Military Advisor

Okay, I think the only two advisors we haven't touched is financial and military. The FA doesn't really need changed IMO, but the MA does.

The Enhanced MA was good, but was very slow and actually you couldn't view as much as in the regular MA. Enemy Units weren't accessed as well as before.

If you had to redesign the military advisor, what would you change?

EF, do you think you could speed up it's load time at all?

Original EMA Thread: http://forums.civfanatics.com/showthread.php?t=150477

TheLopez EMA Thread: http://forums.civfanatics.com/showthread.php?t=169549

alerum68 said:

EF, do you think you could speed up it's load time at all?

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There are a lot of performance enhancements to be had in modifying code written by enthusiasts, so my guess is yes. I'll take a look at the code this week and report back.

I wouldn't limit that statement to enthusiasts, EF - there's almost always a lot of performance enhancement possible if one sets that as a goal.

EmperorFool said:

There are a lot of performance enhancements to be had in modifying code written by enthusiasts, so my guess is yes. I'll take a look at the code this week and report back.

Click to expand...

hmmm - feel like I've just been insulted! Ok, if you want performance enhancements, how is this ...

Actually, knowing EF ... he will come back with this:

Which isn't necessarily a performance improvement even if it's less lines of code

I'm not that dissatisfied about the military advisor. The main thing it needs is a speed enhancement. It's a bit weird that a list of your units + locations takes this long to generate.

If you want ideas for enhancements, then you could work with colours again.
-colour for units that have a promotion left (blue glow?)
-colour for the 3 highest promoted units (handy to find these units which you want to promote further to get the Heroic Epic and West Point)
-have the option to filter units according to their level (level 1,2,3,4,5,6+) (again for getting the highest promoted units for the Heroic Epic and West Point)
-bring back foreign units to the advisor
-option to rank units according to their experience point total (again for getting the highest promoted units for the Heroic Epic and West Point)
-option to see the units per city and then order the cities according to most/least units protecting them. (would help identify your weak spots)
Next to that mention the units that are not in a city per unit stack.

All of the above options aren't very important to me. I might use them a few times. And if you decide to include one of these options, then you probably don't need the others. The speed enhancements would really improve the use of the military advisor.

These all sound like good ideas. I need to put my General Patton hat on and see what type of info I would like. Your power graph is made up of all your units 'power' - I'm assuming that there is a formula for that and we could show a list of different powers and use that to colour code the map.

I would even go further to 'defensive' and 'offensive' power so you can see where you offensive units are.

ruff_hi said:

These all sound like good ideas. I need to put my General Patton hat on and see what type of info I would like. Your power graph is made up of all your units 'power' - I'm assuming that there is a formula for that and we could show a list of different powers and use that to colour code the map.

I would even go further to 'defensive' and 'offensive' power so you can see where you offensive units are.

Click to expand...

The power rating isn't completely related to the units power rating. Also the population size and the number of walls, barracks and some military technologies and such are counted. You can find more information about that in this strategy article (see section soldiers):

The Inner Workings of the Demographics Screen Explained

Indeed, power consists of:
- military units
- population
- technologies
- buildings
- wonders

Having power breakdown might actually make the power information useful, but it would present spoiler information - until such point that all that information can be accessed by the player.

so an index of unit str per tile (as a percentage of total unit str), maybe broken down between offensive / defensive - we would have to stipulate what unit was what.

What about adding units that are in a queue. So if you for instance have 11 macemen and have 5 further macemen in building queue's in your empire, then it could be denoted as macemen: 11(5). This kind of information would help you estimate the strength of your military in a few turns without a lot of looking around in the domestic advisor. That would be especially useful for large empires with say 30+ cities.

^^ THAT is a great idea!!