Production queue limit problems

[Jazzepi]

Fate said:
It is not an arbitrary bug, and is there for strategic reasons (albeit slight and mostly limited to the realm of annoyance).

A 100 unit cap isn't strategic, it's an arbitrary limit set by designers that just happens to have an unrealistic, and probably unintended, limiting effect on a powerful high level global. It really should be raised. If someone has the production to use it, they shouldn't be restricted by an arbitrarily too low production cap number.

1,000 would be sufficient.

Jazzepi

[vfb]

Some powerful high level globals are also more useful for some nations than others. Second Sun is not very useful for Niefelheim. Aren't there some more resource-expensive troops you could recruit instead of whatever you are building?

The 100 unit limit may have been just as intentional as the 1 commander limit. The recruiting queue is documented as being 100 units in the manual, after all.

And is realism is really an issue? It's already unrealistic that recruits do not come from the population.

[Loren]

vfb said:
Some powerful high level globals are also more useful for some nations than others. Second Sun is not very useful for Niefelheim. Aren't there some more resource-expensive troops you could recruit instead of whatever you are building?

Anything more expensive isn't going to move at speed 3. I'm *NOT* buying junk, I just have two provinces with over 1300 resources.

I have hit the limit a few other times as a land nation trying to get into the water. Shamblers aren't armored--very low resources. While you're building an army it doesn't matter--the 1 commander limit is more important than the resource limit. If you build an army and then bring it back out of the water for reinforcements, though...

[Saxon]

Seems to me that this ties to the other thread that stats there is a unit ceiling for the entire game of 100k units. I jokingly said only Gandalf Parker plays games that big, but obviously not.

If you are pulling in this many units a turn, it is likely that your opponents are as well. Given the gold you must have, you must have a decent sized empire and so do they. Let us assume 500 units are being added to the game a turn, if not more. You are buying top quality troops, others may be buying chaff.

That unit ceiling is going to get hit in 200 turns, which is a pretty long game, even on a big map. If you remove the unit limit, the unit ceiling is going to get hit a lot earlier, leading to another problem.

[Edi]

Seems to me that the complaints about the 100 unit limit in the queue and not using up all resources under highly specific circumstances is little more than bellyaching. For the vast majority of cases, it is not an issue at all and rare enough to not warrant changes.

And as Saxon points out, it's a choice between the lesser of two evils. Increasing the unit ceiling is not an option due to performance issues even on high end systems.

[Jazzepi]

Edi said:
Seems to me that the complaints about the 100 unit limit in the queue and not using up all resources under highly specific circumstances is little more than bellyaching. For the vast majority of cases, it is not an issue at all and rare enough to not warrant changes.

And as Saxon points out, it's a choice between the lesser of two evils. Increasing the unit ceiling is not an option due to performance issues even on high end systems.

Between Edi and Gandalf it's surprising that anyone bothers to raise any issue with Dominions 3. This is a legitimate complaint, but every time someone tries to bring up something that could be improved or has been giving them issues, sooner rather than later one of you two posts about how people should stop whining about Dom 3 and just worship it in all it's semi-perfect glory.

Jazzepi

[Loren]

Edi said:
Seems to me that the complaints about the 100 unit limit in the queue and not using up all resources under highly specific circumstances is little more than bellyaching. For the vast majority of cases, it is not an issue at all and rare enough to not warrant changes.

And as Saxon points out, it's a choice between the lesser of two evils. Increasing the unit ceiling is not an option due to performance issues even on high end systems.

I think there's an answer to the unit limit problem.

Make some more units. They would be basically squads. If you have a bunch of something in a province they would sometimes combine into the squad units. Squad units would cost the same in support, leadership & food as what they were made out of, but they would function as a single unit for the rest of the game.

[PvK]

Jazzepi said:
Between Edi and Gandalf it's surprising that anyone bothers to raise any issue with Dominions 3. This is a legitimate complaint, but every time someone tries to bring up something that could be improved or has been giving them issues, sooner rather than later one of you two posts about how people should stop whining about Dom 3 and just worship it in all it's semi-perfect glory.

I don't imagine anyone has any problem with suggestions. But often suggestions are over-stated as problems, which confuses the issue and leads to people trying to put problems in perspective. Given that it's a very complex game with tons going on and many great ideas about what could make it even more fun, there is of course a constant large list of bugs and suggestions, and so it's helpful to put suggestions in proper perspective, and it can be confusing to everyone from new players to Illwinter if discussions are out of proportion. In this case, for example, while it's a perfectly good suggestion that ideally there would be no recruitment limit, and this thread nicely explains the circumstances where it can occur and be an issue for a specific game situation, it's also appropriate to reflect that this is a very rare situation (I don't remember ever running against it after years and years of play since Dominions 1). I also expect you could spend all your gold by recruiting in other provinces, and being limited to 100 Helhirdlings or whatever is the sort of problem many players would love to be their worst concern. Now, calling it "just bellyaching" might have rubbed a nerve, but it seems to me there's far more out-of-proportion comments which are complaints (e.g. people deciding unit X is worthless when they haven't realized what it's good for, and others chiming in and saying it should be changed, etc.).

As far as recruitment goes, I'd much rather see the ability to recruit mundane (non-magic, non-holy) commanders at the same time as magicians and priests in the same province, so there wouldn't be a forced choice between recruiting mages versus interesting commanders.

[MaxWilson]

Jazzepi said:

Between Edi and Gandalf it's surprising that anyone bothers to raise any issue with Dominions 3. This is a legitimate complaint, but every time someone tries to bring up something that could be improved or has been giving them issues, sooner rather than later one of you two posts about how people should stop whining about Dom 3 and just worship it in all it's semi-perfect glory.

Hey, ease up on the ad hominem attacks. Edi took a substantive position on why the issue is not a serious concern (100k units in a game is rare); apparently you disagree about the seriousness ("legitimate complaint") but instead of e.g. arguing that the limit is often hit in 1000-province games you're attacking Edi. That's not cool.

The computational resources probably does constrain the maximum number of units (probably the same reason why we're limited to 1500 provinces maximum), but if this were an important issue it could probably be set in preferences and/or with command-line flag. The question is whether this issue is important enough to merit special attention that way. Looking at all the other things on the short list should put this issue into perspective.

Incidentally, keeping on the good side of the short list maintainer (i.e., Edi) is probably a good idea for a number of reasons.

-Max

[Loren]

Saxon said:
If you are pulling in this many units a turn, it is likely that your opponents are as well. Given the gold you must have, you must have a decent sized empire and so do they. Let us assume 500 units are being added to the game a turn, if not more. You are buying top quality troops, others may be buying chaff.

Actually, there's no way that anyone else is building anything like as many.

I've got probably 40% of the map, an AI has another 40% and there are two little empires left that, we are each munching on one of the little ones. Obviously we will have a big fight when the two little ones are munched up.

So far, equal. However I have up Gift of Nature's Bounty, Fata Morgana and Riches from the Deep. This gives me gobs of cash he doesn't have and gobs of production to use it with. It's impossible to actually compare our armies as his has been at the max line for a long time now.