I do think this is a great direction to head in (and I mean that most sincerely
), but I'm having trouble understanding what I need to do.
1. It seems for an existing game, a lot of units just stop healing entirely. Am I correct? Are the fortify and sentry while healing buttons obsolete now?
No... fortify and healing buttons aren't obsolete from the perspective of ease of use... it's stronger to use the rest and recovery build up BUT there's a combat penalty when using it so its something to be careful with.
I don't think I've done anything that would get units to stop healing entirely outside of some factors that may have achieved something much like this effect already. If units aren't healing AT ALL in any case then I'd like to take a look at it.
What I believe CAN happen right now is merging units so far that the merge based healing modifier (a penalty for larger group sizes) takes the unit down to the point where they are healing at minimum rate (1 hp per turn.) This would obviously mean the unit would benefit severely from a strong healer supporting it.
It will be possible for some units to not heal on their own without any existing healing support but currently I don't believe any units have been given this xml boolean indicator... this is intended for naval units eventually. I wanted to keep it out of the equation until the rest of the functionality had been proven.
As always if units have moved in a round they don't get the opportunity to heal that round but any sleep type, fortification, buildup, sleep, should allow them to. If this is somehow not working correctly I need to debug that.
One more situation where units won't heal is if they are on terrain that would damage. Someone pointed out a bug in this where units that can individually ignore the terrain damage will still suffer this problem if grouped with units that are still vulnerable. I know where the problem is but have been unsuccessful at finding the syntax to fix it. I ran across an example the other day that suggested a way around the problem but do you think I can remember where that was? lol... damn. I'll kick it out eventually.
Another thing that happens is that you need to be concerned with the damage in all the combat classes of a given unit. What this means is, if you have, for example, a mounted unit that has both
heals as people and heals as animals, all damage they've received will count towards both types, each accounting for its damage independently but suffering a cloned amount of the overall damage received.
Thus if 10 damage is assigned to a mounted unit, that means 10 damage is assigned to the heals as people side of the unit and 10 damage is assigned to the heals as animals side of the unit and the worst of the unit's damage types is still 10 therefore the unit, from the classical perspective of the game's damage mechanism, is considered to have 10 damage. 10 towards death...10 towards weakening the unit.
However, each will thereafter heal at differing rates depending on the types of healers that are there to support them (and at the same rate if there is no variation in the degree of specific healer support.)
Therefore, having a strong healer for people alone doesn't help the mounted unit much because the people side would heal up very quickly, sure, but the unit counts its actual hp according to the
worst damaged 'heals as' type so since the animal side still takes longer to recover, the unit overall takes longer to recover.
So to carry on the numeric example, let's pretend for a moment there's no base healing amount and healing can only take place if there is healing support. The mounted unit that took 10 damage during combat now has 10 damage to its 'heals as people' class and 10 damage to its 'heals as animals' class. There's a local healer that heals 5 for people. The next round, the unit, being given support by said healer, would therefore have 5 damage to its people and still have 10 damage towards its animals and would therefore, as a unit total based on the worst of both, have 10 damage as a unit still.
However, the base healing for all classes is the same and is based, as usual, on enemy, neutral, friendly territories and city plot. So lets say there's NO healing support. Enemy territory healing base is 5 hp per round. The mounted unit heals 5 towards people, 5 towards animals and is left with 5 damage towards each and therefore 5 damage as a unit since the worst of each is 5. Add in the same healer support and his people side of things is now after one round completely healed while his animal side still has 5 damage, making the unit at 5 damage total.
Therefore, if you have a strong animal healer but not much people support the same problem exists. So you really need some of both to have an impact.
2. Some units say on mouseover: "will heal (in each healing class) in n turns". Is this to be believed? And if there is no such message, does that mean the unit will not heal at all?
The class that takes the longest to heal is the one that will drag down the overall healing process the most as explained above. I did do my absolute best to try to make these round counts accurate but I haven't seen it in play much so if it's not accurate then I need to work on that some more.
The basic point is: documentation (in-game) is desperately needed, unless I've missed something (and if I've missed something, it means it was too hard to find!
).
Yeah, I do need to do something with that once the system has fully stabilized.
As I said elsewhere one turn I am able to build apothecaries the next time I try the best I can build in the same city is the Wise Woman which is the basic unit.
I could probably quickly sort out what is going wrong there if I can get a save that shows this issue. It's probably some kind of xml issue with the prerequisite buildings I think. Are there unit limits established on healers that I'm unaware of that should be removed now that the process has changed?
Also the cross group healing just seems wrong. By that I mean I train an animal healer and can then give him 4 engineer promotions or human healing promotions. Maybe the promotions need to change a bit so they don't seem as confused, eg "animal healer - heal humans 1" rather than just "heal human 1". It means many more promotions but would allow a bit of control and, in my opinion, make it feel right.
Animal healers shouldn't have normal promotion access to engineer promotions. What they would have, if the xml is correctly established and you may have just pointed out a flaw, is the ability to, when just about any other unit could, develop engineer healing abilities to a seriously minor extent (though doing so would help them further the rest of the types of healing in terms of how many units they can assist in a given round.)
Generally whatever healing types the unit can perform without aid of promotions is what has crafted their access to further promotion development. It should be possible to build an animal or human healer and if you're not looking to have them be the best possible animal or human healer they can be but would like to have a fair healer in both categories represented in the one unit instead then you can cross-develop them so that they end up being quite serviceable in both categories... just not as strong as one that was completely dedicated to their primary type. This kind of strategic thinking shouldn't be foreign as you can do the same kind of thing by giving, say, axemen promotions that help them fight mounted or spearmen promotions that help them fight melee.
My strategic suggestion here is to have a fully specialized healer in each type in your power stacks of doom so they can get your strongest units up to full health as quickly as possible but to have some cross-trained types in there as well so as to provide additional support wherever the support ends up being needed - and they may well be very handy for making sure there's at least a solid baseline of healing support for all types in the stack. Based on the above given example of the process, you can probably see why this would be very important. One super specialized people healer isn't much help to a mounted unit at all if that's all you have.
Keep in mind how many units your healers can support in a given round and take a measured amount that can support at least half to 3/4 of the stack (with the assumption that if it gets THAT bad you probably lost quite a few units in the stack and those will be beyond the ability to thereafter heal anyhow.)
Also keep in mind that one unit may take the assistance of two healers to get the most benefit. As explained above in how the different heals as classes track the damage independently on a unit, this means that a strong people healer AND a strong animal healer will both jump in to help the mounted unit recover, each healer using up one of his #of units supportable limit in that round.
Hopefully this helps. The more I can try explaining this the more I can start trying to get something put together that can be put in the pedia that doesn't overwhelm a person with the explanation, which I fear I've probably already done here.
