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Nilla- back North

Started by Nilla, February 28, 2019, 01:58:56 AM

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Tom Sawyer

#15
Those trolls are really an issue. I have heard, the female trollets are even the worst, taking young men and so on but in version 5 or 6, I added a new suppression function to the map generator. Some people might have seen this in the loading screen. It should be better since then but maybe it's not really working.

With merchants from other mods, I would be carefully. They are often not so present here taking a long time between visits and bringing only a few resources. When it comes to supporting a settlement far north in harsh climate, it can also be a strategy to order exactly what you need, even for the 25% mark-up. Just imagine a full boatload of grain instead of a small chance to get only one or two stacks in the lucky bag of a merchant.

Tom Sawyer

I did not answer about health and the chance of diseases, @Nilla. In Ironman, these values are unchanged but it's a good question if to do this or at first how it actually works. As with the happiness and other things we can only guess or test how it's calculated. I will just write my knowledge here since your blogs are always also nice discussion threads.

In the external resources (which we can mod) are 3 chances of disease.. for healthy and unhealthy people as well as arriving nomads/merchants. Every chance is defined by 2 values (years and population) and they work probably as divisors like Luke used it in other cases too.

RandomSelection _diseaseChanceHealthy
{
   float _years = 20;
   float _population = 500;
}


In my understanding this means 1 case of disease of 500 citizens every 20 years. So, especially in early game it should be very unlikely to get hit with healthy people. Let's look at unhealthy:

RandomSelection _diseaseChanceUnhealthy
{
   float _years = 1;
   float _population = 400;
}


As we guess from the other code snipped, this is the case of a health at or lower than 80% (4 hearts) and it is 1 of 400 people every year. If this interpretation is right then it is a 25 times higher chance with a bad diet.

In simple numbers it means 0,01 % chance to get a disease for every banny every year, increased to 0,25% if unhealthy. If you have 100 unhealthy people, it's already 25% chance to get a case of disease in your town this year. Question is, should these values be changed to make things more interesting or is it actually good as it is. I was not sure back then and kept vanilla values. Would be interesting to hear your thoughts. :)

brads3

these behind the scene's formulas that LUKE uses make the game interesting but frustrate modders. you say 25% chance to get sick if un-healthy.
the formula seems to be far more complex. how un-healthy,per star drop? plus i do wonder if the un-happiness changes you made have some affect. in other words a bannie who is down to half hearts plus unhappy will be more likely to get sick than say a bannie who is very happy but have 1 less health heart.

Nilla

These values sound interesting. My feeling from all the games I've played says, that I think you've interpreted the codes right. And as far as you've seen the difference is only between 4 and 4½ star. That's pretty blunt. My guess is also that it's not the average value that counts, each individual is calculated extra.

Can this be tweaked to make the gameplay more complex (and fun at least for people like me) in a similar way, as you did with the happiness? The difference in probability between 0,01 % and 0,25 % for a disease for each Banni is already big but the values are low. Now it seems to pay off to have a perfect diet, perfectly distributed over the place but there's no difference between quite a good diet and a real miserable diet. I guess the code doesn't allow to have more steps than these two; healthy/unhealthy. Nothing in between or worse. A pity.

If my assumption is right, I find the cut between 4 and 4½ stars on the right spot. In a normal game, after the initial years, you will have no big difficulties to get 4 stars but more might be trickier on an individual basis. Maybe it would be fun to get a more visible punishment; to increase the probability say at least 10 times for the unhealthy people. It would really make it pay off to have a good diet, well distributed to every corner and enough herbalists.

First picture
Anyhow, I decided to give the ultimate challenge; "Ironman on harsh" a final chance. I had a save from my attempt with the Mini Food Port just before I started to build it. I played some years after that. Now, I will start to build a large port soon.

Second picture
It's ugly but it illustrates that not all weird things in Banished are bugs. Here are two:

The sheep pastures produce no wool! A bug? No, the limit for textiles is reached but there's no sign for it on the pasture. (Maybe it's possible to add one to the pasture)

Macker, the builder was found out in the woods on the other side of the small stream; too far away from the filled stores, so he died of starvation. The troll bug again? No, it was a man and I have never heard of these troll women who fancy young men. And besides I was careless when I searched for gold, made a mistake and clicked on one gold piece on the other side of the stream without a bridge and the obedient Macker went to get it.  :( :'(

Tom Sawyer

I have the story about Bergatrollet and Herr Mannelig from Youtube. It also can be found in Wikipedia. I have read again and she seems not so evil actually. :)

About health I had the same thoughts.. It's too simple and there should be more than one step. Best would be a higher risk with every lost heart or any other kind of scaling. But it's not possible to mod. And if we have only this one cut then I also think that from 4 to 4.5 is the right spot just because there is the difference to a managed diet or to the use of herbs. And also yes, 25 times higher sounds much but almost nothing x 25 is still almost nothing. To make the chance higher may be a good adjustment. Another thing can be to make some diseases more dangerous for a higher impact on your settlement. This usually makes events more interesting than just increasing their frequency and we have access to them.

The sheep pasture can be fixed I think. If not even to remove this textile limit there. It is actually more confusing than useful for sheep farming because not a specific wool limit.

Nilla

OK, @Tom Sawyer, I give up! It's "proved" that also female trolls might fancy handsome young men. But if I read the poem right, the troll woman tried to bribe the man but when he still didn't want to marry her, she went away. She didn't steal him. And as I said, I'm no mythology expert and the trolls I've heard of steal young girls, preferable princesses, like on the picture.

I might have cracked the code! A prosperous settlement playing Ironman on harsh. My settlement is still small but it produces quite a large surplus and I have no intentions to let it grow fast out of control. This time I follow these 3 strategies.
1. Patience! Let it grow very slow. Control the number of children. Use houses for small families. First I had only 1 person houses, now I have started to also build the turf houses for 4 people, but I might relocate young couples to the goathi and give elder couples the larger houses. Resist the temptation to take a lot of nomads.
2. Don't give one thought on happiness and health. Let them eat meat and fish, import only the cheapest.
3. Process as little as possible: Keep it simple. Sell wool instead of coats. In the other attempts, I used to smoke meat and sell it for other food categories. If I make "my classic calculation" it's profitable, mainly because it increases the value of the product. But for the Bannis mutton is as good as smoked meat or bread or fruit or anything I can buy.

We will see how long I can follow this. I feel quite comfortable. The production is much simpler, so I can reduce all micromanagement. It makes it easier to run on 5x speed. I just slow it down from time to time to look a little into the houses and to plan some extension of the settlement.

I use the large port to sell various goods and order much at the two small ports; bread, vegetables, roasted meat (the only goods you can buy for 2). At the moment I don't need to buy all they bring even when I can.

In one way it's quite a boring game, it's slow, not much is happening but on the other hand, it's very exciting to see, how long this can work.

First picture
Whole settlement. Food graph looks almost ridiculous. Hard to think it's ironman on harsh. It's not a pure Nordic game. I have decided to use the mods I've loaded as far as they make sense. You can see the town hall and hospital from Kid's Tiny mod and the hunter and forester from his Forest Outpost.

Second picture
Here are the reasons for the food graph: High production and mostly meat in the inventory.

Nilla

Yes, I definitely cracked the code. Cracked is maybe too soft; I rather blew it! 100 inhabitants. Very prosperous. It´s a rather boring fast running game, no more micromanagement, no new development. Just a few pastures, houses and barns to be built, a little manual trade, always the same. I even run 10x from time to time, so I think I will stop here. The fun part is done: Finding out if my ideas work. I guess I could go on building pastures until the map is full but repeating the same, isn´t much of a challenge.

First picture
This picture shows the most important source of supply; the pastures. Houses and barns; a lot of barns around them and forest at the edge. You can see, the people only lack two things; health and happiness.

Second picture
You may see on the production numbers, that I don´t really need these two ports to buy anything. In fact, I built the second port to get rid of export goods. I sell for coins but I rarely buy anything. This settlement certainly would need a bank! The inventory shows how this town runs; meat, too much export goods.

Third picture
My starting area and a few graphs.

Tom Sawyer

That's really impressive how your settlement grows in this setup! So, the shepherds are the Ironman champions?^^ Maybe to summarize your strategy as specializing in pasture farming, keeping things small and simple, as well as consequent abstinence from any comfort including health and happiness.

Looking how the Norse people managed their conditions, especially in Iceland and someplace else, it is actually a realistic scenario. They were also pastoral farmers mainly with sheep and cattle, had only small settlements or scattered farmsteads and a simple life without comfort. No fancy houses, big marketplaces, churches or lots of luxuries. Nice how this comes out also in Banished.

One reason why pastures are still so broken on harsh is of course that they have just no connection to the climate. This "shelter/fodder in winter mechanic" would solve it in a great way but not possible to mod and I don't want to replace cows and sheep by simple production buildings. What I already did for v 7 is reducing the output of meat. It will somehow balance it, at least in a general way. And the other thing I want to do is punishing this specialization in an unhealthy diet by increasing the chance and/or the impact of diseases as we said. This I can do now and with a test version of North 7 I have to come up soon. :)

Nilla

Yes, sheep and cattle are really the champions.

I´m looking forward to test your test version of the North. :)

A few more thoughts about the gameplay.

In the harder starts, you need to hunt a lot to get enough deer hides for clothing: A lot of hunting with the instant hunting tool. Maybe the inhabitants only need a coat every 4 years or so, but each baby needs a coat, so does each nomad and at least I want a small store, to be able to provide this. Since you need to kill 2 deer for each coat, you need a lot of deer.

The venison from the instant hunting tool is necessary at the beginning of a game, where you can´t farm from the start. Maybe 100 meat is a bit high but not all too much. It´s not always so easy to hunt this way, so I don´t want it to be (much) lower. I would rather like, that you only need 1 hide for 1 parka. Let it take longer than now to make one at the campfire, change it to be fair clothes instead of warm clothes, make them only possible to make at the campfire (the new tailor can´t make them but I think the vanilla looking tailor can) and make them uninteresting to sell. I think that this will neutralize the difficulty at the beginning.

About the pastures; Opposite to vanilla, your pastures are free to build. I don´t know if I find this so good. It´s easy to build one, if you want it bigger or locate it elsewhere, demolish it and rebuild it; no costs. After all, there is a small hut at the pasture, so I wouldn´t mind that some wood is needed. I guess, that the output is connected to the animal, not to the pasture; that it´s not possible to make an expensive pasture with a higher output. But maybe it is possible to replace the hut with a more expensive "Fähus" (like some of the pictures connected on the North thread), that can hold more animals on the same space as the normal pasture.

Now there are 3 different pastures, each adapted to a special animal, each of them of different maximum size. That´s fine with me but you can put chicken in the huge cow pasture if you want to. Why this?

Tom Sawyer

About the parka we had some thoughts here. I want to keep it as warm coat (because it is a Reindeer Parka) and also from more than 1 animal but making it less interesting for trading is a good idea. From the tailor shop it was already removed if I remember right.

At the pastures I can take a look again. I liked the idea of open pastures because it feels more realistic for me to move a sheep herd to another area without demolishing and building actions, especially over hilly terrain where the fences tend to make glitches. What I would like to add are some more reasonable costs for the small shelter, the coop and such but I could not do this. Pastures have a hard coded function to calculate the costs per surrounding tile (fence segment). I did not see a way to define a fixed amount independent of the dragged size. The only option was to remove the costs at all and to add only small things with neglectable costs. Such a Fähus would be really nice but I have no idea how to include it with reasonable costs and functions.

The different pasture styles are only for aesthetics. If I could, I would limit the animals to avoid chickens in a pasture but except of this, there is actually no reason to misuse them for the wrong animals because they are all free to build. To do this, we would need some custom select groups in addition to field, orchard and pasture. And we could also create some more interesting things with that.

In the last months I had some of such situations with new ideas and trials for acceptable workarounds but at the end impossible to include because of technical limits with the Modkit. A reason for decreasing motivation to mod further at this game. :/

Nilla

I can understand that it´s frustrating to have ideas that aren´t possible to make real, but remember; you have achieved a lot of gameplay improvements also with the limitations. :)

I can also understand the argumentation around clothes on your homepage. For me, the main reason that I asked for a change, is that it´s boring to have to hunt so much at the beginning. It´s not really difficult but you need to spend a lot of time searching for deer, that could be spent on funnier things. The venison you get "for free" fills the stores and you don´t really need to bother about much other food production at the beginning (other than for diversity). I can´t remember that I´ve ever used the trout fisher early in a game. As I said; I would find the gameplay right at the beginning more funny, if you don´t need to hunt so much for clothes. As far as I´ve seen the export of parkas is not so interesting. I don´t think, that any merchants pay the high price for it. I´ll rather keep them for my population; early and late game and sell wool/leather coats for the higher price (or in Ironman/harsh, sell wool and cowhides).

About the pastures; I like the fenceless pastures, too. I wouldn´t complain about it but it is kind of weird if the small shed would cost much more on a large pasture than on a small. But maybe a small amount of wood would be better than totally free, anyway.

Nilla

I haven't written anything lately but I have played a little. I'm still in the North. It's no way an upsetting game so I haven't blogged it; no Ironman but I want to play with the happiness, so it's Norseman. To make it a bit more challenging it's "harsh" and on a mountain map. I don't know, @Tom Sawyer if you've tweaked the map to give it even more mountains than vanilla or if I'm just "lucky". This map has only one larger spot of land to build on and the starting land isn't very big.

One main goal with this game is to use a lot of trade. I like the principle of trade in the North; the different merchants, the different prices, coins but I'm not totally happy with the whole concept; how it works when you really need to buy a lot of food.

First picture
"Harsh" is really harsh. It's June and it's snowing. No use to try farming. You can see, that it's much more land on this starting spot. The bridge to the other side had to be built fast.

Second picture
A big leap. I have 3 goals.
1. 5 harts.
2. 5 stars.
3. Full education.

1 and 2 are done and 3 on the way. I've started to enter modern times; replacing the old houses with the nice red cottages. The new doctor in the middle looks perfect in these surroundings. It doesn't look like it has something to do with happiness. I never see idlers close.

Since I can't farm, I order bread, cabbage and sometimes pepper (but the merchants don't bring much). In this game, I want to process food, so I also buy salt and sugar when I can. I sell smoked meat and fish, cheese, furs and when I have a surplus also herbs, logs, charcoal and iron ore. I have 2 small and 1 big port. It's barely enough, so I will soon build a second large port. I find that too much for 70 people.

How could this be changed to work better in a case like this? I like the different merchants, the different goods and the different prices. I like the "gambling" part; sell now to a lower price or wait until the right merchant arrive. (at the moment I sell some herbs or fur to the lower price when I'm almost out of bread or vegetables, I have much more smoked meat but I lose 33% instead of 25% here and you all know how stingy I am). In a normal settlement, where you can farm and only need to buy some seeds, animals, salt, sugar, occasional diversity goods or goods you may produce too little of at the moment, the small ports work very well.

One solution could be to let the merchants arrive more often, but I wouldn't like that. It would be annoying, especially if you don't need to trade much. What is, if they bring more goods/coins each time? It could work, but only if the ports can hold more goods. In this game (and remember I don't sell much heavy goods like logs and ore) if I want to buy the maximum 2600 food for coins, I can't buy everything at the same time. I need to wait until some is carried away, before I can buy the rest. Another option could be to keep the small ports the way they are and make two different large ports; one for selling, that could be filled with export goods; you need no space left to buy anything and one for buying from merchants that only take coins with a lot of free space to buy a lot. Maybe you could manage with 1 small and one of each sell and buy large port for some 100 inhabitants.

(Just one small thing to fix in the next update; I wanted to build a second living area. To get everyone happy I need a chapel. I planned it and paused it but the pause sign isn´t shown footprint. No big thing, just something I happened to notice)

Tom Sawyer

The mountain maps in the North are tweaked but only in terms of streams and lakes. They are not more mountainous than in base game. I think you were just lucky with the main river somehow cutting your starting area.

The quantity of imports I reworked in last version to have it more consistent. Of course, it will never be reasonable for the tiny rowboats but I wanted it in a right ratio comparing stacks of different resources by weight. One result was that a boatload became smaller in general which limits this strategy of supporting a settlement just by trading and I did not mind this effect. But I want to adjust it in new version with new resources. I agree that more food import should be possible. What I don't want is (as you also say) increasing the frequency of boats. I'm satisfied with this and more would become annoying.

I finished the mead hall last days and now want to work at the new trading post. The sketch was made in October, you might have seen it here. It fits exactly the vanilla size to replace it in starting scenery but in general it's still possible to create it with your idea of specialized export and import parts. The high timber-framed storage building to the left could be an export dock with high capacity for stocks and the other one for imports with room for livestock in this kind of barn. I'm not yet really convinced of this splitting idea but will keep it in mind. Or maybe to create them as white dummies to test the trading system with them.

Nilla

I´ll be happy to test whatever you have in mind.

I´ve played some more years. ~100 inhabitants! Now 5 trading ports; 2 small, 3 big.