Topic: automatic upgrading of a building

I just finished playing a large map with barbarian, and I was annoyied by the amount of micromanaging they require. and not the good kind of micromanaging, the one that gives you some advantage, but the kind that is just mechanical clicking. the necessity to upgrade mines all the time was the worst, but also building taverns and bringing them to big inns, or making breweries, required a lot of attention.

I'd really llike, when I make a coonstruction site of a building that can be upgraded, to have an option "immediately upgrade building when finished", with the possibility to choose how much to upgrade for metalwork shops and taverns, which can be upgraded twice. Alternatively, in the menu where you select which building you want to make, a new category "upgraded building" could be added, and by selecting there, you can decide to build a war mill, and that will start a metalwork shop that will immediately upgrade when completed.

For mines, I'd like to have a selectable option already in the construction site (I want to be able to give the "build" order and forget about it, not having to wait for the mine to be ready before i can select the option, if i haven't forgotten about it) that says "automatically upgrade the mine when exhausted". It will cause the mine to kick out any food it has left inside, then upgrade, all by itself. When it cannot be upgraded anymore, it should still give the "exhausted" message and wait for me; I want to be notified that a mine is exhausted so I know to build a new one. Or possibly it could also dismantle the mine by itself, as long as i get a notification that i have one mine less than i did and i need to make a new one. It's important that the food is removed before the mine is upgraded; barbarian bread is awfully expensive, and i'd rather not waste it, but the time waiting for the mine to spew out food is possibly the worst part.

I hope it's simple enough to code that someone will do it.

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einstein13 wrote:

If you want to "upgrade when finished" withouth such a button, you can just leave their windows opened when the site is building. When it will be finished, the size of window usually change the size (width & height), and you know that the building is ready.

that's exactly what i'm doing right now. and having some ten windows open that way is not something I'm looking forward to. especially since on a large map transportation of wares is going to take time. and all the while messages from the mines kept popping up. And then if i had to reload I had to go back and look for all the buildings again.i also like building up stuff, but i don't see how leaving a window open for ten minutes, then clicking to go to it when completed, tell it to upgrade, then selecting it again and leaving the window open for ten more minutes waiting to order the second upgrade enhances the experience. if you dont like such an option, no one is forcing you to use it.

And during a large battle (i fought 150 vs 150 level 10 soldiers on that map, in multiple waves as new soldiers kept arriving at the front and attacking again) my economy slowed down because i could not fix mines. i was busy with seven military buildings opened, clicking out wounded soldiers to replace them with fresh ones, and i could not keep track of mines.

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king_of_nowhere wrote:

if you dont like such an option, no one is forcing you to use it.

I like the option, but using it will make huge difference between begginers and very experienced players. We can add thousands of benefits to players, but you have to learn one by one to use all of them. I don't want to make the game too easy.

If you want to make your economy more efficient and less upgradeable, just build mines with larger distances between each other. Also you can build breweries in only few spots (for example 3). Then you can check the breweries very fast. For me it is the easiest way to do all of that.

And during a large battle (i fought 150 vs 150 level 10 soldiers on that map, in multiple waves as new soldiers kept arriving at the front and attacking again) my economy slowed down because i could not fix mines.

I know that this idea is quite different, but in Age of Empires II you could invite your friend and you could play with him using only one empire. For small maps/ short games it is not useful, but if you play large maps, you can easily split the responsibilities. I was playing once with my friend and that was great. I was building economy (simplier than in Widelands, but still needed lots of stuff) and he was building only army.

Also I have a bit other idea: special building. Let's say "upgrader house". Big building, very expensive and not very useful for short games. But on large maps- yes. The upgrader will upgrade the mines automaticly, maybe other buildings too (if you let him do it). It is possible to set him orders "first get rid of food from mines/ breweries/ inns, then upgrade". The upgrader can be "your friend cooperating" when you will fight.

I know that the second idea is also a bit strange, but for me it is better to introduce. Everybody can build it. Begginers and advanced players.

kaputtnik wrote:

For mines i think it's a task to the message window because the "exhausted mine" message appears in there. By clicking on such a message the window moves directly to the exhausted mine(s). Do you use the message window? I do not often... it covers a lot of the screen and it's a bit useless in current state. May there could be a possibility of defining an "alarm" for specific messages by the player?

I mostly hear the sound of incomming message. Then my fingers do "n"->"g"->"del"->"...can't remember how I close the window..." sequence (automaticly!) and I am in other place on the map. Sometimes I don't want to go there, but my fingers are... doing it all the time It is less than a second and I have to focus to see the message text.

einstein13
calculations & maps packages: http://wuatek.no-ip.org/~rak/widelands/
backup website files: http://kartezjusz.ddns.net/upload/widelands/

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in that map, hearing the sound of messages was complicated by the fact that my economy was reliying on charcoal for coal, I had some 50 woodcutters and they kept sending the "no more trees" message as soon as their productivity dropped a little bit. which is also something that i suggested fixing, some time ago.

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king_of_nowhere wrote:

in that map, hearing the sound of messages was complicated by the fact that my economy was reliying on charcoal for coal, I had some 50 woodcutters and they kept sending the "no more trees" message as soon as their productivity dropped a little bit. which is also something that i suggested fixing, some time ago.

I did a rework of these a few weeks ago; looks like the frequency of messages still isn't optimal. Could you please play around with the values a bit to see what would be the best productivity % to trigger the message? e.g. for the Barbarian Lumberjack (tribes/barbarians/lumberjacks_hut/conf), we have productivity_threshold=66 at the moment. The trigger for the mines is separate from these.

We could also adjust how often these messages get sent - at the moment, Widelands will only send them again after 30 minutes in-game have expired. We could adjust the frequency of the messages for the mines separately from the other production buildings.

Busy indexing nil values

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