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Topic: maning military buildings

GunChleoc
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Posted at: 2016-05-12, 11:49

No0815 wrote:

I'll ignore the balance discussion here since it's OT. Regarding the suggestions of GunChleoc and king_of_nowhere:

I don't know, this sounds rather complex. Even if my code isn't usable in this form (what a surprise), wouldn't it still be easier (and even more effective) to just iterate through the array that stores the soldiers to pick the best (or weakest, if rookies are requested)? These functions could even be reusable for other situations.

You have the choice of iterating while adding a soldier to the warehouse, or iterating when selecting a soldier. Sorting algorithms can be made a lot more efficient than iterating though, so sorting the soldiers when adding them to the warehouse is a better implementation. If you iterate over an unsorted list while selecting you always have to go across the complete list.

king_of_nowhere wrote:

No0815 wrote:

Thanks! It's actually nice to see that someone explicitly agrees that the current behavior is suboptimal, to say the least.

Oh, I also agree that the system is suboptimal, but the programmers have limited time, so it is best to spend that time on more important things.

Well, rating importance can sometimes be a delicate issue. But if a problem can affect the game in such a deep and potentially game-changing way, as the example of kaputtnik should illustrate, I would hardly consider it as unimportant.

It's not unimportant, but less important than a crash, for example. Which issues get addressed also depends on which developers are available - you need to know quite a bit about the engine in order to work on this, so you need somebody who knows the codebase well.

Furthermore, we must make sure to not swap a suboptimal algorithm for one equally subotpimal, only with different problems.

Now that's definitely fair enough, as long as it doesn't implicitly means "Nah, changing would require effort, do not want." Though I can hardly imagine that this change could have unwanted side effects, unless the changed code itself is defective. Though I still could be wrong, I don't know the source code, so if someone has substantiated arguments ...

I think we should only look at this for Build 20 - at the moment, we are trying to finish up Build 19. Any changed code at all can potentially introduce a new bug.

And don't worry, your feedback is appreciated face-smile.png


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teppo

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Posted at: 2016-05-14, 10:37

king_of_nowhere wrote:

In my first game in the tournament, I was the only one who knew the micromanaging to create level 10 soldiers without a strong economy. I had only a handful of them, but they killed weaker soldiers and then retreated to get healed.

I was quite astonished when I realized how powerful that was. Generally, I would like to move Widelands towards the direction where micromanagement does not pay off . However, I have not figured out ways to make micromanagement of training to be less profitable (without crippling the game). Making training sites to prefer "heroes in other arts" would be a possibility. Any ideas?


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king_of_nowhere
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Posted at: 2016-05-15, 18:45

teppo wrote:

I was quite astonished when I realized how powerful that was. Generally, I would like to move Widelands towards the direction where micromanagement does not pay off . However, I have not figured out ways to make micromanagement of training to be less profitable (without crippling the game).

that's not really possible, unless you want to completely remove the chance for micromanaging - and in that case one may as well go back to play settlers 2. if micromanaging is possible, then the only way to not make it advantageous would be for the computer to do all the best moves by itself. which 1) would require more skill and time than anyone here has, and 2) would make human players mostly redundant.

Really, what's wrong with getting ahead by micromanaging? it's not necessary, so casual players can still enjoy the game. let powergamers also have something appealing to them.

Edited: 2016-05-15, 18:45

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teppo

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Posted at: 2016-05-18, 16:38

king_of_nowhere wrote:

that's not really possible, unless you want to completely remove the chance for micromanaging - and in that case one may as well go back to play settlers 2.

I am not sure we understand each other now .. Removing the options would be stupid. I think that the training sites could be improved a lot if they, for example, would have a weak preference for tranees that are already trained in those arts the training site does not teach.

Really, what's wrong with getting ahead by micromanaging? it's not necessary, so casual players can still enjoy the game. let powergamers also have something appealing to them.

Micromanagement is not evil. However, if it brings a huge advantage then that is a sign that the buildings are not doing their job right. You would not like to instruct each forester to place their trees to vacant slots, would you? Removing the huge payoff from micromanaging makes the game better, in my opinion.


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king_of_nowhere
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Posted at: 2016-05-18, 18:05

Micromanagement is not evil. However, if it brings a huge advantage then that is a sign that the buildings are not doing their job right. You would not like to instruct each forester to place their trees to vacant slots, would you? Removing the huge payoff from micromanaging makes the game better, in my opinion.

that's not what i meant. what i meant was that a skilled human player will always be able to do things better than the algorithm, and so he will be able to get some advantage from micromanaging; unless you go out of your way to make that impossible, but that's not good for the game.

I'd say there are two different kinds of micromanaging, a good one and a bad one. good micromanagement is about making meaningful decisions; it enriches the game, and let the player use his skill for something. bad micromanagement does not involve meaningful decisions but only mechanical, repetitive tasks; it does not take skill to perform it, except maybe for remembering it all the time while doing something else. your forester example would clearly be a case of bad micromanagement.

Regarding training sites, I'd say they already work pretty well. they wait long enough to kick out a soldier that if you have a passable economy you should get your soldiers to full promotions. They were vastly improved from build 18. I don't really see that they can be improved. Keep also in mind that sometimes, especially in early game, it is preferrable to send out a partially trained soldier to quickly defend the front against untrained soldiers, so I'd still pen that under "meaningful decision".


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GunChleoc
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Posted at: 2017-01-16, 09:22

Related bug: https://bugs.launchpad.net/widelands/+bug/1643201


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