[Alpha 8] Feedback on dealing with equipment

[mik]

I've noticed that newly summoned creatures go straight to the storage and take the best equipment available. I think that's a very useful feature. But I see problems with updating equipment when better things are produced. E.g. if a creature is wearing a leather armor and a chain armor is produced, it will never replace the current armor with the better one.

And updating the equipment manually is very tedious. There is no way to tell what items are inside the storage. The only way to check this is to control a creature, walk over every storage tile with an item icon and open the pick-up dialog. The icons don't help much since only the uppermost item of a stack is visible, e.g. if a knife is dropped on an ancient weapon, you will only see the knife symbol. That may be ok for a chaotic battlefield but IMHO managing items “at home” needs some improvement.

Maybe it would help to re-trigger the initial item fetching from time to time, e.g. always when a creature has finished sleeping. This should be easy to implement since the algorithm itself seems to be available and manual management would be mostly avoided. Or each creature could get a task for updating equipment that could be ordered manually like the tasks for training or workshop.

For manual management there could be something like a split-dialog with creatures on the left and items in the storage on the right side. Assigning an item to a creature in this dialog could mean to order the task: go to the storage and fetch this item.

This could also be extended for items that are not available now but will created in the future. Assigning future items would help to deal with items that only make sense when used together. Currently this is the case with bows and arrows. So when a creature is ordered to fetch an existing bow but no arrows are available, it could be ordered the task to wait for some arrows and fetch them after they were produced.

[miki151]

Yes, periodically checking for better equipment is a good idea. I wrote it down. Arrows are automatically given to creatures that possess a bow, so that should be working ok already. Thanks for the feedback.

[mik]

Arrows are automatically given to creatures that possess a bow, so that should be working ok already.

Oh, I didn't notice. But you are right, my creatures seem to have enough arrows most of the time. How does this work exactly?

[miki151]

Sorry. what I meant was they are assigned to them when produced. A minion will only pick up arrows if he has a bow already. And there is a limit of 40 arrows per minion, so with the amount produced they are more or less fairly distributed.

[KnightZero]

Along with auto-updating the equipment there should be some sort of heuristic to decide who gets what. A level 1 goblin shouldn't really get better gear than a level 10 Legendary Humanoid in most cases I would think. If a heuristic is implemented it would be nice to give the player some control over it, like being able to designate a group to always receive priority for better weapons and armor.

[miki151]

That's also possible, but sometimes stronger creatures will spawn when all the good gear has already been grabbed, so they won't always get the best gear. Of course I could make the weaker creatures give their good gear, but I'm afraid it would create a mess and they would do it in the worst possible circumstances 🙂

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