[PATCH] Wooden Tower upgrade to Defense Tower

[Lionkanzen]

Can be nice individual upgrade from outpost upgrade to wooden to watch tower. It's my idea. But upgrade individual.

[elexis]

• There should be a more creative string than "Upgrade to a defense tower." (immersion). Perhaps "Enforce with stone and upgrade to a defense tower."?

• There should be either a link to some forum thread or a ticket description somewhere here.

• I agree on the idea. Defensive structures have been improved throughout the decades, so this upgrade could express that.

• My only concern is that this upgrade might incentivize building many towers more and thus make the current turtle-issue worse. In particular it would reduce the window of opportunity for attacks in the first 10min significantly.

Thus I suggest so penalize this upgrade in comparison to avoiding the wooden tower + building a stone tower.

A wooden tower costs 100 wood. A regular stone tower costs 100 wood + 100 stone. Thus the upgrade should cost more than 100 stone IMO. Otherwise everyone will build towers earlier, even without urgency. It should be cost(stone tower) < cost(wooden tower + upgrade) < cost(wooden tower + stone tower). So increasing the upgrade cost from your patch by 50 wood should solve that issue. That wood could represent materials that had to be broken up to be replaced. The upgrade time 110 (iber:160), wooden tower time 40, stone tower time 150 (iber:200) fulfil the equation if we replace "<" with "<=", which seems ok. If it's too harsh, we can correct it later. I'd rather have something underpowered than overpowered.

• Reducing the iberian stone tower costs by 50 might be noticeable in some games where wood is more abundant than stone, but that's not really an issue. So I agree with that proposal.

[elexis]

Correction: The upgrade time can't be really compared to the build time, since usually more than one unit builds a tower. So it's a significant penalty too. Hence I grant to reduce the upgrade time from 110 to 100 (iber: 160 to 120).

[fatherbushido]

That sounds good. (And it will look nice if lordgood commits his new small tower models).

[elexis]

Or should we rather close it as won't fix since minDistance for wooden tower is 40, maxDistance for the stone tower 60?

[fatherbushido]

Indeed. I m lazy to check if upgrade component check those requirement. If so, it's ok else we should perhaps make both 60 ?

[elexis]

BuildRestrictions only apply to building buildings. 60 distance seems more than fine since the wooden towers have 60m range too, thus can cover each other. Notice romans can't build wooden towers anymore as of r18024. Thanks for the review, you helped this release a lot!

[elexis]

In 18754:

Make wooden tower upgradable to the defense tower. Reviewed by fatherbushido, siole and Hannibal Barca, fixes #4125.

Let towers cost 50 wood and reduce the stone cost by 50.
The upgrade costs so much that it's cheaper to build a stone tower than building and upgrading a wooden tower, but still cheaper than building a wooden and stone tower.
Increase the minimum distance between wooden tower to 60, so that the upgrade won't circumstance the minDistance of the stone tower.
Add missing newline to the entity limit tooltip of the upgrade component (refs #2706) that was never visible before.

[fatherbushido]

In 18789:

Disable upgrade for the gaia palisades rock fort template. The bugs was noticed by elexis in gauls sandbox map. Refs #4125, r18754.