Topic: Selection of Soldiers

About the ratio of good to bad soldiers, naturally it depends on what tribe you play. Let me use the empire as an example. You need helmets for lvl0 soldiers and for training, so if you have one armor smithy, weapons smithy and trainingscamp you produce HQ soldiers. Via building a second armor smithy you can produce more helmets such that you get more lvl0 soldiers and if you have enough of them you can shut down the second armor smithy.

So via managing the high end of your economy, weapons and helmets or whatever production, well you can decide how many low level and how many fully trained soldiers you want. If you have 200 soldiers and only 40 of them are highly trained yet you want all of them to be highly trained you did not achieve your goal. To be very blunt, it's your problem when you cannot do this and not an error of the game. Just try to micromanage well, focus on HQ guys, send them into the frontier buildings and then you can aim for some time more on LQ soldiers such that you have ample new guys to train and then focus on HQ again and so on.

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There is not correct ratio in Widelands. Not even the developers could tell you how many X buildings you need for one Y building. Gee, when I play the game I never know how much foresters a woodcutter requires for every tribe or how many mills and bakeries you gotta build. The fun thing is to figure this out while playing.

When you start a game you usually build one weapons, one armor and the two training buildings. On larger maps you might build more than that and in the case of the Empire you can create more lvl0 soldiers via additional armor smithy as helmets are required twice, for lvl0 guys and in training. About the target quantity, sure, when you want more lvl0 guys you should increase it for helmets while you let your second armor smithy run. In case of the Atlanteans and Barbarians you have 4/2 respectively 5/3 weapons to armor stuff that you need in the trainingsscamp (not sure whether the production times change anything) so you gotta perhaps rather build a second weaponsbuilding if you want training to happen faster.

I think it is an asset that not everything runs automatically in Widelands but that you gotta do it "by hand". Send the weak soldiers from the frontier home once you have a bunch of well trained folks, send the weak guys who just came home back in the trainingscamp and so on. I mean, gee, you gotta do it perhaps every half an hour or so, it is not like it is an unbearable and tedious micromanagement burden.

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Obviously I am merely talking about training of soldiers and not the issue of wounding and healing.

When you have too many low level guys your trainingscamp is perhaps not running at full capacity. So you gotta perhaps build enough weaponsmithies and armor smithies to supply it. Check whether you are short of weapons and armory. Perhaps you are also short of food. Perhaps you gotta temporarily close your colosseum (evade training facility) such that there is no demand created for new lvl0 soldiers. It is hard to tell from a distance how you can involuntarily have reached a situation in which you have plenty of untrained soldiers despite having aspired to get mainly fully trained soldiers.

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