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Topic: Introducing a new building for the creation of untrained soldiers

kaputtnik
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Posted at: 2016-11-03, 18:19

GunChleoc wrote:

The separate tab in the Trainingsites makes sense, because soldiers have different levels and you need to be able to kick out a specific soldier.

Does soldiers with different training levels appear in this building? I thought it is only used to 'create' new soldiers and after a soldier is created he goes to the trainingsites or the headquarters/warehouses.


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Notabilis
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Joined: 2016-11-03, 20:37
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Posted at: 2016-11-03, 20:59

Currently, normal carriers come from the warehouse, are added to the queue and removed when a soldier is created. The soldier leaves the building immediately and goes to a warehouse.

I decided for the extra tab for the carriers with the argument of possible future usages. Kicking out a carrier is pretty useless right now but if we have a building which consumes e.g. miners it could be useful to kick miners with already high experience. (What can't be seen on the screenshot: When hovering over a carrier in the tab its experience is shown.)


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fuchur

Joined: 2009-10-07, 14:01
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Posted at: 2016-11-03, 23:30

My first thought was to use an extra tab for the recruits in the barracks building, just like in the trainingscamp.

After thinking a little more about it I'd say it's sufficient to treat the recruits/carriers as a ressource. Of course that is counter-intuitive because they are people and not wares. But if one wants to do some micromanaging (which will surely be needed) it's easier to have all possibilities on one tab.

Concerning the micromanagement of the barracks: I guess that's merely stop the building or have it running. If you place the building near a warehouse a new recruit can arrive in a short time because it won't be delayed by traffic jams. So reducing the numer of slots from 8 to 5 or so won't change a lot in the production of soldiers. I assume that having only 1 or 2 slots will make a difference.

By the way, if I look a the picture I can see beer as a needed ressource. Is that really planned? I think that will require a not so small economy to produce soldiers because one needs farms. But farms are also needed for bread, and beer is needed for training and advanced food.


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Tibor

Joined: 2009-03-23, 23:24
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Posted at: 2016-11-03, 23:35

Will soldiers (as output of the building) treated as a ware? With target amount and statistics of soldiers "on stock" (in warehouses)?


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GunChleoc
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Posted at: 2016-11-04, 07:25

Soldiers as output of the building will be finished soldiers. They can walk to a warehouse or occupy a military building as usual. Works just like the Ox/Horse/Donkey farms. That part of it is already implemented and live in trunk.

As inputs, we should have the same wares that we need to recruit a soldier at the moment - which means a weapon, and for Empire and Atlanteans 1 piece of armor as well.

Good point about the extensibility - how about we display the workers below the wares queues in the same tab, but with the mechanics that we have in the separate tab right now? We could do that for Training Sites as well then.

New mockup:

barracks - new mockup

We might run out of vertical space for some of the training sites though, because they have a lot of input queues.

Edited: 2016-11-04, 07:26

Busy indexing nil values

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Notabilis
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Posted at: 2016-11-04, 08:02

I added the beer requirement due to comment 12 in the linked bug report. But that part of the comment was more of a joke, I only liked the idea. It does not have to remain that way.

I am not really convinced by the design with nested tabs tab. What are we doing when there are multiple worker inputs?

Maybe we could use a blend between the ware and the training queues:

Further UI mockup

The black background as a hint that the player can kick workers out of the queue. The experience could be written in the hover tooltips we already have in place for ware queues or maybe written on top of the worker icon.


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GunChleoc
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Posted at: 2016-11-04, 09:44

Yep, that looks better.

If we want to unify this with the trainingsite/militarysite interface, what about the priority and prefer heroes/rookies buttons?

I think that we should review and merge your branch with the current user interface and then do the redesign as a second step.

Edited: 2016-11-04, 09:44

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toptopple
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Posted at: 2016-11-04, 11:03

What are the plans for time managent? Certainly the more interesting part of the building is that there (probably) is no instant soldier generation any more. But what does this mean for soldier requests? Will you have to set up a Warehouse/Headquarters minimum request for soldiers?

The solution with only one tab for resources is the better! Noone will understand why some is on an extra tab making it cumbersome to gain the information. Also, I don't think you really need more than 6 slots for Recruits if and when you set up a time delay for soldier creation.


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Notabilis
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Posted at: 2016-11-04, 20:38

The creation of soldiers is currently restricted to one soldier every 30 seconds (if I understand it correct; 15s sleep, than 15s training). There currently is no warehouse request for soldiers like there is for wares. As long as enough inputs are present, the barracks will train new soldiers.

I am not sure whether we should merge this with the trainingsite/militarysite interface. I thought about this before, too, since they are similar. But the stored workers or soldiers are handled quite differently: Workers are consumed (and with that removed) while soldiers are trained / are defending. I think this difference should be somehow expressed in the UI, too.


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GunChleoc
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Posted at: 2016-11-05, 07:42

I have thought about this some more, and I think the input should look exactly like the wares input after all. If we do stuff with upgraded workers in the future, they can simply get their own queue, just like beer/strongbeer and ration/snack/meal. So, I don't see the need for an ability to kick out specific workers.

Edited: 2016-11-05, 07:43

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