Lighthouse bonus/effect

[wowgetoffyourcellphone]

I have it on good authority (I have ESP) that the current effect of the Lighthouse bonus is not what was intended. I think it should lift black map, but retain fog of war over all of the water. The current effect is kind of awkwardly OP.

[elexis]

Only removing the shroud of darkness is the same as discovering the area once, a bit useless?

I thought it might be reasonable to restrict the range of the effect, instead of yielding a global illumination. Shoreline-only yields a weird pattern for island maps in particular.

Also shouldn't it reveal all ships in the illuminated area?

If the effect had only a short range, one might let the player build two or so perhaps.

(Also related tickets on trac)

[Nescio]

Or perhaps just remove the <RevealShore> from the lighthouse and simply increase its vision range (e.g. 300).

[Thorfinn the Shallow Minded]

Perhaps it could have some aura as well such as improved movement speed within a particular range.  This might seem deceptively useless, but could help with fishing and trade longterm while also giving a better escape window for damaged units.

[wowgetoffyourcellphone]

4 hours ago, Nescio said:

Or perhaps just remove the <RevealShore> from the lighthouse and simply increase its vision range (e.g. 300).

I did this in DE. The current bonus is just unacceptable. 

[elexis]

1 hour ago, wowgetoffyourcellphone said:

The current bonus is just unacceptable. 

Depends largely on the map, but I'm afraid you're right. We played often enough with a "no-lighthouse" rule.

Removing the reveal-shore feature entirely would be a bit sad, perhaps it can be fixed instead of deleted.

What is @borg-s advice?

[borg-]

10 hours ago, elexis said:

Depends largely on the map, but I'm afraid you're right. We played often enough with a "no-lighthouse" rule.

Removing the reveal-shore feature entirely would be a bit sad, perhaps it can be fixed instead of deleted.

What is @borg-s advice?

I particularly like how it is now. In the mod I added an aura to the ships.

[bb_]

Never really experienced any OP-ness, maybe cuz I usually play ptol on naval maps . Anyhow a suggestion: One could consider that building the lighthouse reveals the shore but retains the FoW and add a "tech" in the lighthouse to reveal all shores again for a little cost (similar to the bribing feature we have).

[elexis]

The OP-ness is specific to naval maps and comes from the fact that once the enemy has an advantage on the sea, he can snowball that irreversibly by:

• seeing every new dock built by the opponent
• seeing every new ship trained by the opponent
• seeing every ship being garrisoned by the opponent, and the unit composition

The team with the lighthouse can then focus the entire fleet onto the one point where the enemy operates on the shoreline, rather than having to distribute over the waters to gain the knowledge piece by piece, while having to pay with significant population cost to gain that little view otherwise.

In a 4v4 on naval with ptol, a tactic to exploit that is to swing resources to the ptol teamplayer, build the lighthouse, a dock and a manned ship in the first 6min or so, and make sure the opponent team will never have  way to even build a single dock. In particular if you have played against Hannibal on Corsica vs Sardinia, you will know that this exact thing is going to happen and you can't do anything about it.  (Only anti-ship units can help, which are random imbalanced units not intended for that purpose usually)

[wraitii]

On 4/14/2019 at 8:13 PM, elexis said:

Removing the reveal-shore feature entirely would be a bit sad, perhaps it can be fixed instead of deleted.

 

It would make the code much easier to understand though :p 

[WhiteTreePaladin]

2 hours ago, wraitii said:

It would make the code much easier to understand though :p 

I like the current effect, but wouldn't mind if it had to be tweaked for balance. However, if it were removed, what alternate effect would the lighthouse offer?