Topic: Soldier status for HQ/Port/Warehouses

I have an open PR that adds soldier information in the status line of warehouses. It replaces the building type in the census line with an icon, so the town name is moved there to free up the status. It is however marked as "under discussion", because of a disagreement over how much info should be shown. I'd like to ask for feedback here too, because we didn't get any on github.

Current implementation

The HQ and ports have it similar to military sites, but if there are surplus soldiers, then it shows the min garrison size in parentheses, and fighting soldiers are not tracked as belonging to the building (this is a limitation of the current warehouse soldier code, the status line code is there to show them in the PR).

Plain warehouses always show the number of soldiers there, but the wole line is in parentheses to show that they are only stored and cannot fight from there. I actually added this only after some testing, because it looked strange that plain warehouses didn't show anything.

Change requested by @Nordfriese

IMHO we shouldn't show this for warehouses that can't have a garrison setting and are not attackable

and

I though about this some more and actually I think not only should we not show it for warehouses, it also should not be shown for ports and HQs with a garrison setting of 0. To me this emphasizes the military aspect too much by showing players all the time and right from the start that micromanaging your soldiers is such an important part of the game even your warehouses have to show you detailed soldier stats. And that totally misrepresents what Widelands is supposed to be about; in an ideal economy you would never have to worry about tracking individual soldiers.

So I'd like to hear some more opinions on this…

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I am more on @Nordfrieses side with having less soldier info. To me the presence of a soldier status line suggest a military building, which at least for warehouses isn't the case. It should only display soldiers which are garrisoned and hide if the garrison setting is 0. Yes, this would mean that there may be hidden soldiers present, but if you want to see more soldier stats you can manage the garrison to display them (I know this is not possible in a replay, but I rather not have different layouts for a game and a replay).

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OK, if we make it official that warehouse desired soldiers are not a real garrison, ie. disable the rookie/hero preference buttons (I think I can try this in this PR), document it somehow that ports and HQs should always be protected by military sites too, and maybe even reduce the maximum allowed value (though that may make new colonisation ports vulnerable), then I guess it's OK if the text only shows the "garrison" setting if greater than 0, and whether it's filled up. E.g. "Garrison: 7 (+5)" instead of "= 7 soldiers (+5)".

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hessenfarmer wrote:

Ports really need a military site imho, due to the design of the naval warfare feature. And HQ should have it as well for consistency imho. Normal warehouses do not have the feature yet and don't need to have it. Ans we need to make the Hero rookie buttons work properly rather then skipping them .
For the display I think a HQ and a Port are military buildings as well as warehouses.
So I agree on Nordfriese for the warehouses. But I think showing that really importnat buildings are not guarded, would be acceptable, as it is an important information for the gameplay.

There's also another way. On land, everything is fine: Ports behave like HQs and are protected against attacky by the surrounding military sites.

However, on sea, this role has to be taken by the ships. You have to place ships around the port that automatically block and attack incoming invaders. This is of course much more balanced if not a ship alone but the ship's soldiers do the fights. So, ships are like movable military buildings.

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