a recover capability (post-desaster) could be an extra thrill.

But okay... most players will play WL competitively only, and there you're right with the "unfair" argument -
though nobody needs to enable the feature....

[SirVer (sirver)]

I am against this feature because they go against my feelings of games I mentioned very often before: 1) randomness is bad in a multiplayer game 2) there should be one set of well defined rules, options are gravy that often water down the core of the game concept.

That said I like all those ideas mentioned in the original post. I can also imagine that they are interesting to be played, but that should not go into the ruleset of widelands imho but into single player or multiplayer scenarios. Infact all those things could already be implemented using Lua scripting and I suggest making a multiplayer scenario with some of these features, we will surely ship it with widelands!

I always quote from blizzard games, as I know them best: starcraft I had many play modes (greed, king of the hill, skirmish...) while warcraft III and starcraft II have only one tightly defined set of rules. But those games offer great scripting support, so from Warcraft III there came a fun map (Defense of the ancients [1]) which was so succesfull that it was in fact turned into a game of it's own, including tournaments and fully featured reprogrammings. I think this is the way to go: provide widelands - The Game and offer enough flexibility to let users make spectacular fun maps that expand on the rule sets of the game.

+1 for Won't fix.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Defense_of_the_Ancients

[Peter John Hartman (peterjohnhartman)]

On Mon, Mar 14, 2011 at 09:51:02AM -0000, SirVer wrote:
> I am against this feature because they go against my feelings of games I
> mentioned very often before: 1) randomness is bad in a multiplayer game
> 2) there should be one set of well defined rules, options are gravy that
> often water down the core of the game concept.
>
> That said I like all those ideas mentioned in the original post. I can
> also imagine that they are interesting to be played, but that should not
> go into the ruleset of widelands imho but into single player or
> multiplayer scenarios. Infact all those things could already be
> implemented using Lua scripting and I suggest making a multiplayer
> scenario with some of these features, we will surely ship it with
> widelands!
>
> I always quote from blizzard games, as I know them best: starcraft I had
> many play modes (greed, king of the hill, skirmish...) while warcraft
> III and starcraft II have only one tightly defined set of rules. But
> those games offer great scripting support, so from Warcraft III there
> came a fun map (Defense of the ancients [1]) which was so succesfull
> that it was in fact turned into a game of it's own, including
> tournaments and fully featured reprogrammings. I think this is the way
> to go: provide widelands - The Game and offer enough flexibility to let
> users make spectacular fun maps that expand on the rule sets of the
> game.
>
> +1 for Won't fix.
>
> [1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Defense_of_the_Ancients

I'm glad this has garnered some discussion. Let me just dig in and add a
new hue to the pitch. A few things:

1. Consider the fact that Widelands is an *economy* game, where the goal,
unlike with many other warcraft-like games, isn't to conquer but to develop
a good economy. Part of building a good economy is disaster recovery, cf.
simcity.

2. There is already an element of randomness related to this: player start
location, and whether or not you have gold in this mountain or trees over
there, etc.

I think it should be worked into the game as a whole, ultimately, where one
has to *plan* for disasters and not just assume that their homearea is
perfectly safe and sound and then move on to conquest the rest of the world.

The primary motivation for me is that the ai is sooo dumb. It gets stuck in
little patterns. Disasters would allow them to "unstick" themselves. It
would also prevent the sort of massive world conquer that always seems to
happen to me: I defend up one border, build up a good enough economy, and
then just start conquering the other border and never stop.

Ok, that's the second pitch.

Peter

--
sic dicit magister P
PhD Candidate
Collaborative Programme in Ancient and Medieval Philosophy
University of Toronto
http://individual.utoronto.ca/peterjh

[SirVer (sirver)]

to #8:

1: i disagree, i feel disaster recovery is not part of the things that I see in the core game philosophy.

2: I disagree again becaue the player start locations and resources are defined by the map designer and the starting locations are indeed always the same. So no randomness here as I define it.

I stay to my point that this should be left to scripters. Why don't you give it a shot :P

[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)]

I still believe this should happen in multiplayer scenarios. In fact, we have at least one that has rising vulcano lava now.