Topic: Barbarian Trainingscamp and no warmill
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teppo
Joined: 2012-01-30, 08:42
Posts: 423  Tribe Member |
Posted at: 2012-08-03, 13:28
One solution which should be easy programming-wise, UI-wise and AI-wise would be tho have separate training sites for no-gold-needed training steps and gold-needed training steps, where the latter would only accept soldiers that have completed former. New graphics would of course be needed. From my point of view this would be very close to a perfect solution, except if made the management too easy. 
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teppo
Joined: 2012-01-30, 08:42
Posts: 423 Tribe Member |
Posted at: 2012-08-15, 12:29
I did the change described above, and am mostly happy with it: It fits to the barbarian profile. Barbarians get somewhat trained soldiers more easily in early game. Later on the benefit more or less goes away. In short, fixing this "problem" is easy. Should it be fixed?
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QCS
Joined: 2009-12-29, 21:47
Posts: 256 Tribe Member |
Posted at: 2012-08-16, 18:25
After carefully thinking about this problem, I think a better solution would be:
CMake is evil.
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teppo
Joined: 2012-01-30, 08:42
Posts: 423 Tribe Member |
Posted at: 2012-08-17, 10:46
QCS: Half-trained soldiers on field can also be a disadvantage: A lot has been invested to a half-trained soldier, and when he goes away after not-having a change against a fully trained enemy all the materials are lost forever. In early game, any training is good but later it gets more complicated. A huge pile of untrained or evade-only soldiers has, in my opinion, a better price/performance ratio. What you propose makes it difficult not to have half-trained ones around. In latest release barbarians have cheap untrained ones, cheap (counting in fossile resources) evade-only trained soldiers and fully trained ones. Making a setup where instead of half-trained being stuck in the camp they always en up in the battlefield without a real change of being ready punishes barbarians in late game. As barbarians already are, in my opinion, at disadvantage in late-game situations, they should not be punished more. Why do you propose to kick the soldiers away also when a training step was successful? This I did not understand, else your suggestion made sense. Should all training sites be changed like that or only the barbarian trainingscamp? Currently, the trainingscamp does not iterate through soldiers but training steps. In your proposal that should change I guess. I still like my own approach more, but agree that it could be a question of taste. What I like in your proposal is that you solve the problem without increasing the building-type count.
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QCS
Joined: 2009-12-29, 21:47
Posts: 256 Tribe Member |
Posted at: 2012-08-17, 11:11
The idea was to train one step and then kick the soldier out; which really leads to more halftrained soldiers than maximumtrained ones. I agree, that's not the desired behaviour. So let's approach the training of an individual soldier: One training round is
If he is kicked out after failing a training, there's a chance (of which I don't know how probable) he gets re-added to the queue. But from my experience, the soldier selection for such sites does neither prefer untrained or halftrained soldiers, so this might even out. At least half the soldiers are requested freshly. And as long as there are enough fresh soldiers available, the training can commence as it is currently the case. CMake is evil.
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Horatio
Joined: 2011-11-07, 19:27
Posts: 36  Pry about Widelands |
Posted at: 2012-08-17, 13:59
@teppo: Gold is rarely scarce on Widelands maps and two trainingcamps are hardly a perfect solution. Training takes pretty long and if you lack gold all you gotta do is kick out soldiers perhaps every half hour (the interval is probably even longer). As the military side of Widelands requires kicking soldiers out of buildings anyway (Kick weak soldiers out of a military building while hoping to get better ones from the HQ which requires of course that you do not have too many untrained soldiers which again requires that you decently manage your military economy, not overproducing the stuff for lvl0 soldiers ... which is what Widelands is all about, the economy. It is not a war game!) having to do it in the case of trainingcamps if you want mid-level soldiers is hardly a problem. @QCS: Your suggestion interferes with the basic demand system of Widelands. When a soldier is automatically kicked out after one training the demand for an additional soldier is created. So your system involuntarily leads to a production of "too many" lvl0s. Furthermore a soldier could end up in the HQ just because the item he needs for training isn't there yet. Currently there are no queues, every soldier is trained, and this is obviously far better than your suggestion which would lead to a lot of soldiers running around on the map, far too many lvl0s and above all, the key weakness, a training of ALL soldiers (guy receives one training, goes home, new guy enters the camp). In the current system players can decide WHICH soldiers they want to receives training, i.e. if you want e.g. quickly train a bunch of high class soldiers you put fewer people in the camp. The current system is fine as it is. It requires some micromanagement but all the suggestions to amend this via some ill-designed automatic procedures that are oblivious to how Widelands works lead to far more problems than they solve. Edited: 2012-08-17, 14:01
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teppo
Joined: 2012-01-30, 08:42
Posts: 423 Tribe Member |
Posted at: 2012-08-20, 13:10
Horatio: A horde of untrained soldiers is sometimes the way to go -- both in wars of history textbooks and widelands. I agree that when one has the possibility to properly train soldiers, having huge number of untrained ones in the warehouse should be avoided. I also agree with you in that widelands is about economy. Scarity of gold depends on map and on the actions of other players, and is not a feature of widelands game itself. There are many maps where your findings are true. Unfortunately, I do not understand your conclusions at all. You propose micromanagement, and oppose a solution without justifying yourself. Why would two trainingscamp harm, and if building count is evil then why would not merging battle arena and trainingscamp improve the game from its present form? Having the trainingscamp built in two steps allows more development paths to choose from; sometimes it is not at all obvious whether it is more beneficial to upgrade the trainingscamp or not. I do not see why you would like to force a player to always take the same path. Remark: I read again my old comments. In the test build I am commenting now, the "upgraded trainingscamp" behaves exactly as trainingscamp in latest official version, not like thought to do it last month. In other words, it is not necessary to force the player to have two trainingscamps even if this issue would be improved from its present form. The suggestions of QCS I have not tried in practice.
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Horatio
Joined: 2011-11-07, 19:27
Posts: 36 Pry about Widelands |
Posted at: 2012-08-23, 00:52
You talked about two trainingcamps, upgrading it with gold being the separating feature makes of course far more sense and I am not opposed to this idea. Yet maps with gold scarcity are rare so it is a fairly academic problem. Anyway, all I want to emphasize is that the military side of Widelands requires tedious micromanagement anyway and clearing the trainingscamp when the soldiers achieved the maximum feasible level of training is not more complicated than exchanging weak soldiers in crucial military buildings for stronger ones sitting in the HQ. If you ever played the Atlanteans you know what a pain in the ass it is if you wanna merely train evasion in the early part of the game, from time to time you gotta kick the soldiers out of the labyrinth and check whether they really go home while really untrained ones come out of the HQ... yet this bit of micromanagement is still preferable over complicating the game with new features. This is by the way a far more significant practical problem than your lack of gold scenario as it occurs in virtually every Atlantean game.
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teppo
Joined: 2012-01-30, 08:42
Posts: 423 Tribe Member |
Posted at: 2012-09-01, 07:19
Micromanaging soldiers is sometimes needed. It would help a lot if the military buildings could have a "prefer-untrained" and "prefer-trained" modes. Doing this would help a lot, but it is wort a discussion of its own. Atlanteans are so powerful already that I would make playing them even more easy anytime soon. Does anybody else see big problems in changing the barbarian trainingscamp into a two-step thing?
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Horatio
Joined: 2011-11-07, 19:27
Posts: 36 Pry about Widelands |
Posted at: 2012-09-01, 16:19
Atlanteans are not overpowered. Period. If you ever played them you would know that they need a lot of wood which makes space for farms scarce. As your suggestion is obviously based on the ridiculous notion that Barbarians are somehow weaker than Atlanteans it is utterly irrelevant. Play the game for some time, try to understand it and then come back with ideas.
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