Production queue limit problems

[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

[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

[Edi]

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.

Jazzepi

You go right ahead and point to a post where I have ignored things that are legitimate bugs. What I take exception to is when people dig up some really obscure thing that can only happen under highly specific circumstances and bring it up as if it were a serious bug with the game.

Take this one: It is highly specific, it is largely dependent on what nation you play AND a matter of preferences as to what units you want to recruit. Yet it was made to sound as if the 100-unit recruit limit was about to bring the game crashing down around our ears.

I have my issues with certain things in the game (quite a few things, actually), but I also consider priorities and what things can realistically be expected to be addressed. I have to, given my task with the bugs and other issues.

By all means, discuss this and suggest improvements and express what you wish changes, but keep in mind that these are matters of preference and they also have a demonstrated downside, with the existence of the unit ceiling (which seems to be closer to 150k than 100k). Whether that downside manifests is highly dependent, number of nations, the nations included, size of map and length of game, but remember that increase in the limit will also increase it for the AI, which could exacerbate the problem.

[Loren]

Edi said:
You go right ahead and point to a post where I have ignored things that are legitimate bugs. What I take exception to is when people dig up some really obscure thing that can only happen under highly specific circumstances and bring it up as if it were a serious bug with the game.

What's so exotic about my case? Good scales + some good globals. That's it.

Take this one: It is highly specific, it is largely dependent on what nation you play AND a matter of preferences as to what units you want to recruit. Yet it was made to sound as if the 100-unit recruit limit was about to bring the game crashing down around our ears.

I went through the units. There is *ONE* usable unit that costs more resources than what I'm buying. The other has an indie unit that's more expensive but it doesn't like moving--and the province is now several places behind the front line.

[vfb]

Loren said:
What's so exotic about my case? Good scales + some good globals. That's it.

Perhaps when you designed your pretender, if you knew you were planning on casting Riches, then you could have taken less Production and spent those points elsewhere.

Alternatively, if you already have high enough resources because of your scales, you might get more benefit out of casting a different global. Why not cast a Forge of the Ancients instead?

The 100 units limit to each recruiting queue is a documented feature of the game. So design a strategy that works with that.

Fair and Balanced non-Fanboy comment: The 100,000 (or 150,000) unit cap is not as easily dismissed. It seems to me it would be better just to let older systems fail if they run out of memory or get too slow when processing all the units. I think someone suggested a commandline option so that the limit can be specified by the user. That sounds good to me.

[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.

[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.