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Topic: Barbarian Trainingscamp and no warmill

Astuur
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Joined: 2009-02-28, 10:08
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Location: Frankfurt / Germany
Posted at: 2012-02-22, 19:44

Shamefully I must confess, that I never tried that.
Theoretically you will never get any trained soldier unless you manually kick them out of the camp, because they are only autmatically dismissed, if they are at the highest level.
That, however cannot be reached without a warmill.
Is that really the case?


Being no programmer, I apologize for all my suggestions that imply undue workload and for other misjudgements due to lack of expertise or relevant skills.
I am on Win32, have no means to compile, and rely on prefabricated distributions (Thanks to Tino).

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PkK

Joined: 2012-01-06, 12:19
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Posted at: 2012-02-22, 19:50

Worse, AFAIK, some of the dismissed ones will walk right back into the camp.

Philipp


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Personal_Joke

Joined: 2011-08-10, 14:39
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Posted at: 2012-02-22, 23:51

Same goes for any soldier training building if you don't have the resources to produce each level of armour/weapon. If you're playing the atlanteans and only have your food production buildings (no mines/smelters/smithies) and you want to get soldiers to train in evasion in the labyrinth, you have to keep kicking them out once they reach level 2 evasion otherwise they just sit there until they get fully upgraded face-sad.png

It seems soldiers will return to their training building after you kick them out if you have no spare soldiers in warehouses, but if you reduce the maximum amount of soldiers allowed in the training building AFTER you dismiss a soldier then it heads back to a warehouse or military building.

This is the reason i've been thinking that a feature that allows you to adjust the amount of training your soldiers will receive before they AUTOMATICALLY leave a training building would be pretty awesome.


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Astuur
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Posted at: 2012-02-23, 06:57

Thanks guys!
So it is as I thought.
There is a reason why I never build any training facility without the necessary infrastructure it depends on, even if I did not remember why face-smile.png

@PkK: The almost immediate return of soldiers that you have just kicked out, is different, I think.
I see this often with all sort of military buildings.
I think it is the logical reaction in situations where there is no alternative.
You kick one out - and it comes back, because you don't have any other soldier currently that could fill his place.
So you need to reduce the demand (by reducing the slots in that buildings) to create a really vacant soldier first.

@Personal_Joke: Yes, I'd also welcome such a feature. (i.e. setting preselectable "exit" -- and maybe also "entry" levels for training facilities.)
But I think we may need to decide about the "soldier levels" in general first in order to not let this get too complicated. Compare this
I can't help thinking that the topic of different tribes, their soldiers' levels and properties is overly complicated, given the fact that warfare is not the main aspect of this game.

Another question would be whether the current AI can recover from that kind of situation.
Will it detect the loss of the warmill and build a new one?
I think I remember some far too easy victories, that may have been related - too easy even against the AI.


Being no programmer, I apologize for all my suggestions that imply undue workload and for other misjudgements due to lack of expertise or relevant skills.
I am on Win32, have no means to compile, and rely on prefabricated distributions (Thanks to Tino).

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wl-zocker

Joined: 2011-12-30, 17:37
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Posted at: 2012-02-23, 10:00

I've also noticed the problem that soldiers don't get fully trained, but in my case it was because a lack of gold.

I don't think that a feature where you have to set the levels manually is not very reasonable. I know neither what weapons are produced in a axe factory nor what weapons gold is needed for.

So in my opinion there should be two(Barbarians and Atlanteans) or one (Empire) buttons that the player can choose:

  • Barbarians: button 1: "no-warmill-training" (when a soldier has reached the highest possible level without a warmill, he is dismissed); button 2: "no-gold-training" (only what can be reached without gold is trained, then the soldier is dismissed)
  • Atlanteans: button 1: "no-gold-training"; button 2: "no-iron-training" (in the labyrinth, so only evasion is trained)
  • Empire: "no-gold-training"

As for the AI, a lack of gold, gold ores, and gold-made weapons should be detectable (the player can see all wares he has got). The same thing applies for the warmill: When the AI builds a warmill or looses a military building, it should check whether it has one.

I don't know if a "no-iron-training" is reasonable. I only had needed it once (Finlakes as the blue player), where I only had the soldiers with that I started (in a castle village), where I needed long to discover and reach the mountains. But normally, once you have an iron production, that should no longer be necessary.


"Only few people know how much one has to know in order to know how little one knows." - Werner Heisenberg

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Astuur
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Posted at: 2012-02-23, 20:12

I certainly agree that there should not be a situation where you have to manually kick out every soldier from a trainings camp.
This sort of micro managing for each individual soldier is something that Widelands usually tries to avoid.

Up to now there is a simple rule:
Do not build a training site if you cannot supply all the input it will need.

In turning the logic around, the question is:
Do we want to allow the Barbarians a training which only uses the axefactories output (plus food).
Or maybe the same thing with "no gold".
Because that is really what the consequence is.

On the other hand:
What's the use of an axe factory it you cannot really (without kicking out manually) use its output to empower your soldiers?
We could just as well disable the axefactory's ability to make sharpaxe and broadaxe, but not of course the normal axe, for this is needed to create level0 soldiers.

A different, relatively simple solution would be another trainingscamp that only serves for attack levels 1 and 2.

We have opened up a can here, with a lot of impact and will have to discuss this thoroughly. The changes in inter-tribe balance could be very drastic.
Barbarians usally win their battles by floods of badly trained soldiers rather than champions. And that is their characteristic warfare.

I wont enter a discussion on this topic right now, because I want to do other things of WL. But we should come back later to this.


Being no programmer, I apologize for all my suggestions that imply undue workload and for other misjudgements due to lack of expertise or relevant skills.
I am on Win32, have no means to compile, and rely on prefabricated distributions (Thanks to Tino).

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stulle

Joined: 2012-03-12, 04:48
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Posted at: 2012-03-13, 13:10

Sorry, i know this is paused, but i had an idea.

I think a whole lot of the problem could be solved with one button (rsp. menu) in soldier equipped military buildings: "Send soldiers practice."

By pressing this button (maybe also a drop down menu with "number of soldiers"), all soldiers which can be trained (with resources existing in training facilities) are sent there. It would just automate what you now try to do manually.

Alternatively a right-click on the soldier could send him practice...?


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simplypeachy

Joined: 2009-04-23, 12:42
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Posted at: 2012-03-26, 16:42

stulle wrote: Sorry, i know this is paused, but i had an idea. I think a whole lot of the problem could be solved with one button (rsp. menu) in soldier equipped military buildings: "Send soldiers practice." By pressing this button (maybe also a drop down menu with "number of soldiers"), all soldiers which can be trained (with resources existing in training facilities) are sent there. It would just automate what you now try to do manually. Alternatively a right-click on the soldier could send him practice...?

Maybe the game logic should work as follows: Every time a soldier with training is received at a warehouse (or whenever the soldier is ejected from anywhere?) it should send that soldier to any military site with empty slots. Once all of these are filled, relevant training sites should be supplied if there are free slots. Once the training sites have been filled it should then look to replace the soldiers of all military sites which do not have the highest-trained soldiers. As new soldiers are trained, they will trickle into the existing military sites.

When slots for military sites are made available (new structure, increased soldier limit) the game always fills them with the best soldiers it has.

This means that your soldiers are always being used effectively and means you don't have to sit there emptying a castle, waiting for it to fill with randomly-chosen soldiers, and emptying it again until you have the best solution. Even if the military slot logic always selected the highest-trained soldiers it would be an improvement. I think there could be an argument that the player should be responsible for "sending soldiers to be trained" - but please, please, send the best you have!

Having to click a large military site's soldiers eight/ten times for each soldier you wish to eject is cumbersome, I agree. You can click and hold the slider down, then fill it up again, but when you have four+ sites to perform this on, maybe an "empty all slots" button would help.


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mr.x

Joined: 2012-04-04, 22:46
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Posted at: 2012-04-04, 23:04

Hello

A button to train solders from the military buildings could maybe do it. But i think a better solution would be to treat the solders as we now do it with wares. in the regards that we can prioritize. If we are able to say in this building we want highly trained soldiers, then as soon as a higher trained officer is available he will walk there, go into the building kick out a lower one. this will also help to avoid almost empty military buildings while waiting for maybe a better one if we are lukcy.

Also if the training sites check with world production and kick out/deny solders that are "maxed" to train would be nice. It would also automaticly boost the AI considerably.

Edited: 2012-04-04, 23:04

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Horatio

Joined: 2011-11-07, 20:27
Posts: 36
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Posted at: 2012-04-19, 14:15

Sure, it is a bit annoying that you gotta manually kick out soldiers when you train evasion as Atlantean without having any shields yet or if you lack gold or whatever in general. But training occurs relatively slowly so I fail to see the problem with a little bit of micromanagement. If you want e.g. moderately trained soldiers you simply empty the building, let the guys walk home, send them to the military site where you want them and then reopen the camp with lvl0 guys. In my opinion this doesn't require any new features. If you overfeature the military side of the game you automatically make economic decisions less important.


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