[PATCH] Limit arrows on certain buildings

[sanderd17]

Garrisoning units has different advantages currently:

• It increases arrows shot in defensive buildings
• Some buildings heal your units
• It's possible to transport them in ships
• It's good against the enemy trying to capture the building

For some of these effects, you need a big garrison capacity (f.e. big ships need to be able to transport a lot of units). However, if the fire rate enlarges linearly with the number of garrisoned units, the building becomes overpowered. So some buildings would profit from limiting the arrow count to a certain number:

• The roman army camp should be limited to somewhere between a defense tower and a fortress. In history, it mostly served as protection for the army, while battles were being hold outside. Garrisoning more units will indeed protect them, and protect the building from being captured
• Many ships need to have a limited fire power. A big sea battle requires many ships, while you can transport many units with a few ships

[elexis]

Your patch works and the code looks very clean.

The tooltip displays the correct values and I also compared the attack damage in an actual battle (compared a ship with 30 units garrissoned with a ship that has only 13 units in it and they did the same damage). The heavy warship was the strongest ship so far, since it could garrisson 40 units and shoot 43 arrows (OP). Now it is limited to 13 arrows too, since it is considered a trireme internally.

The following things could be added:

• Ptolemian military colony can garrisson 20 units and shoots 21 arrows
• Seleucid military colony can garrisson 15 and shoots 17 arrows
• With this patch, the heavy warship receives a tooltip that explains how to increase the firepower. However the other ships also need tooltips urgently, since most players don't know that you need to garrisson ships to make them stronger. (This usually results in empty boat spams, so don't fix this if you want that big sea battle :D )
• There should be a loading screen tip that explains how to increase the ship firepower, so that even those people will be informed, that don't read (or didn't have time to read those) tooltips. Those tips are defined in binaries/data/mods/public/gui/text/tips, the images displayed are defined in binaries/data/mods/public/art/textures/ui/loading/tips.
• Sword cav doesn't shoot arrows, while swordsmen and skirm cavalry does. That is because GarrisonArrowClasses contains Infantry and Ranged for bireme and trireme. One could add Swordsman to that list or rather remove the Ranged class from the list, so that all infantry but no cavalry shoots arrows.

Further I think that the balancing is okay. If you played with naval experts, then you could be certain that they would find out how many ships and units garrissoned you have on the sea and try to get more units on boats. This in turn means that you can lose all your boats and all your units while the expert keeps all of his boats alive and doesn't lose a single unit (if executed correctly). This balancing would mitigate this a bit.

[elexis]

Implements the changes suggested above. Maybe the loading screen tips for ship ramming attacks should be removed, while it's not implemented. If you want to test a particular loading screen tip, then add tipTextFilePath = "gui/text/tips/triremes.txt"; to loading.js.

[elexis]

Replying to elexis:

Sword cav doesn't shoot arrows, while swordsmen and skirm cavalry does. That is because GarrisonArrowClasses contains Infantry and Ranged for bireme and trireme. One could add Swordsman to that list or rather remove the Ranged class from the list, so that all infantry but no cavalry shoots arrows.

Maybe the most coherent fix would be to only make ranged units shoot arrows on ships? Another idea might be to let all military units shoot arrows.

[scythetwirler]

Great concept. However, I'd prefer avoiding using the numerical stat in the tooltip to avoid string translation chaos (though I'm not too sure on this) if it needs to be changed.

[elexis]

Replying to sanderd17:

A big sea battle requires many ships

In r16776, the attack rate of warships had been reduced by 50%. Empty ships still fire 3+1 arrows (#3763), making it more a risk than a profit to garrison units, rewarding empty-ship-spam. If you want to have sea battles at all with warships, then it shouldn't be plain spamming, but tactical maneuvering of garrisoned (armed) ships.

=>

• the multiplier should be increased again
• the number of arrows limited (to 20?) using the patch above
• the default number of arrows should be modified proportionally to the multiplier

[elexis]

In 17784:

Don't shoot an undocumented arrow from UnitAI if the entity also has a BuildingAI component shooting arrows. Fixes #3763.
Instead, add the arrow to the affected unit templates (except bireme and trireme, refs #3196).

[Itms]

Rebased and merged with elexis' patch.

[Itms]

In 17882:

Limit arrows on certain buildings and ships. Patch by sanderd17, fixes #3196.
Balancing by elexis, reverts r16776 in favor of the new total arrow limit.

[elexis]

In 17944:

Return Infinity instead of undefined in BuildingAI.GetMaxArrowCount. Refs #3196, #3846 and r17939.

Notice the previous check if (count > this.GetMaxArrowCount()) implicitly relied on
numerical comparisons returning false if one of the two arguments is undefined.