Could you please document the village / town / castle prices please ?

[Lucas-C]

Hi,

First : thanks a lot for that game !
That's one of the best terminal-based video game I played :)

I found out about the buildings prices here:
https://github.com/a-nikolaev/curseofwar/blob/master/king.h#L33

But could you please add this information to the README ?

Thanks

[a-nikolaev]

Hi Lucas!
I'm sorry for not responding promptly. This issue with prices is a thorn in my side.

Let me put it this way. The originally chosen prices (the ones in the tagged release) seemed to be off balance, as many people pointed out that it's advantageous to build many villages, at least in the first stage of the game. It's not that it made the game easy, it was still quite challenging enough, but I was not happy about it.

This problem was the reason why I came up with new, more balanced, prices (the ones in the master branch, 160, 240, 320). They definitely remove this advantage of building too many villages. However, the change never made its way in the tagged release, because I was honestly not sure if this change actually makes the game better. Yes, it makes it mode balanced, but does it make it more fun?.. I'm sorry, that this thing is causing confusion.

If you don't mind me asking, have you tried to play with both prices? What is your opinion about it?

At the moment, I think that a good solution would be to revert the master branch to the old traditional off-balance prices. And add a command line option for setting custom prices (something like -m 100,200,300), so the players can choose for themselves. (The multiplayer mode would require some changes though, making sure that the server informs the clients about it).

Do you have an opinion about prices? Or if my proposed solution would work for you? I tend to neglect things and getting stuck in indecision. However, I actually have time this January, and would like I resolve this issue. Thank you again, for the input and generally for the interest in the game!

[Lucas-C]

Hi Alexey,

Thanks for the full explanation :)

The curseofwar command does not have a --version flag, but I played the version 1.1.8-3 in the Ubuntu repositories, and that version only for now. Considering this file contains the 150 / 300 / 600 prices at tag 1.1.8, I guess I only played the released version.

Hence I cannot really compare between both versions. In my personal experience I didn't figure out that villages were that advantageous, but I was surely curious to know the buildings prices to improve my strategy. While I certainly could have guessed that through experimentation, simply displaying this information in game may be helpful.

I like the idea to make those prices configurable, but I feel somehow that multiplying those CLI flags isn't very user-friendly. Maybe the curseofwar command could take a single "level" file containing all those parameters, so that players could exchanges levels they created more easily.

Anyway, that's just my 2 cents :) I don't have a strong opinion myself on what the ideal prices should be.

And keep up making fun games !

[nsajko]

A bit OT, sorry, but one thing to note is that the AI players play as if the more balanced prices were in effect, ie. they upgrade villages instead of building more of them, and with the code in master they're making less of an error :)
So if you reverted the change they'd be too easy to beat again. :(