Planewalker

Fantastic news! I've been pleased with the castle editor, but there's no question that the UI feels very dated and can be hard to work with at times.

That's a wild outcome. Thanks for posting the end info.

The single biggest thing I agree with is how much people sleep on men-at-arms. I think people instinctively equate them to Spearmen from previous SH games too much. Arthur's ability to produce honor early on is also fantastic due to four granary food types plus a full lord's kitchen. I am also very impressed to find out that Gawain's shield protects you from Ice Queen and Ice Dragon. Does it also defend against Ice Mirrors?

Both were pretty bad, but the SH2 behavior was more often frustrating for the player. Map design could fix the AI issue by always putting iron and stone in relatively close proximity in an estate.

Fantastic. Glad to see this kind of work coming along after the recent editor improvements. :D

As some of you may have observed, I have occasionally done some delving into the inner workings of Stronghold Legends over the past couple of years. I know some of you, particularly @ Asophix and @ Lord_Chris are particularly experienced at SHL gameplay (especially in multiplayer). I would like some input from the more experienced members of the community about the flow of the game, things like: What's too weak/strong? What's the most common problem with skirmish maps or custom scenarios? What are noteworthy gameplay differences between singleplayer and multiplayer? If you had the opportunity to redesign SHL, what would you change, and why? In full disclosure, I am considering creating something like a standalone expansion mod which introduces new campaigns and a variety of improvements. I've had quite a lot of time to think about it (over 15 years). The discoveries made recently with modding tools like the AI editors may be a sign that it is time.

Man, I used to post on SHH a lot (as Lord_Tanthos at that time) when I was a teenager. I appreciate your preservation of it.

Now this is the kind of awesome potential I was thinking about. :D

Not only is this UI beautiful and on theme, but the additional warning helpers are super great for the user experience. I appreciate having so much insight into the AI's actions. The AI user patch being discussed in the other thread is probably a good pursuit.

Beautiful work, Asophix! I'll have to experiment with how big the castles can feasibly get before they introduce vulnerabilities like gaps in the defenses due to other buildings or terrain features. Have you experimented with large AI castles?

@ Asophix How has the castle building gone so far? Have you had the chance to do skirmish experiments? The main lesson I learned is that fire drakes on the outside walls are a great way to get the AI to burn down their own economy. Oops!

Hey everyone - Lord Tanthos here - an old-time Legends fanatic! Having recently explored the differences between granary food, I decided to examine royal food next. Background. The castle kitchen stores royal food: eels, pigs, wine, and vegetables. Each month, your lord may feast upon the following in exchange for honor: Half Feast: 1/month = 5 honor Normal Feast: 2/month = 8 honor Extra Feast: 4/month = 12 honor Double Feast: 8/month = 20 honor +1 honor per month for each extra food type eaten Note that vegetables are only available to Arthurian lords. I built a castle kitchen and placed two of each: pond, garden, vineyard, and pig farm adjacent to it. First, I noted delivery sizes: Eel Farmer: 4 eels Gardener: 5 vegetables Grape Farmer: 6 wine Pig Farmer: 2 pigs After 10 minutes, I had the following: 80 eels, 52 pigs, 36 wine, 50 vegetables There is a major output difference between these farms. A single eel farmer can nearly match the production of two other farmer types. I expected more from the grape farmers, given their large delivery size of 6. However, wine production is slow - the farmer takes a long time gardening, gathering, and pressing all the grapes grown on their farm. I repeated the same test (2 of each farm for 10 minutes), but placed the farms approximately 15 tiles further away from the kitchen. After 10 minutes, I had the following: 48 eels, 28 pigs, 24 wine, 30 vegetables Distance affected each of these substantially, but not equally. Eels and vegetables dropped by 40%, but pigs dropped by almost half, whereas wine only dropped by 33%. This is because pig farmers have the smallest delivery size and grape farmers have the largest, thus being most and least affected by walking time, respectively. Therefore, place pig farms closest to the kitchen and place vineyards further away. Now, most importantly, how many farmers does it take to maintain levels of feasting with good variety? First off, a single eel farmer adjacent to the kitchen is alone sufficient to maintain Normal feast consumption, providing 8 honor per month for a single peasant and a small amount of wood. One of each farm is sufficient to provide Extra feast consumption, but you'll occasionally run out of wine due to its slow production time (even more so if you're Ice or Evil, and thus have no vegetables to make up the difference). In most circumstances, it's best to always place at least two vineyards. If you want to have constant Double feast, place 1 pond, 2 gardens, 2 pig farms, and 3 vineyards. As it turns out, it doesn't take too much to get 20+ honor per month.

I also tried a mixed configuration with the two farms where one farm is adjacent and one is distant. Result was: 168 Meat, 147 Apples, and 90 Cheese. It's certainly clear that chicken coops are superior from output, when adjacent. Dairy farms are simply comparable once distance and cost are accounted for. Cheese is only better if you run out of room. As for seal holes, you are right that it's essential to have those face the right way... otherwise they perform even worse. The more seal holes you have, the harder it is to keep the path to the granary ideal. Chicken coops with their walkable fences do not have that problem.

Hey everyone - Lord Tanthos here - an old-time Legends fanatic! Being curious about the differences, I decided to examine the output of SHL farms (for granary food). I set up a an empty granary and placed 2 apple, dairy, and chicken farms adjacent to it. I then set rations to None and waited 10 minutes. (2 years, 6 months in game time) I noted the following. First, delivery sizes: Chicken Farmer: 6 meat Apple Farmer: 7 apples Dairy Farmer: 6 cheese After 10 minutes, I checked the granary contents: 198 Meat, 168 Apples, 102 Cheese This helped to give a sense of how efficient each type of farm is. The apple farmers occasionally wandered to the other farm's trees and back, reducing their efficiency. The dairy farmers also spent a long time waiting for cows to return to the barn after returning to their farm. Chicken farms are direct from granary to coop. A note about seal farmers: seal farmers perform similarly to chicken farmers (including a 6 meat drop-off). However, their meat processing animations are slower. In testing, they deliver about 10% less meat. Together with the lack of bread, this means the Ice faction has the worst food production options. Next I wanted to know how the farms fare when placed at a distance. I repeated the same test (2 of each farm for 10 minutes), but placed the farms approximately 15 tiles further away from the granary. After 10 minutes, I checked the granary contents: 84 Meat, 84 Apples, 90 Cheese The extra distance had a substantial impact on the efficiency of meat and apples due to all the extra walking time. However, dairy farmers were almost unaffected by extra distance. I discovered the cause after carefully examining the dairy production process. First, unlike in SH1/SHC, a SHL dairy farm's calf is born and grows into a cow without the farmer being present at the workplace - this means the dairy farm gets ready for production after placement regardless of where the worker is. Second, and most importantly, each cow appears to have an internal timer on being ready for milking. When that timer is up, it slowly returns to the barn. When a dairy farm is close to the granary, the farmer spends a lot of time standing around waiting for the cow to be ready for milking, and then spends more time waiting for it to walk back to the barn. When a dairy farmer is far from the granary, the cow returns to the barn while he is on the way back to the farm, so when he arrives, he may immediately resume cheese production. TL;DR - place cheap dairy farms away from your granary to maximize cheese production while leaving room for other buildings I'll examine royal food production next. Let me know if you have more economic questions about SH:L that might be interesting to examine.

This research is very interesting. I had been independently working on some similar attempts. How did you discover the zlib compression method and what did you use to decompress it?