The Battle for Wesnoth Forums

iceiceice wrote:You can read the irc logs from the day that this change was made, but if I remember correctly we were motivated to do this because the current system seems quite confusing for newbies. Best defense / worst movement is a good system that we use for forests, why do we do something completely different for mushroom groves? The "rule" that mushroom grove doesn't get this behavior isn't written anywhere... not very newbie friendly.

What day it was? I can't really contribute effectively to the discussion if I don't know what have already been said there.

This motivation is ok, I guess... But it made sense to me that a pervasive mushroom grove could negate the movement and defense bonuses of the terrain it was on (replacing with its own movement cost and defense). I was not confused.

But I do not agree with the dwarves and khalifas capped at 40%: if we extend exceptions, then all becomes exception.

Also, more importantly, if we start capping defense in order not to change the current situation, then I do not see how map-makers will now have more options. I could accept the "mushrooms change" for the sake of more options, but then something has to change. And now we are taking the path to "not change anything".

I explain with a little example:
Mushrooms + Hills for Dwarves now is 60% and 1 mp cost
If we cap at 40% (previous defense value), then why add the mixed terrain in the first place? Simply say that mushrooms overwrite the values of the base terrain (as it was before).

If a map-maker, hearing the changes, wants to finally mix mushrooms and hills for new interesting strategic solutions, he will be soon quite disappointed to find out that nothing really changes from the previous "mushrooms take it all" era, except for units who move worse on a particular base terrain than on fungi (so swimmers, elves and flying saucers *erhm* drakes in some situations).

These are the only exceptions I think should be implemented:
- Loyal and Khalifate Cavalry get max 20% defense on any fungus type (horses have hard time navigating in this terrain, elvish horses and wolves instead behave generally better as we already know) possible proposal: mushrooms at 20% for all mounted units!
- Gryphon gets max 30% and it will the necessary second exception (why not also flying drakes? so we could say that large flying creatures are hindered by the large mushroom caps and the cloud of spores in the air )
- On mp maps change most Hills + Mushroom to Flat + Mushroom if we want the fungus defense and not the hills' one
- On mp maps change Cave + Mushroom to Flat + Mushroom at discretion, if we want to give elves and drakes an easier way
- Absolutely give Khalifate foot units 40% on fungus, or even 30% (but then, when will it apply? so maybe better 40%)

Since hills have an equal or better defense than mushrooms in nearly every case, the only change would be that mushrooms only slow down units who spend more mps to move trough them than on hills.
If you want dwarves at 40% on fungi, put the mushrooms on flat terrain. If we want a change for them, I think it should be on movement then: they could be slowed down too (but it will never happen, since they are so slow, I guess).

The change for dwarves and khalifas should not reverted back, since it is nearly the only difference from the previous fungus behavior.
Dwarves and khalifa footmen will behave as if no mushroom exists if they are on hills.

"Do not change back the changes if you really want a change, else the change will be not a real change. Face the consequences."

Okay, let me recap and go through my reasoning in detail:

When you have a complicated system, it's best not to make any exceptions, and if you have to, then you should make as few exceptions / make the exceptions as rare as possible, or else the system becomes complicated. Moreover, you should provide strong visual hints when possible to clarify the exceptions.

1. For mixed terrains the default behavior is "best defense, worst movement". This is the case with all kinds of forested terrain types, and with villages on hills.
2. There is a subtle difference which I only now realized for "bridge" terrains. On a "bridge" terrain, like a bridge over a river, or a ford, or a bridge over chasm, units enjoy "best defense, best movement". Thus, bridges over unwalkable terrain are passable to humans on foot (unsurprisingly). This is therefore an exception to the "best defense, worst movement" rule, but the visual hint that a terrain is a bridge is so strong and so good that no one complains about it, nor did anyone even realize that it's "unusual" and mention it in this thread. To me this is an example of good graphical design helping to make something complicated into something more manageable.
3. There is another exception encountered early on for water villages -- even though the terrain text says "Village", your land units don't get 60% defense there. Perhaps unfortunate, but in this case one can get used to it quickly -- land villages generally have a "house" of some kind displayed on them, but water villages generally have a shiny coral reef which looks perhaps like a house for "The Little Mermaid" rather than a place that a spearman would be comfortable, so this at least gives you a strong visual hint that something is different.
4. Finally, one learns that "Fungus is wierd". You don't get best defense, or best movement, or worst movement, the other terrain apparently just doesn't exist. The new terrain type indicators in 1.11 actually help to explain it now -- the mixed terrains with fungus only show fungus type. But it doesn't explain at all "why", so even in the new version it's a special and totally bizarre behavior for mixed types which is unique to fungus. This is actually a huge exception -- it affects every unit that goes on a fungus hex, and nearly every map, and it has no explanation.
5. Besides this, certain units have exceptions to "best defense", for specific types of terrains. Specifically, cavalry type units are given a "defense cap" for forested mixed types -- they get only 30% on forests, and on a mixed type with forest they can never get more than 30%. Since dual terrain types were introduced, the "defense cap" behavior applies to
   • Cavalryman and its advancements
   • Horseman and its advancements
   • Chocobones

(5) above is an exception we are actually stuck with. As annoying as it is we can't get rid of it, we need it for balance. But once we have accepted this, what we should do is *actually document that exception well in a way that people can understand*, and then *use that exception to eliminate the other kinds of exceptions*. If we can eliminate (4) it greatly reduces the number of kinds of exceptions, and the frequency with which they apply. So it greatly simplifies the system.

To fix the documentation problem -- I'm not sure why the docs were so bad about the defense caps, anyways clearly we should be explaining in detail how it works. There's actually a significant amount of code that has been written to implement this defense cap behavior, so it's surprising that there's no mention in the help and only on the wiki. I have added some patches to fix up the help in this regard, only on master atm. This is what it looks like: http://imgur.com/a/x6h6F#0
Only units that have a defense cap for at least one terrain type will get the note and the "Defense Capped" column in the terrain table.

tekelili: I'm not sure why you say that mixed terrains are hell, I would think that any problem you have could be solved by (1) putting defense caps on certain unit types for certain terrains, documented here: UnitsWML#.5Bmovetype.5D or (2) replacing dual terrain types with custom terrain types. But I don't really know what problems you were having.

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So, making fungus a mixed type makes things simpler and gives map makers a new tool. But there's some question of balance impact. To fix any such problems we have two options

• Change the maps
• Change the defense ratings for fungus using (5).

Most likely we'll actually do a little of both.

For *current balance* of *current maps*, the only terrain types that actually matter are Flat + Mushroom, Hills + Mushroom, and Cave + Mushroom. Of course the properties of units will change on obscure things like "Desert + Fungus" and "Swamp + Fungus" but that's largely irrelavant, most likely there is no impact and if there are maps with a handful of these, they can be adjusted on a case-by-case basis. The point is that those currently "obscure" terrains will become *new and interesting* tools for map makers to use in the future after their properties have changed. This answers Xalzar's question:

Xalzar wrote: Also, more importantly, if we start capping defense in order not to change the current situation, then I do not see how map-makers will now have more options.

Besides this, even if we aggressively added caps so that all mainline units had nothing changed, it would still offer opportunities to UMC makers to not add such caps.

I think it's pretty clear that we should add exceptions in the style of (5) so that Flat + Mushroom is the same as basic Mushroom for all mainline, core units, that might normally go on a fungus hex, otherwise IMO it will be needlessly confusing. You might not agree with me and we could debate this further, but if you do agree, it more or less *necessitates* adding exceptions:

Loyalist Cavalry: Defense cap of 20% on fungus, just as they have max 30% on forest
Khalifate Cavlary: Defense cap of 20% on fungus
Gryphon Rider, Gryphon Master: Defense cap of 30% on fungus.

After making those changes, the only units (ignoring mermen and nagas) that still have a stats change, have it only on Fungus + Hills / Fungus + Cave, and they are:

Dwarves:
Fungus + Hills: 40% defense -> 60%
Fungus + Cave: 40% defense -> 50%

Khalifate warriors:
Fungus + Hills 40% defense -> 60%

Elves + Wose + Flying Drakes:
Fungus + Cave: 2mp -> 3mp



So at this point you can either say,

• we will accept this and tweak the maps a bit, perhaps switching Fungus + Hills or Fungus + Caves for Fungus + Flat accordingly
• we also gives Dwarves a cap of 40% on fungus, and live with the remaining changes for Khalifate / elves in caves, not needing to change any maps.

I don't really have a strong preference here, but to me it seems that Dwarves getting 60% on fungus hills is a significant change for maps like the new Hornshark island, and also I would be concerned about Dwarves getting 50% on Fungus + Cave -- for underground scenarios, that's supposed to be a place that they are weak. It seems hard (for me) to evaluate what the consequences of 40% -> 50% buff there would be. So to me the natural thing to do would be, add a fluff line to the help on the page for Mushroom Grove along the lines "Wild mushrooms are known to have a potent intoxicating effect on dwarves, and the spore clouds which emanate from mature giant mushroom stalks will render a dwarf sluggish and slow to react." and change the part: "Most units receive 50% to 60% defense in mushroom groves, whereas cavalry receive only 20%." to "Most units receive 50% to 60% defense in mushroom groves, whereas cavalry receive only 20%. Dwarves recieve only 40%, and dwarvish fliers only 30%." Or similar. Then simply be done with the whole thing, since the only remaining changes don't seem very important. I doubt if any maps would require any noticeable changes after that. I like this also because, the only thing you have to remember are "horses are penalized on forest, and horses and dwarves are penalized on fungus."

A different option is, don't make dwarves weak on fungus, just make gryphon riders weak (maybe some fluff about gryphons?). (This is Xalzar's suggestion if I understand correctly.) But I don't know if you need to rebalance cave scenarios then. And you might have to make tweaks to Hornshark, the Freelands, and many other mp maps that use Mushroom Hills. (Not that we can't do that, of course.)

Another more aggressive option is, both Dwarves and Khalifate get cap of 40% on fungus. You could also consider to give mermen a cap on fungus if you think that will make Swamp + Fungus more interesting, for example. (But since caps are somewhat annoying its probably best not to add them unless they serve a clear purpose.)

Like I said, no strong preference, IMO decisions beyond what to do with Cavalry / Gryphon riders should probably be guided by, what will make the Mushroom mixed terrains that are *not* currently being used more interesting strategically, taste and simplicity etc. If there is some map balance problem that is solved by making Hills + Mushrooms available which depowers Dwarves, or depowers Dwarves and Khalifate, then we can at least decide if it's worth the added complexity. That's not a judgment in my area of expertise.


About irc logs: The commit was here: https://github.com/wesnoth/wesnoth/comm ... 4a9d430682
You can look up the irc log for that day at irclogs.wesnoth.org

Its a problem that didn't need fixing.

I'm against any 'fix' that creates more problems.

It's silly things like this that are constantly breaking UMC. Backwards compatibility should be the priority, imo.

Orcfoot: Mushroom hills: 40% -> 50%! This is ignored by all of the change lists.

It would make zero sense to say dwarves are weak on mushrooms as it is 10% better for them than flat.

Creating exceptions everywhere is not nearly as simple to remember as the blanket override that mushroom currently has, so that option doesn't seem like a good idea.

Please note that this is a "compatability-breaking" change only in the most pedantic sense. As Velensk pointed out, you can still easily define single type mushrooms just as you had before. You can even take the code that fendrin ammended here, paste that into your add-on and change the ids around, and in a prestart event replace all the mushroom overlay terrains with the legacy version, and it will work exactly as in 1.10. That's about 10 lines, completely cookie-cutter pasted into your add-on. It's a far cry from serious compatibility breaking changes like "this filter now works differently and you cannot get the old behavior, you now must rewrite the whole thing so as not to use filters". Depending on how we work out the other aspects of the change, it probably will boil down to replacing some mushroom hills with mushroom flat, or similar.

Mint wrote: Orcfoot: Mushroom hills: 40% -> 50%! This is ignored by all of the change lists.

Thanks, I missed that one.

The dwarf weakness thing was just one idea. Like I said the only thing that I personally would like to see here is that plain Mushroom Grove should work out equivalently to Mushroom Grove + Flat, with the mainline definitions, the same way that Forest + Flat currently works. IMO the defense caps needed for that are tolerable and not significantly different from what we have had forever with forests. Your mileage may vary.

Now that I know about the orcfoot thing, I think I actually favor Xalzar's proposition, although it's hard to put my finger on exactly why. I don't think that changing existing Mushroom Hills (at crucial locations) in mp maps should be a big deal where deemed necessary -- like I said, IMHO it was not nice to newbies to use those terrains in mp maps anyways, and IMHO it would have been better to change them even regardless of the changes in 1.11.16.

Edit:

Mint wrote: It would make zero sense to say dwarves are weak on mushrooms as it is 10% better for them than flat.

Okay, but clearly something about the mushrooms makes them much weaker, since they get 60% defense on hills, but only 40% on hills + mushrooms...
I guess the 1.10 system just doesn't make any sense, does it.

iceiceice wrote:Please note that this is a "compatability-breaking" change only in the most pedantic sense. As Velensk pointed out, you can still easily define single type mushrooms just as you had before. You can even take the code that fendrin ammended here, paste that into your add-on and change the ids around, and in a prestart event replace all the mushroom overlay terrains with the legacy version, and it will work exactly as in 1.10. That's about 10 lines, completely cookie-cutter pasted into your add-on. It's a far cry from serious compatibility breaking

As Velensk didnt point, map makers have now less decorative choices.
Your solution for simulate 1.10 looks like is using custom terrain and wont allow join to a multiplayer game users without add on installed? (if that were case, it would look like a "compatability-breaking" change in a serious sense).

Most of mak makers that placed mushrooms over hills/cave/swamp/sand/snow base, did it as a decorative choice. It is no trivial change base to flat. Decoration will be affected, and all those map makers will waste some time deciding what kind of flat terrain looks better. I really dont think it worth waste all those people time for a quite arguable gaining.

So... confusing but decorative: does that about sum it up?

While the rather unintuitive behavior of those mixed terrains has irked me in the past, I can definitely sympathize with those MP map designers who want that extra bit of aesthetic flair without sacrificing balance.

Still, whether it's done now or later, I think it's a good change. The primary use of the mushroom terrain is as a speed bump for flying units, and the best defense/worst movement behavior still preserves that effect. I am saying this as someone who is, however, not an expert map maker/balancer so I could very well be wrong.

tekelili: No, actually my suggested solution is if you don't want to change the base terrain then in most cases you should just ignore, because unless there is a very extreme scenario nothing mp-related has become imbalanced. I wrote this in my first post:

iceiceice wrote: We did consult with mp devs to figure out if there would be balance problems with this, iiuc it was expected that the balance impact would be quite limited.

But if we really want for there to be zero balance change, it would be very easy to do computerized find and replace, and swap mushroom + hills for mushroom + flat etc.

These kind of tweaks and changes would only be done if one is obsessively concerned about some unit getting a slight advantage in some hypothetical situation, or if you have an unusual map or an add-on with radically different rules. If you refuse to accept any cosmetic change, or any change at all to the stats of the units, then yes you probably have to make a custom terrain. But if the goal is balance rather than zero stats changes, I don't see why one would think that the change in 1.11.16 has imbalanced "The Freelands" for default era for example as was suggested. Sure, a dwarf or a gryphon will be a bit stronger in the channel with the mushrooms, but I don't see at all how that enables a game changing strategy for Knalgan on this map.

Actually the mainline maps I would personally have thought the mushroom change would be most significant for are probably Hornshark Island and Silverhead Crossing. In case of Hornshark, its only because there are many scattered Hills + Mushrooms there on the various fronts -- for example just at a glance, I notice that there are two additional 50% spots in place of 40% on the east side, so it looks a bit harder for the south player to attack those two villages. But it's not very meaningful -- it also means that there are more high defense spots immediately next to the villages which makes it easier to attack them later. The movement costs on these hexes didn't change so I wouldn't expect it to affect the day-night push and pull. If it were up to me I would think about replacing 21,15 and 25,15 with Mushroom + Flat but it's not up to me and I'm not an expert . In Silverhead Crossing, it turns out that the mushrooms at 13,8 and 14,7 are cave mushrooms. So gryphons won't get better defense there, although dwarves will go from 40% to 50% there, in 1.11.16. That means it will be a bit easier to block off that passageway with dwarves and prevent the east player from attacking the northwest keep through that route, and also from attacking village 10,10. Similarly, you would be able to block up the middle more easily with dwarves since they will get 60% now on those hills + mushrooms 15,13 and 15,15, instead of getting 40% there. So in this case, again I would think about replacing those with mushroom flat.

But besides those two examples I don't currently see *any* other mainline maps where I can see any change that is tangible in a strategic way. (Silverhead Crossing is pretty unique for being afaik the only map with a wall of mushrooms set up comparably to that.) A significant fraction of the maps don't have any mushrooms at all, and a significant fraction beyond that have only mushroom flat anyways. So what's the total possible impact we could be talking about in the worst case, 2 maps out of 50, 4 or 5 hexes changed on each? Even if we very generously throw in "The Freelands" and change the mushrooms to flat in the channels, what is that, about 5% of the maps, and maybe a dozen hexes? At most? Since I'm not an mp dev, and the mp devs actually did contemplate this change and didn't suggest that any such changes to the maps should result.

I'm not sure exactly how you configure the random map generator -- do you force it to create many clumps or walls of Hills + Mushrooms or similar? Are you actually, honestly concerned about a balance problem resulting?

As far as I'm concerned, the changes about cavalry / gryphons on mushrooms is a change that I would want to make only to simplify the terrain rules, because IMO its a bit ugly if mushroom + flat is different from mushroom for some units. At the same time it's something I could get used to, I don't see any reason to think that that either is clearly necessitated for balance.

It's too bad that fendrin is not here to explain in detail why he thought the change is a good idea, but anyways it is my opinion that this change to fungus makes the terrain rules as a whole vastly and objectively simpler, regardless of whether or exactly how you add new defense caps to the units. It's understandable that someone might not see this if they have been playing the game for years and have internalized every rule and unreported bug, but I think it's something that new players and new add-on makers would likely appreciate.

It's clearly a controversial change with not enough thought behind it, so I don't think it'd be a bad idea to simply revert all of it now and then decide which, if any, alternative we choose.

Just to be clear, this is a change I've been wanting for awhile. It's always been a bit annoying to me that I cannot combine mushroom groves with any terrain and that mushroom groves that look like mixed terrain don't act like it.

I think that it should be implemented in such a way that mushroom grove/flat terrain acts just like a strait mushroom grove (like the forest terrain) but that past that, to whatever extent possible it should act like any kind of mixed terrain.

Sapient wrote:So... confusing but decorative: does that about sum it up? .

That is only on side of problem, there are also WML issues. Any addon manipulating mushroom defenses (with trainings, magic items, or whatever) my have its code broken. To manipulate forest defense you have to take into account that some units have negative defense and use proper code... but this was not neccessary for mushrooms in previous BfW editions and probably lot of addons use a stright boost to mushroom defense without consider a negative defense as possible.

I personally like the option to replace all the mushroom with flat/mushroom, nerf cavarly/gryphon (set the negative defense) and the balance should be unchanged.

To deal with addons just mention the change and tell them to use negative mushroom defense where it's better than on flat to keep the addon's balance on mainline maps. Add-on maps should replace all mushroom with flat/mushroom to keep the balance with mainline units.

As we're in dev version, some changes are expected and this change isn't an API one which prevents an addon from working.

As a note on the 'UMC will need to adapt/be fixed' end of things. They'll have to do that anyway. The forest terrain already necessitates it. I've already had to deal with that hurdle. I can't say that reverse compatibility wouldn't be nice but I think it's a bit late on that one.

In part, this is my fault. I was asked on IRC if this would be a problem, and I think I said something like "I'm sure it will but it's fine with me because it is for the greater good". I have long hated the mushroom groves and how they are thrown around on maps for awkward reasons. I feel strongly the the bass-awkward way we've been dealing with mushroom groves has been a thorn in our side ever since we didn't do it right when all the other terrain overlays were implanted. Now that mapmakers have been reaping the fruits of that for years, how mushroom groves work is even messier now (because there are so many more of them creeping in like... mushrooms). What, you have a map that needs flying units to move a bit more slowly? Just throw some mushrooms on it!

If we have to use so many mushroom groves to balance stuff, shouldn't we be changing the units instead? But in hindsight I can see how much work this would be causing for poor UMC folks, and I realize that I agree with this:

zookeeper wrote:It's clearly a controversial change with not enough thought behind it, so I don't think it'd be a bad idea to simply revert all of it now and then decide which, if any, alternative we choose.

Since terrain is such a core concept I feel strongly we do need to revisit the overlay rules and make it as simple as possible, but I can see how much grief it will cause existing maps I guess we should wait and do that in the development cycle. These last minute changes are always the worst.

Wintermute wrote:Since terrain is such a core concept I feel strongly we do need to revisit the overlay rules and make it as simple as possible, but I can see how much grief it will cause existing maps I guess we should wait and do that in the development cycle. These last minute changes are always the worst.

Should I revert it for 1.11.17 and 1.13.0 then? (The original author of the change is currently unavailable and I sort of became responsible for it after forward-porting it to master.)