Should new large militarysites get filled with heroes immediately?

[fk]

Whenever a new military site is built, the game logic sends the weakest soldiers that will have to be replaced later by the desired soldiers.

This makes new military sites vulnerable for attacks. Instead of strenghening the front line, it effectively becomes weakened, especially if the new building is larger than the buildings that were already there. After the easy conquering of the large new military site, the balance can be shifted completely and the player can loose the whole area.

[wl-zocker (wl-zocker)]

I have also experienced that and think it is sometimes very unfair: You build a castle to be able to defend the area, it gets occupied with rookies and then your enemy attacks with his heroes waiting for such an opportunity, conquering the castle and occupying it with 12 trained soldiers, making it nearly impossible to conquer it.
Sometimes, I also notice the contrary: A building far away from war that wants rookies by default (e.g. an Atlantean tower) requests strong soldiers. This is of course not as bad as the other way round because you can reduce the number to 1 immediately and this one will be replaced sooner or later, but nevertheless annoying.

[Teppo Mäenpää (kxq)]

Currently, when soldiers are missing, the site requests *anything* instead of requesting soldiers of certain type. The economy then delivers something, usually those who are located nearby. In the case described by wl-zocker, the most likely explanation is that the new site far-off battle got its nearby soldiers from a warehouse that was close to a training site. The nearby soldiers just happened to be well trained.

Also, it was intentional to make the replacement so that new sites are more vulnerable. Erecting new military buildings to battle area is dangerous.

Player who wants to ensure quick supply of new soldiers, should either ensure that there are no poorly trained soldiers in the economy (difficult but doable) or ensure that the replacements happen quickly.

In some cases, having soldiers fast is more important than having the best available ones, so this is not an obvious drawback.

Of course the behavior can be changed from what it is presently, even if the current state was an intentional feature instead of being a bug.

[SirVer (sirver)]

I can understand both viewpoints here and can not make up my mind to which one I agree. I suggest we wait a while longer until we have more feedback and experience and decide than what we want to do with this.

[Teppo Mäenpää (kxq)]

I do not have a strong preference here.

The idea behind the soldier exchange was to reduce micromanagement. The idea was not to make gameplay easier. Wouldn't it be easier if all soldiers were created as heroes? Now they are recruited in a vulnerable state.

I see an analogy here, but do not object if you wish to change logic.

Related thing, not in the initial bug report: Now, whenever a military site becomes non-full (soldiers die, or go to a recently conquered building), the military site again request "anything", and resumes being picky when full again. _IF_ we decide to change the initial fill, should this be changed too? It would simplify the code if there were as few states as possible.

Yet another way to make the military site stronger: Currently, the old guy starts walking away before the new guy arrives.
If that would be changed so that a replacement arrives first, the discarded guy leaves only later, the number of lines of code would go down. I am against this, but it would simplify the implementation and make the sites even stronger.

[fk (fredkuijper)]

#2 "Also, it was intentional to make the replacement so that new sites are more vulnerable. Erecting new military buildings to battle area is dangerous."

Is in contrast with:

"In some cases, having soldiers fast is more important than having the best available ones, so this is not an obvious drawback."

If it has to be dangerous, than soldiers do not have to arrive as soon as possible. Another thing is that unoccupied buildings cannot be attacked, but poorly defended buildings can.

#4 "Yet another way to make the military site stronger: Currently, the old guy starts walking away before the new guy arrives."

Replacement of soldier has always been dangerous. This is not new to the game.

[SirVer (sirver)]

I see a difference now though - before, the other player probably only had some of the better soldiers on his front, now you can be sure that all his best soldiers are at the front. So the state of balance has changed with the auto exchange patch.

Not saying that this is a bad thing, but it changes the game for sure and must be taken into account when thinking about balance. Right now I am not convinced that we have enough data to make a balance change.

[Teppo Mäenpää (kxq)]

fk, #3:

No contradiction; getting soldiers as fast as possible can be both beneficial and dangerous.

Example: A military site who gets soldiers first conquers unoccupied land. This way it can even destroy its opponents similar construction sites or not-yet-occupied military buildings. Destroying the military buildings of an enemy without a battle is a benefit. Take a look at the third part of Tournament 2013 semifinals, construction site near (8 130) for an example of this.

The dangers are obvious, I guess?

I know that the it has not been possible to replace soldiers without sending away the old guy first. This is not an argument against doing so in the future, if we conclude that military sites should be as strong as possible. I feel that the soldier exchange is good as it is now, but since you said otherwise, I list all things in my mind that could be done to make the soldier exchange less dangerous.

There is one thing I have been thinking: Add a third option to the preference. In addition to rookies and heroes, the site could also request evade-only trained soldiers. They have the best performance/metals ratio, anyway, and such option might be nice in places where you do not really expect a battle. I do do not have actually done anything about that, though. Comments are appreciated.

[Launchpad Janitor (janitor)]

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

[SirVer (sirver)]

I retarget this bugs for b19 - I think some change in the way things work might be needed, but I feel that sending the 'correct' soldiers into a new military buildings is maybe to strong for the builder of this building (right now, it might be too dangerous). So I retarget so that we can evaluate closer to b19 again.

[SirVer (sirver)]

Setting to "confirmed" since there is no other option really fitting this kind of bug.

[Teppo Mäenpää (kxq)]

I still think that new buildings being vulnerable adds some taste to the match, and consequently this is a desired feature. Same rules apply to enemies, too, and best way to fight it would be the introduction of caserns, when a player can tune the economy to produce a small army full of heroes if that seems right.

However, of somebody wants to change this so that the milsites grab soldiers of their preferred types from day one, I do not mind.

[fk (fredkuijper)]

@7 "Add a third option to the preference. In addition to rookies and heroes, the site could also request evade-only trained soldiers."

I think that that would be a good idea. Only problem could be that is hard to determine what is a medium soldier, as this will change during the game. Perhaps the lowest 40% should be rookies, 40% medium and 20% heroes (or other numbers).

[Teppo Mäenpää (kxq)]

#12:

evade-only trained soldiers are different from a medium soldier.

If we would like to have an option for the site to specifically ask for mid-trained soldiers, I would do it approximately in the following way:

Add a method to the economy, which returns the current definition of a mid-range mid-range soldier. The method would then loop through all soldiers in that economy (regardless of whether they are occupied or available), and return mean level and standard deviation, lower bound being always at least one and upper at least lower. The method could cache the results for few moments (gametime). Each military site could then use this information to tune its soldier requests. This way, there could be a plethora of different grade-related preferences if we want that, without much extra code or too much extra execution.

Anyway, I would see an evade-only preference more useful than a general mid-grade preference.

[SirVer (sirver)]

Setting to incomplete for bug sweeping.

[SirVer (sirver)]

I think the current behavior is most fun - a new big building needs flanking until it is able to protect itself by getting a random draw of soldiers. If players want to avoid that, they have to have only strong soldiers in their economy, which is very challenging.

Setting to wontfix, feel free to disagree and we can reopen the discussion.