Suggestion: Add ability to set preferred work/soldier level

[daniel_santos]

Military Buildings
For military buildings (or maybe even all buildings that contain soldiers), add the ability to specify a min & max preferred level. This would allow you to house veterans in military buildings near enemies and keep military buildings in safer areas manned by green soldiers. This will require new "changing of the guard" logic, where the new soldier should walk all the way to the military building and arrive *prior* to the old soldier leaving, ensuring that you do not leave buildings with inadequate protection.

This same logic can be carried over to non-military buildings, so you can specify certain levels of workers. For instance, I might have a new mine that I want staffed by inexperienced workers, so they can get trained up. Then, if they level up beyond what I set as my preference and I have another worker of that type available (of a lower level), they should come and relieve them.

Finally, this same should hold true for headquarters & warehouses -- at least for soldiers. This would allow you to keep a reserve of your trained veterans near the front and keep any excess of green soldiers near your training buildings. I'm not sure how much sense it would make to allow this feature for training buildings, however.

I'm currently playing with revision 4751.

[Nasenbaer (nasenbaer)]

moved to feature request

[Raul Ferriz (raul.ferriz)]

This should fit better on a blueprint, but for now I left as Confirmed Wishlist, please fill a blueprint and mark this as Incomplete to allow expiration of this bug.

[Foppe Benedictus (foppe-benedictus)]

Setting a maximum training level in training sites would make it possible to train soldiers until a certain point. In a game where you do not yet have gold this would be very useful. Now you need to dismiss the soldiers by hand. Combining this with slowly raising the minimum level of the military buildings it makes a good training plan.

[_aD (ad-simplypeachy)]

Related to https://bugs.launchpad.net/widelands/+bug/536548 "Allow control of stationed Soldiers in Military Buildings"

[SirVer (sirver)]

Setting to incomplete for bug sweeping.

[wl-zocker (wl-zocker)]

Most part of this bug are fixed:
- Military sites have a prefer hero/prefer rookie button with automated exchange of soldiers.
- Civil buildings have a button to evict a certain worker. This can be used to train workers by evicting the experienced one. Since this only affects some buildings, an automating is not necessary.
- Trainingsites kick soldiers out when the training has failed several times.
- I do not understand the paragraph about the headquarters - does the OP mean something similar to this blueprint: https://blueprints.launchpad.net/widelands/+spec/garrison-on-headquartes ? And what is the progress with that blueprint?

[Daniel Santos (daniel-santos)]

Great work! I played recently, but I'll check it out this weekend.

For civil buildings I recall this being quite a challenge that's often best solved by tearing down the building, but maybe I'm remembering an older version prior to the eviction ability? I'll have to test that again.

The idea for training sites is to optimize the training process, especially in times of war, so that if you only have the food/strong ale (for instance) you can get them in and out and not try to train them when you don't have the supplies.

Finally, about the HQ & warehouses, the concept is thus. If my HQ is nestled in some safe place, I don't really mind if there aren't too many soldiers there and if they are all green. But if I have a warehouse near a conflict zone, I will want to have my soldiers who are trained tend to want to hang out there when not requested by a military or training building. That way, when I send some soldiers off from a fort to go get killed by the enemy, there isn't a long trip to make to re-garrison the fort.

Alternatively, some logic can be setup so that when we see enemy units or buildings, trained soldiers will tend towards warehouses in that area, making it less of a micro-managing function. I'm not necessarily keen on that approach, but it would solve the problem and add a rather nice touch. If that is an approach you guys are interested, you would likely need to have a "weight" variable for HQ & warehouses, with HQ natually having a greater base value. Then, for each each enemy building sighted, you give it a value of something like 1 / distance_from_your_nearest_building. Then, for each warehouse or HQ, you take the value of each sighted enemy building, divide them again by the distance from that warehouse and sum those together -- that will tell you how to distribute your soldiers. If you want to adjust for the case where no enemy buildings are sighted, but you are invaded, you would have to create some type of temporary estimate of an enemy building that gets deleted once the area is expored (yeah, that one gets complicated).

Personally, I like the simple and micro-managed approach better.

[Daniel Santos (daniel-santos)]

Corection, I *haven't* played recently.

[wl-zocker (wl-zocker)]

Widelands has changed quite a lot in the five years that have passed since you wrote this feature request. You should definitely check build 18 to see the features I talked about.

Training sites:
There was a discussion in our forum about that topic (https://wl.widelands.org/forum/topic/978/). I just scanned the it, but it is about different programs when having no gold or no iron. The case you describe (having only food) is only a problem for the Atlanteans because the other two tribes have a building (battle arena/colosseum) that only trains evade.

Warehouses:
When I skip the automated soldier distribution calculation part (which I do not want to be implemented into the game because it is too complicated, too much effort for the programmers and takes the coming to a decision away from the player), I would like to know if a simple Prefer Heroes/Prefer Rookies button for warehouses would do what you want.
You could set your headquarters near your training sites to "Prefer rookies" and a warehouse near the enemy to "Prefer heroes", which would be exactly what you want (if I understood you correctly). The benefit would be that the player can control where his soldiers go fairly easily with button he already knows from the military buildings.

[Launchpad Janitor (janitor)]

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

[SirVer (sirver)]

I set this to fix released as most of othis stuff is in b18. If there is more to it, we should split it out of this bug report.