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Topic: Design of the Soldiers' training

Astuur
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Joined: 2009-02-28, 10:08
Posts: 733
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One Elder of Players
Location: Frankfurt / Germany
Posted at: 2009-07-12, 10:38

The current design of the soldiers' training system has some flaws with considerable impact. I am using the Barabarians as an examples, but this applies to all tribes.

1) Only soldiers inside Warehouses and HQ are eligible for training.

2) Training facilities are valuable. Also training soldiers takes a lot of time. Therefore training camps/arenas will typically not be built on the borders to an enemy, but on safe grounds, and as early as possible; that means in the secured center of the realm. Unfortunately they will draw soldiers from the warehouses on a "nearest first" policy. Consequently the warehouses close to the borders that will need them most, will get their soldiers trained last.

3) Trained soldiers are dismissed always to the nearest warehouse (from the training camp) As a result of this, the warehouses close to the borders are empty of trained soldiers and will always hold newly created, untrained soldiers only. Because military building also look for replacements with a "nearest first" scheme, you can never benefit from ejecting and replacing an untrained soldier in a milityry site on the border. Ejecting soldiers from military building and having them replaced is pointless and annoying, because currently you have no control over the "recruiting rate". As long as you have axes available, the system will always create new soldiers in the warehouses. They of course are untrained.

There is currently no way to influence all of this. There could be many ways to solve this problem. My suggestion is this:

1) Please give us a display of the "Soldiers in stock", both economywide and per warehouse, that shows their training state. And it definitely would help, if economywide "in stock" did not include all buildings but only the warehouses/HQ. (for all wares!)

2) PLease create a switch "want weakest available" or "want strongest available" for all military sites, that takes effect when you eject a soldier from a site. Let the system look first for a soldier of the requested strength (strongest/weakest) economywide and only then for the nearest of those that match the request. Create the same switch for warehouses/HQ too, to allow further control over storage of soldiers.

3) Please create an automatism that takes untrained soldiers from military sites first (warehouses later) one by one, and fills the vacancies using the same switch and prodedure as described above. Possibly this automatism could be able to identify the military sites closest to the enemy and priorize those.

It's pretty obvious, but I still want to mention it, that these mechanism would not only increase the fun using player tactics, but would also help considerably to create a smarter AI.


Being no programmer, I apologize for all my suggestions that imply undue workload and for other misjudgements due to lack of expertise or relevant skills.
I am on Win32, have no means to compile, and rely on prefabricated distributions (Thanks to Tino).

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hulagutten

Joined: 2009-07-19, 21:34
Posts: 56
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Posted at: 2009-08-03, 23:50

I remember the function in the settlers game where one could empty a warehouse for a certain type of goods or people. This would solve many issues.


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MegaMatze

Joined: 2009-06-20, 16:06
Posts: 33
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Pry about Widelands
Location: Germany
Posted at: 2009-09-13, 10:36

I always get confused with the great amount of different axes und helmets. There are 5 axes and 3 helmets. Which of them combine? Do the combine at all? In the "ware help" it say that the stronger a worrier is, the greater weapon he needs. That makes totally sense, but it would be nice if the worriers had a definit rank. So one could know ahead wich weapon he needs. At the moment the training is not quite understandable. What, for example, is the diffenrence between the arena and the training camp?

Edited: 2009-09-13, 10:37

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