Some ideas relating to unit decommissioning

[WhiteTreePaladin]

Many times in a game I find that I need more population room. However, in the late game the pop cap basically means that there simply isn't enough space in the houses. To prevent "deleting" your own civilian units to free up space for the more powerful units (this would apply to soldier units too), I suggest we implement decommissioning.

The Delete Unit button would be replaced with a Decommission button. Units would simply disappear when decommissioned (or maybe use a simple particle effect). This would represent sending off units when you don't need their services. The unit would return all items received during the course of employment. This would be realized by adding the loot (equipment) values of the units back to the player's resources.

To prevent killing all the enemy civilian units, I suggest two changes:

First, that we make female citizens non-conquest critical like traders and priests. This requires removing the ability to set Civil Center foundations.

Second, to avoid having Gaia units just sitting around after a player is defeated, we could implement automatic Gaia ownership changes based on proximity like in AoK. The proximity ownership change takes away most of the difficulty of figuring out which player actually defeated the other player.

Any thoughts?

Edited February 15, 2015 by WhiteTreePaladin

[Lion.Kanzen]

I think same with females selling in market for metal(slavery)

[wowgetoffyourcellphone]

Sounds unnecessary. What is the big difference between deleting them and 'decommission' them? They still leave the game. Also, where are thease people going? Up in smoke, poof like magic trick?

[Lion.Kanzen]

I think I do is when I don't need a unit is bring the unit to the enemy base to explore, can be nice upgrade these units to spies or low healers ( priestess).

I know this will change with capture feature.

[WhiteTreePaladin]

Sounds unnecessary. What is the big difference between deleting them and 'decommission' them? They still leave the game. Also, where are thease people going? Up in smoke, poof like magic trick?

For one, it avoids having dead units all around your base when no battle has occurred. Killing your own units to free up pop space just seems bizarre. Other than the graphical effect and it being more logical, you would receive the loot per unit decommissioned which provides some new strategies. You could decommission some units you didn't need in order to get some of the resources back to research some critical tech or train some units that you had a more immediate need for.

It needs to apply to all units, so a slave market really wouldn't work as well; you should be able to decommission both military and civilian units. Also, the civilians are generally citizens with certain rights, so selling your own people off doesn't make much sense considering they weren't captured enemies. (It also is a sensitive issue that would be more offensive to people without a real benefit to the game, so I don't think it should be implemented that way.)

[wowgetoffyourcellphone]

"It also is a sensitive issue that would be more offensive to people"

It was a sensitive issue to 1 guy on the forum.

[GunChleoc]

It will probably be offensive to a lot more people who don't speak up

I like the decommissioning idea - we could make them walk to a barracks or civ center first?

Edited February 16, 2015 by GunChleoc

[Lion.Kanzen]

I want sell them for metal than kill it, otherwise I want send to a suicide mission to have more population space to soldier/champions

I'm more to specializated female worker into other unit, assasin , spy, healer, slave( like Starcraft mule boost for economy but finish dying).

You prosal is change a name, a icon and animation?

[WhiteTreePaladin]

It's been mentioned that players would decommission civilian units during an attack to avoid letting the enemy get loot/exp, so direct decommissioning that allows return of loot values to the original player could be abused by very experienced players (in circumstances where a building is destroyed and the units could not make it to safety.) The other system (walking to buildings or applying only to garrisoned units) was considered too much effort for too little gain.

I get the impression that it's simply a difference in player skill. An experienced player has no issue with unit deletion because they plan well enough to never need to delete any units. They are always producing new units; they don't really make a massive attack force all at once. It is an issue for casual players who like to build up a big economy with a massive store of resources and then free up the entire pop cap for an epic battle afterwards. The play style is basically a slower pace regular game that ends with death match level resources.

Edited February 16, 2015 by WhiteTreePaladin