Topic: Workers and upgradeable buildings

Silversnow wrote: Erm... I do not buy the comparison of this problem with maintenance of realm-wide wood supply. Sure, there are many mistakes a player can potentially make in the game, as has become evident to me, and no doubt several in the area of wood maintenance alone. But the key feature of the worker-and-site-upgrade problem is clearly how you can cripple your economy with one single mouse-click at the "wrong" time (when you didn't micromanage the progress of individual workers). Right?

I agree, totally (also now that trees spontaneously grow themselves, it's jolly hard to completely destroy wood production; you have to industriously destroy every lumberjack's hut before noticing what's going on). I've picked up Widelands again recently, and showed it to a couple of other people, and the relationship between worker upgrading and building upgrades - well, that's the thing I find myself carefully explaining in agonising detail (and even then it's not like the game will tell you in advance what's going to be needed after the upgrade) and that still causes the occasional "augh" moment, especially when the existing situation is buggy; every now and then the chief miner goes and sits in the second slot and yet another cry of annoyance splits the air... and if you upgrade two mines at once it quite consistently does the wrong thing.

I feel that if you could eject a worker from a building (leaving them to seek the most appropriate empty post), if buildings with underskilled workers gradually trained them (and perhaps even produced a trickle of resources), and if you could see in advance what workers are needed for an upgraded building, this would be a great deal less vexing, but an inappropriate upgrade would still leave you in trouble - you can shoot yourself in the foot but you have to work at it for game-over, which is rather like wood.

... it'd also be nice if upgrading a building didn't lose you the wares in it but this is a hardy perennial, right?

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