Newly conquered building should prefer heros

[wl-zocker]

Currently, the building itself decides whether it want to have strong or weak soldiers. While this often makes sense (e.g. as an Atlantean, I would rather build a guardhall than a tower near a frontier), it completely fails when you conquer buildings of your enemy. Normally, you want to have your best soldiers at war, regardless of which building type they are in (when I conquer an Atlantean tower, I want to have four well trained soldiers inside). Having to click on every single building can be very tiresome.
I therefore suggest two ideas of how can it be determined whether strong soldiers are sent into a building (note that these are only extras that overwrite the default (building-based) system only in some circumstances):
1) If a hostile border is near the new (built or conquered) building, heroes should be sent in. I think the AI uses the same fact to decide whether it sends all possible or only one soldier into a building, so this code could be reused.
2) Every conquered building gets the prefer-heroes state.
The main difference is whether buildings built near an enemy's frontier are automatically set to prefer heroes (possibility 1) or not (2). Existing buildings should of course not be changed.
I think this change is a logical enhancement to the system we currently have.

[SirVer (sirver)]

I disagree - I think it is wise to have a predictable standard as we have now: every building of one type has one default and it is predictable. and especially 1) is whishy-washy and the player will not understand why one state was chosen over the other.

+1 for keeping it as is.

[Teppo Mäenpää (kxq)]

Setting all buildings to prefer-heroes mode during change of owner would not make the system less predictable than what it is now.

Regarding the suggestion of using distance-related heuristics, I agree with SirVer.

[Teppo Mäenpää (kxq)]

I can do the change described in the first paragraph of #2, if we agree that this is a bug and needs fixing.

[wl-zocker (wl-zocker)]

As already mentioned in #2, the new behaviour will be very predictable - just in another way than the old system. I think that is what most players want/expect to happen, so they will rather remark "Why are there rookies in this building near the frontier?" (old way) than "Why gets this sentry occupied with heroes, and the other one with rookies?" (new way). Having conquered a military building from an enemy is a different situation than having built it yourself, therefore I think it is justifiable to treat the two cases differently.
@Teppo: Since there have not been many opinions, I suggest to change the code and push it to trunk. If people do not like it, they will complain.

[Teppo Mäenpää (kxq)]

People complain regardless.

You did not set a target. If you think this is a b18 bug, then I would like to hear more senior opinions.

[Launchpad Janitor (janitor)]

[Expired for widelands because there has been no activity for 60 days.]

[SirVer (sirver)]

I read from the comments that 2) is liked as an option. 1) is not a good idea as it is not very predictable imho (how far is close to the borders?). S2 had a similar system - defining number of soldiers in a building with the distance to the border and it was neither flexible nor easy to use.

[SirVer (sirver)]

I changed the title accordingly - as always, if you disagree just write more comments here and restart the discussion.

[Teppo Mäenpää (kxq)]

For some reason, I was not able to push a branch to launchpad. However, I attach the one-liner that took some 9 months to make..

[SirVer (sirver)]

Applied in r7108.

[GunChleoc (gunchleoc)]

Fixed in build19-rc1.