Topic: odd recruitment behavior

There is one thing about recruiting (both workers and soldiers) I absolutely don't get. For example:

If I have built a mine (not occupied yet, nor someone on his way) and my warehouses don't hold any miner but several master miners, the program insists to recruit a new miner instead of sending a master miner. That doesn't make any sense to me. If it would prefer simple miners over master miners it would be useful so they gain experience. But if recruiting is preferred over using an "overqualified" worker, that means that the master miners in the warehouses are ultimately useless ballast. And one will gain a lot of them when more and more mines are completely depleted.

It's a similar problem with soldiers. Okay, this is a bit more difficult to describe and apparently I don't really catch how training priority and order work. If I'm not mistaken, the arena works faster (in terms of fully training a soldier) than the camp because there are only two training stages vs. eight in the camp. Therefore the arena is finished much faster with training all (fully) untrained soldiers than the camp and then starts recruiting new soldiers to train, therefore keeping my war mill busy producing axes instead of advanced weapons and thus letting fall my training camp even more behind. Since the camp seems to prefer training lower levels over higher levels, this sends the system into an endless cycle, with the camp replacing the half trained soldiers again and again. Even if some more well trained soldiers stay in the camp they hardly ever get fully trained, if at all. I'm currently playing the second barbarian campaign scenario and it took me some four hours to finally get eight fully trained soldiers, with three smelting works that I'm barely able to supply. No, I don't get at all how this is supposed to work .

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king_of_nowhere wrote:

No0815 wrote: It's a similar problem with soldiers. Okay, this is a bit more difficult to describe and apparently I don't really catch how training priority and order work. If I'm not mistaken, the arena works faster (in terms of fully training a soldier) than the camp because there are only two training stages vs. eight in the camp. Therefore the arena is finished much faster with training all (fully) untrained soldiers than the camp and then starts recruiting new soldiers to train, therefore keeping my war mill busy producing axes instead of advanced weapons and thus letting fall my training camp even more behind. Since the camp seems to prefer training lower levels over higher levels, this sends the system into an endless cycle, with the camp replacing the half trained soldiers again and again. Even if some more well trained soldiers stay in the camp they hardly ever get fully trained, if at all. I'm currently playing the second barbarian campaign scenario and it took me some four hours to finally get eight fully trained soldiers, with three smelting works that I'm barely able to supply. No, I don't get at all how this is supposed to work .

If it is fully supplied with wares, your war mill will make one level 0 axe, then one level 1 axe, and so on until it makes a level 5 axe. then it will start back from 1. in that time, the training camp will use those axes to train a soldier from rookie to full. the arena will also train a soldier, and it will remain empty most of the time.

But! If you don't have enough wares in your war mill, it will stop and start back from 0. So if you have few resources arriving, you'll only be getting level 0 axes, with maybe some level 1 or 2 every once in a while. So you won't get promoted soldiers. Also, if your training camp does not have enough food, or the right axe to train a soldier, it will kick the soldier out and get a new one to train from scratch. So, the way to make your economy work is to have enough supplies that the war mill always has metals and the training camp always has food.

this is intentional, as one needs to build a goood economy in order to have the best soldier. poor economy, poor soldiers. A beginner is not supposed to get fully promoted soldiers easily, and the campaign indeed does not require it; mildly promoted soldiers will be more than enough to win; the AI is also not the best at getting the higher promotions.

There is however a simple micromanaging trick to get over it: if you really want the best soldiers, stop your war mill, training camp and arena, accumulate metals and food, then let them work for a while at 100% efficiency; you'll get your fully promoted soldiers. Stop those buildings again when you are running low. Figuring that trick led me to win the tournament while i was still a relatively unexperienced player, but now most human players do know of it; the AI, however, is not good at implementing it, so you can get easy wins against the pc that way.

Also, getting fully promoted soldiers without micromanaging now is much eaasier than it used to be in build 18. at the time, the training camp had a much smaller cooldown before kicking out a soldier.

Another easier trick: when a training site is made, reduce the amount of soldiers you want inside to two; it is pointless to keep 12 half-trained soldiers in there, better to train them one at a time and getting them to war sooner.

I do not play on multi (would like to observe at least one before, especially since I don't play often... I probably go here to check more often) but I would like to point out that micro-managing the soldiers in general seems important to me: unlike in settlers 1 (not sure about the 2nd, I preferred the first, can't remember exactly why), there is no global command to help at that (on the other hand, settlers 1 only had the macro-management feature. Also, soldiers were trained in military buildings, but it's another story). To be exact, when playing against AI, I find that I regularly need to force some buildings to not ask full resources (and soldiers are a resource, in a way), but it's probably because I'm bad at creating quickly an efficient economy. I would loose against most humans, I'm sure :) Also, I usually spend a lot of time saying "no, this building is way too far from frontier, one man here is more than enough" repeatedly.

Anyway, I do not think the campaigns mentioned anything about the control of resources in buildings, but the reason might be because the campaigns were written before that feature (it's the same for burning/dismantling buildings, but I may be wrong). In short, I am afraid that campaigns are "outdated" (in the meaning that they do not show how currently the game helps the player controlling things, or only for the "big picture", not in the meaning that it's boring or bad balanced. Also, remember: I don't play very often, it might have changed in the year...).

Considering the need for highly trained soldiers in campaigns: it's useless at the moment, in all campaigns. But this may because only less than 3 scenarios per campaign are currently written? I always feel like if only introduction have been written (which is sad, because I like the stories behind, but I guess campaigns are not the most interesting thing to create?).

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Keep that Widelands is still being created; the campaigns will be longer when it's done, but right now the staff is busy working on other parts of the game.

Also, I've thought about making a fan campaign (I actually did a little work on it), but for it to get anywhere I'd have to either get someone to co-create it, or at least to have someone to answer some lua questions (I'm an average-at-best programmer, and I don't know lua).

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freem wrote:

I do not play on multi (would like to observe at least one before, especially since I don't play often... I probably go here to check more often) but I would like to point out that micro-managing the soldiers in general seems important to me: unlike in settlers 1 (not sure about the 2nd, I preferred the first, can't remember exactly why), there is no global command to help at that (on the other hand, settlers 1 only had the macro-management feature. Also, soldiers were trained in military buildings, but it's another story). To be exact, when playing against AI, I find that I regularly need to force some buildings to not ask full resources (and soldiers are a resource, in a way), but it's probably because I'm bad at creating quickly an efficient economy. I would loose against most humans, I'm sure :) Also, I usually spend a lot of time saying "no, this building is way too far from frontier, one man here is more than enough" repeatedly.

there aren't many multiplayer games available. i had no more than three or four in the last year.

as for micromanaging, it depends on the economy size. in a small map you can't get a large economy, so you need to micro to get the best soldiers. in a large map, you can get enough resources that you do not have to worry about it - at most you'd have to periodically stop and unstop one of your training sites.

king_of_nowhere wrote:

....the program insists to recruit a new miner instead of sending a master miner. That doesn't make any sense to me.

this seems like a bug. what version are you using? I'll see if i can confirm this.

This might be intentional: Previously, the mines just requested a miner that could do the job. This lead to stalls when upgrading old mines and building new ones: a master miner, needed in a "deeper mine" was sucked to a shallow mine during upgrade.

Doing this made the locks go away. There would of course be better ways to tackle the problem, but I guess nobody has bothered.

I can see why someone would do that, but it creates more problems than it fixes, imo. especially because you can always kick a master miner out of a mine, so it will go to a deep mine, but you can't undo a miner if you wanted to send a master miner in its place. the best fix would be to make the game capable of automatically move master miners where needed. the easier fix would be to tell the game to create a new miner only if there are less than 3 master miners in warehouses, so that there would always be a few master miners to use in case of need, but not too many new miners would be made.

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king_of_nowhere wrote:

Doing this made the locks go away. There would of course be better ways to tackle the problem, but I guess nobody has bothered.

I can see why someone would do that, but it creates more problems than it fixes, imo.

You are right, but the problems that it fixes used to be nasty. In the old days, a miner in deplenished mine did not gain experience at all (or actually at 0.25% probability; nowadays it is 15%) Not being able to mine because miner cannot be trained was an ugly problem.

especially because you can always kick a master miner out of a mine, so it will go to a deep mine, but you can't undo a miner if you wanted to send a master miner in its place. the best fix would be to make the game capable of automatically move master miners where needed. the easier fix would be to tell the game to create a new miner only if there are less than 3 master miners in warehouses, so that there would always be a few master miners to use in case of need, but not too many new miners would be made.

That could work. However, one does not always want to avoid having some extra master miners. Like when expanding to enemy territory, where the mountains already are half-depleted, and new mines need immediate upgrading (=no time to train).

Better would be to have user-configurable target quantity for master miners, and use the experienced guys for entry-level jobs when stock is full, and recruit new ones otherwise. This should be possible to achieve with rather small amount of new code; auto-swapping miners would be a tougher challenge.

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