Topic: Barbarian Trainingscamp and no warmill

Just re-reading this - a year later, but the situation is unchanged.
Although this thread is so old, we did not see any additional comments.
I'm trying to summarize:

• All contributers, with the exception of Horatio, seems to agree, that the game mechanics are not ideal in this point.
• All (except Horatio) want to overcome the current situation where soldier training comes to a standstill if for any reason the training cannot continue to the final level.
• The common ground is that the system should use the economic resources that currently exist to built up a military force, as best as possible, and that it should do so with very little or no player intervention.
• Some suggestions have already been introduced how to best achieve this, but the discussion of the individual pros and cons of each of them has not yet started.

I personally am very happy with QCS's solution.

If I understand well, this would have the effect, that the absence of required wares, be it temporarily or permanent, in the trainingsite would not postpone or stop the training, but would be reflected by the training level of the released soldiers.
In the case of a temporary shortage of food or weapons, there is a chance that the training be continued later.
I like that idea.

I hope my summery is okay so far.
I can see that in fact any solution would have an impact on the military equilibrium and the way a WL game develops.
This may or may not be acceptable.
Now we'd need a word from the others and ... if agreed upon someone who can actually make that changes
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@Horatio: I have been thinking about your arguments, Horation, but I can't follow you.

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.

I agree with the aim of not wanting to emphasize the military aspect of the game but the economy-related one.
I can't follow your rationale, however.
On the factual side there is no danger that the economical aspect might become less important, as it is the foundation of the military side. You can add as many bells and whistles as you like to the latter, if your economy is not working, there will be no wares to equip (i.e. train) your soldiers.
I also disagree with psychological side of your argumentation: In my view the need to micromanage your soldiers keeps you preoccupied with the military aspect, while an automatic system that would adapt to the options that you currently have, would set your mind free to manage the economy, which is what we both want.

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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@Astuur: The rationale is very simply. While trying to fix a pseudo-problem", micromanagement, a far more serious problem is created, utter loss of flexibility.

I already pointed out that QCS'S "kick out a soldier after one round of training" suggestion leads to an overproduction of lvl0s and to many low-trained soldiers. Remember, the guy leaves the training site, goes home and a new soldier comes from the HQ. This is utter lunacy, you have no flexibility at all, the supposedly great automatic mechanism makes it impossible for you to decide whether you want few high-trained or many low-trained soldiers. Currently you can easily achieve that via a fairly limited amount of micromanagement. Every 30 minutes or so you check your training site and if the soldiers have reached the desired level of training you kick them out. What's so horrible about this? When you wanna get good soldiers to large military buildings on the front you have to play the kicking game anyway!

So if you guys wanna change the training sites you gotta change this as well such that the player can pick and choose soldiers. Sounds an aweful lot like making the game too focused on the military element which is antithetical to the basic principles of the developers.

Don't get me wrong, I understand the desire for more automatic mechanisms in the military side of Widelands. Automatic stuff is great. But if you had ever played longer Widelands game you would realize that the little bit of micromanagement of the military is not a liability but an asset. It allows you to actually make decisions and it tightly ties economic decisions to military success. Furthermore micromanaging your economy is what you do the entire time during Widelands! It is just a little bit more of stuff to do. And let's be serious here, even in large maps where you might have several training camps the intervals between having to do something in your training camp (or your weapons/shields producing facilities to determine how much lvl0s you want when you play e.g. Empire) are rarely below 15 minutes.

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teppo wrote:

try it out, if you can! The code is not in trunk, so you would need to download the source branch feature-978-partial-training using Bazaar and then build a binary before testing. After testing, please write your detailed comments here!

Great, Teppo that you did this! ... but, unless some one can offer a win .exe, I cannot test this. (see my sig) Really sorry ....

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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So you put another icon for each type of soldier level next to the generic soldier icon in the window where you set the economy target for all wares. This would solve the problem with soldiers staying in the training facility even if you want them out. Is this what you meant Adamant? You simply state how many of what soldier level you want and the training stops at any level where the economy does not demand further training. About the question of how to train, 7 soldiers to level 1, then all of them to level 2, or 1 soldier through to the highest and then start with the next one. That is easily adjusted by the amount of soldiers alowed in the training facility as Horatio pointed out.

To make it complete, allow for zero amount of any particular ware in the economy demand, why is this not possible? Especially with tools it can get annoying if I want a particular tool but the blacksmith has to make one of each (that I have none of) until he gets to the desired tool.

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Thank you for enlightening me about this. Just one quote that sounded counter effective: "in case of a a target quantity of 0 forscythes with existing request for scythes the scythe would of course be produced anyways." - Nasenbaer

Wouldn't that mean that in the case of not wanting more level 0 soldiers, having axes demand at 0, the training facilities or military buildings would still demand soldiers when a slot is open and thus the axefactory produces another axe?

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