Using thieves to enemy building output stacks breaks the carriers

[vilhok]

The enemy carriers still think that there are items to pick up. I used thieves to steal about 50 or more units of coal from the mine. I think that somewhere the actual loss of resource is not propagated, and carriers still think they can pick something up, but they can't.

In another game I noticed the same issue and I feel like even my own carriers try to pick up the non-existent resources after conquering the area.

[paulwedeck]

Thank you, for reporting this bug.

I just pushed a fix for this particular bug 9901344.
Sadly, I found even more bugs regarding thieves.
It gets worse when you steal material from a construction site.
I will investigate further

[vilhok]

Hey, another occurence: I stockpiled a full storage of fish and I used the Egyptian priest to convert the fish to meat. The same thing happened where settlers try to claim from the ghost stacks, even after destroying the storage, as seen in the screenshot:

[paulwedeck]

I just released v0.6.0.8-alpha.
This should was supposed to fix the old bug but it should fix this new bug as well.
Stealing stuff from a building site is still broken and I don't really know how to fix it.
I must admit that the spell are pretty broken overall.
For example, the snow to mountain spell does not properly connect the economy sectors.

[vilhok]

I didn't look into it much yet, but I assume the building site bug happens because the item is removed from the stack as "regularly" would be, so a stolen material actually counts towards finishing the building. I noticed this because the building was instantly built when I stole all materials, negating my efforts to stop the construction.

A thought about a fix: Seems that the construction being finished is tied to the stacks and are the stacks consumed. That happens here. Upon starting a construction job, the total count of materials required should be stored. Each material that is used should be logged and building is done when the materials needed and materials used are equal. Not when the stacks are empty.

Well, might not be exactly that simple.

Agree on the spells part. I tried to use the egyptian curse bow spell, but I wonder if the range is just very small? The priest tried to get close to the bowmen and was always killed. Can't remember exactly how it worked in the original game, but I feel like it was possible to cast from further away. Also I'm rather grateful that the enemies do not use priests yet, I feel like especially roman priests were always overpowered in the original game, they just converted all the soldiers.

On another side note on the final goal of the project, is this attempting to be a better version, or replicate the original, aside from bugs/annoyances?

A rather big difference I'm noticing is the food supply in the mines. It used to be that each mine had a main food that it could accept 4 units and then it could accept 2 of the other 2 each, in total only 8 food could be taken to a mine.

It's actually a rather OP technique to just spam fishermen and fill all the mines with fish. If iron and coal mines would only carry 2 fish each, it would make sense to actually produce bread and meat, but now I rarely if ever do. What's the point of making meat anyway? I can see the different foods are "worth" different amount of work units, correct? This is negated by the fact that I can just overproduce fish very easily.

Having way too much fun though.

[paulwedeck]

A thought about a fix [...]

I thought about this as well but this is only one part of the issue.
The settlers have to bring new material to the site once it has been stolen. I am not really sure how I would approach this.
The issue is that the building/bearer is not informed when the material has been stolen.
Maybe we can set the stack to always-request and then reduce the requested amount when the building consums a plank?
After looking at the code, we probably need a mechanism to limit the maximum size of the stack and the maximum items that will ever be requested for this stack.

On another side note on the final goal of the project

I am no longer actively developing JSettlers because it is basically dead.
Adding new features does not make sense when the add game-breaking bugs that are only reported a couple of months later.
I will still fix bugs though and add smaller features if somebody is interested in them.

A rather big difference I'm noticing is the food supply in the mines [...]

oh really? I though the mines could take 8 each.

It's actually a rather OP technique to just spam fishermen and fill all the mines with fish

Sure but this is more of a map design issue.
Maybe we could add the rate how fast the fish supply decreases.

[paulwedeck]

oh, I just remembered that I didn't answer to this:

I tried to use the egyptian curse bow spell, but I wonder if the range is just very small

It works different in JSettlers: The bowman still play the animation but they don't shoot arrows and they don't deal any damage