My first thought went in the same direction als Astuurs opinion: what do new players think? But then I thought it's ok if the different behaviour of the empire inn is mentioned in the campaing. At the moment I'm not sure if it is mentioned there, as I played the campaigns almost a year ago.

I can't say much to the mentioned problem of available space on the maps. Most times I play the barbarians (have to change this and get more practice with the empire ).

People, the poll is reopened and everybody has exactly one vote now. I reset all votes, please vote again and sorry for the inconvenience.

Now for the arguments: I think a.bit's assessment while logical will not help us in this case: we have the situation with workers currently. A master miner can replace a miner. The system is hard to get right and leads to much frustration with the players. And the agreed upon "best fix" is currently to add a manual eject button for those buildings to kick the better worker out. If we introduce a similar system for wares, the user will be often very frustrated because the game acts differently than he would want it too. I am not so fond of this idea therefore - or in other words: I would need to be convinced with a very well thought out algorithm to not confuse our players.

About astuurs second argument (space constraints): I agree that the empire needs more space early than the others, but I feel that atlanteans and barbarians will need more space eventually: atlanteans have two kind of farms and many of them are needed and the barbarian eat soooo much stuff when you have your mines on level 3. The empire is on a roll as soon as you have the first deeper mines working and two taverns and two inns. Also, you do not need so many taver and inns (compared to barbarians) because you also need beer and wine. In total, you need more different buildings but not so many more in total. I confess that I never did a 1to1 comparison between building numbers for similar productivity but that would be interesting to see.

I agree. I have played only once on a large map with other folks here but I played the Empire and it was easy to handle in such a long game. Although the Barbarians might need less space for farms in build17 because you can now stop delivery of bread to taverns they nonetheless need a lot of space ... and the Atlanteans can be tough to play on small maps due to their high wood demand as well. So yeah, I don't think that the Empire has a disadvantage in terms of space requirements. Furthermore you can play very well for quite a time without deep mines on small maps.

In other words, I prefer the current settings concerning the tavern/inn issue.

How would the backwards compatible inn be implemented, anyway?

(1) There is a global setting "inn meal/rations production ratio"?

(2) There is a button in every inn saying "also produce rations in this inn"?

(.) something else?

If one decides to take either step, wouldn't it be just as easy/difficult to implement

(1) A global setting "ratio of meals delivered to normal mines vs. meals to deep mines"?

(2) A button in every normal mine saying "also accept rations in this mine"?

(.) .. (I think I can come up with an equivalent demand-side suggestion for your supply-side suggestion)

I fail to see how the latter system is harder to comprehend for the player than the former -- I still find it rather more intuitive.

a.bit wrote: How would the backwards compatible inn be implemented, anyway?

Nothing of that. It would be implemented like the barbarian inns: it would simply alternative between producing meals and rations and would skip any if the economy already has enough of those in stock.

just to check if I got it right. when the empire inn becomes backward compatible, than the productivity will goes down if no more rations are needed by the economy.

right?

if yes, the empire inn is almost equal to the barbarian one... producing every food at an average speed, instead of producing one kind of food at a high rate.

borim wrote: just to check if I got it right. when the empire inn becomes backward compatible, than the productivity will goes down if no more rations are needed by the economy. right? if yes, the empire inn is almost equal to the barbarian one... producing every food at an average speed, instead of producing one kind of food at a high rate.

there was a discussion somewhere - can't find it that fast - however basically what you describe is a bug actually checking whether rations are needed should take no time and only producing meal (or snack) should take time. Of course if all kind of foods are not needed, the inn should not recheck every ware a thousand times in a second (cpu usage problem), therefore a sleep call at the end of all the calls is needed.

Man I was away for quit too long ... someone told me (s)he would take care about this problem and check all the buildings - seems to me (s)he did not, as no fix in that direction was made.

I really, really like a.bit's suggestion, and I would have voted for it in the poll if it had been available. I like the aspect of the suggestion that even the first-level mines can consume meals, but that this is a waste of resources, and so players should learn to balance their ration/meal production - but they're not totally screwed if they fail to do so.

As for the various objections to that suggestion, I think they can be handled in the following way. Let the basic mine have both rations and meals as input. In the production program, set it up so that it always prefers to consume rations, and only consumes a meal when no ration is available (I don't recall whether this is possible with the currently available code, but it is easily added in any case). This does not cause the same kind of trouble as with miners/master miners, because there is no "acts like"-relation that we need to worry about - it is all confined to the mine's production program.

And if you, as a player, want to prevent meals from going into the normal mines to avoid waste, then you can easily do so thanks to the new feature that allows one to do precisely that.

I am not in favor of ixprefects suggestion because it will add the burden to teach new players that the mines can eat "anything" but bigger mines need bigger food and smaller mines do not need them. Also it opens the question if not also the armor/weapons should be replacable: in the end it doesn't matter if a weak lvl 0 soldier carries a warriors axe - it's just wasteful.

SirVer wrote: Also it opens the question if not also the armor/weapons should be replacable: in the end it doesn't matter if a weak lvl 0 soldier carries a warriors axe - it's just wasteful.

Maybe a warrior's axe can be considered too heavy to wield appropriately for a mere recruit?