Unofficialcrusaderpatch: Saladin and Emir's wells are no longer switched off whenever there isn't a fire

Created on 23 May 2019 · 6Comments · Source: Sh0wdown/UnofficialCrusaderPatch

I noticed that Saladin and Emir's wells no longer switch off whenever there isn't a fire, like they did before.

Not sure if that is a good thing, which it will allow them to respond quicker to fires, it can lead to population shortages and less recruitment (especially together with the ale farm spam issue that has been mentioned before). Of course another house could be built in their AIVs but increasing the population may impact adversely on ale supply and fear factor.

It would good to have the option to adjust whether wells are kept on or off whenever there is no fire for an AI.

Source

PitchNeeded

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Most helpful comment

_Any_ AI will have their wells switched on by default (even in vanilla, no patch involved) whenever they have a bit of gold reserves (above ~500 gold or sth like that).
Whenever they have their wells switched off, that usually means they are simply out of gold (or just have everything set to sleep due to being in fear during attacks or similar), which causes them to go into some sort of "saving mode" - the AI then also is less likely (or even 0% likely^^) to restock any wood, flour, wheat, etc in the stockpile, causing even more economic disruptions as a consequence, as production comes to a grinding halt.
Anyway, wells set to sleep is a sign of constant gold shortage, nothing else.

Any AIV that has insufficient housing is just badly designed; wells/waterpots are a regular part of castle population. And besides the (weak) "it just is like that, deal with it" argument, there's also proper arguments for that behaviour:

If wells are manned when a fire starts, the well workers can react a lot quicker, extinguishing a fire while it is still small, before _everything_ burns.
Especially due to worker loss often preceding or going hand in hand with fires, and AI trying to recruit nonetheless, manning before-sleeping wells when the fire is already burning does often not work out well, making things a lot worse.
Furthermore, always-on wells allow the AI to aid allied AIs with firefighting.
More population - if properly planned for - doesn't really affect the AI... more taxes, more gold, more awesome!

It is on 'no switched off buildings mode' (which I use to stop that annoying bug that sometimes happens where AI bakeries switch off while they are still in the process of making bread) but this switching off buildings mode was not supposed to include wells (it didn't at the start whenever I first used it).

The patcher setting to disable "switching off buildings" is supposed to apply to resource processing buildings that are always set to sleep by the AI when running out of the corresponding input resources (no matter whether bakeries or weapon workshops) and having 0 units of those resource types stockpiled for a fixed (short) amount of time.
Fear-based or (for wells) gold-based setting to sleep of buildings is an entirely different behaviour independent of that patcher setting.

My AIV are all balanced around wells being constantly manned. I'd love to know how to do that permanently for all AI because it's super frustrating to plan you AIV around a proper fire defense just to see it burn to the ground because they didn't even man them until they are completely set ablaze.

@Truetobi91 Possibly a better economy will allow your AIs to always (or at least usually) have a bit of spare gold which makes them have their wells manned permanently. Of course, under some circumstances, e.g. when constant recruiting of expensive sortie troops at high rate (popularity 100) and immediately sending them into their deaths nonstop, it can be nearly impossible to create an AI-economy strong enough to be fully "immune" to gold shortage in all cases.
Also, a proper fire defense does not rely on wells being manned all the time. Manned wells certainly help and are desirable whenever feasible, but a proper fire defense uses more than "you just have to place enough wells" to work. The amount of wells (as long as there's a few wells at all) is usually less important than 3 other factors:

_Campfire not burning:_
Why this is useful: This allows the AI to get new peasants that can be turned into well-workers, lowers losses of workers and soldiers, and generally benefits any burning AI unless there's 200 hostile troops trying to storm the keep right now... Also note that well workers are not immune to fire, just quite resistant. But they WILL burn eventually, as all other units do, and then they need to be replaced.
How to achieve this: Avoid having flamable material near (in a radius of ideally 7, but at least 4-5 tiles to be effective) your campfire! Non-flamable material includes things like moat, walls, towers, gates, stockpiles, dungeons, gardens, statues, shrines, wells, water pots, empty space, killing pits, stairs (including stair5 tiles which are accessible from the ground and can be used to create functional streets if one wants to)... generally speaking, if fire from the outside cannot spread onto the campfire, you are almost golden!
_Not everything else burning at once_
Why this is useful: This allows the AI to use their well-workers to extinguish a fire while a good chunk of their castle economy is still up and running, and especially to fight a fire that has a limited area. Larger fires are generally more dangerous/negative/whatever than small ones, obviously, but smaller fires are also considerably easier to extinguish even with relatively few well workers. This is in part to greater efficiency of well workers - usually, smaller fires mean shorter paths, and the ratio of the (full castle) amount of well workers relative to the (one section of the castle) amount of burning buildings is better, and "over-extinguishing" (multiple well workers extinguishing the same building, wasting water) becomes less of a problem. But also, extinguished buildings have a temporary immunity to new burning, which means a smaller area can often be more or less fully extinguished before any already-extinguished buildings start burning once again. And the "maximum instant fire spreading distance" (MIFSD), which is what the extinguishing workers have to overcome by non-instant sequential extinguishing, is limited by the diameter of a "fire-connected" section - the smaller the MIFSD, the less problematic the fire as a whole.
How to achieve this: Use gaps between different parts of your castle, to separate it into sections. Those gaps should be ideally 7, but at least 4-5 tiles wide, and can either remain empty or be filled with non-flamable material (see above).
_Nothing burning inaccessibly:_
Why this is useful: When there are any burning buildings that are inaccessible, no well workers can extinguish it. Not only does this mean those buildings will surely burn down once lit and cause fires that will usually at least burn some bypassing workers or troops in the vicinity, but they also are starting points for new fires spreading through the castle. And if anything is worse than a fire, it is one that cannot be extinguished.
How to achieve this: Simply put, make sure to have no inaccessible buildings in your castle. Or, make sure only non-flamable buildings are inaccessible (e.g. gardens or statues). Or at the very least isolate inaccessible buildings from other flamable material: A handful gallows burning "forever" certainly aren't ideal... but if they are successfully surrounded by 10 tiles of moat, for example, then no workers or soldiers will die, no other buildings will be lit on fire, and all in all, it won't be that big of a deal.

Also, bonus tip: Hovels and woodcutter huts (and farms) do burn, and they burn for long enough to usually do one iteration of "fire sparks" before they crumble, but they also do crumble very quickly (unlike most/all other buildings), which means there will be a gap soon, helping to prevent fire spreading back and forth repeatedly.

Edit1: Just found out Ctrl+Enter posts the comment immediately... ugh...

Edit2: Also, gallows / gibbets in particular seem to be spreading fire in slightly larger radius as compared to other buildings? Anyway, in case you saw some of the Udwin videos with the Saruman AI of @ByBurton, you may have noticed that it originally was VERY prone to burn down... "just use enough wells" obviously doesn't cut it - at least not for any reasonable amount of wells, and unreasonable amounts of wells are bad for the economy, which increases the chance of all wells being disabled, making them useless if the campfire starts burning along with everything else, before they can be manned properly.

You may or may not have noticed that Saruman's castle got a redesign later, to make it more fireproof, among other things.
Now take a look at this screenshot from a game of Saruman vs Saruman... originally, I had intended to demonstrate the fire proofing concept used there (hence the red fire throwers on the bottom-side wall), but the opponent (yellow) Saruman actually did the job to start a fire for me.
grafik
Moreover, he also invaded the orange Saruman's castle with a gazillion of sortie swordsmen that essentially killed off orange Saruman's troops and pretty much all of his workers including all the well workers...
grafik
...nonetheless, the fire stays contained in one quarter of the castle "forever" (until it either gets extinguished or all buildings in that section burn down if yellow Saruman's swordsmen continue killing all well workers).

unless there's 200 hostile troops trying to storm the keep right now

To take care of those very rare situations where a burning campfire is your last resort to defend yourself, engineers with oil pots (or fire throwers) are a pretty good solution, setting ablaze the campfire intentionally and temporarily, without causing any adjacent buildings to burn.

Heroesflorian on 1 Jun 2019

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All 6 comments

My AIV are all balanced around wells being constantly manned. I'd love to know how to do that permanently for all AI because it's super frustrating to plan you AIV around a proper fire defense just to see it burn to the ground because they didn't even man them until they are completely set ablaze.

Truetobi91 on 23 May 2019

I just want to know how did you manage to make them do this "Switching off unused peasants"

Admiral-Gumpert on 23 May 2019

I just want to know how did you manage to make them do this "Switching off unused peasants"

It is on 'no switched off buildings mode' (which I use to stop that annoying bug that sometimes happens where AI bakeries switch off while they are still in the process of making bread) but this switching off buildings mode was not supposed to include wells (it didn't at the start whenever I first used it).

PitchNeeded on 30 May 2019

❤1 👍1

If wells are manned when a fire starts, the well workers can react a lot quicker, extinguishing a fire while it is still small, before _everything_ burns.
Especially due to worker loss often preceding or going hand in hand with fires, and AI trying to recruit nonetheless, manning before-sleeping wells when the fire is already burning does often not work out well, making things a lot worse.
Furthermore, always-on wells allow the AI to aid allied AIs with firefighting.
More population - if properly planned for - doesn't really affect the AI... more taxes, more gold, more awesome!

It is on 'no switched off buildings mode' (which I use to stop that annoying bug that sometimes happens where AI bakeries switch off while they are still in the process of making bread) but this switching off buildings mode was not supposed to include wells (it didn't at the start whenever I first used it).

My AIV are all balanced around wells being constantly manned. I'd love to know how to do that permanently for all AI because it's super frustrating to plan you AIV around a proper fire defense just to see it burn to the ground because they didn't even man them until they are completely set ablaze.

_Campfire not burning:_
Why this is useful: This allows the AI to get new peasants that can be turned into well-workers, lowers losses of workers and soldiers, and generally benefits any burning AI unless there's 200 hostile troops trying to storm the keep right now... Also note that well workers are not immune to fire, just quite resistant. But they WILL burn eventually, as all other units do, and then they need to be replaced.
How to achieve this: Avoid having flamable material near (in a radius of ideally 7, but at least 4-5 tiles to be effective) your campfire! Non-flamable material includes things like moat, walls, towers, gates, stockpiles, dungeons, gardens, statues, shrines, wells, water pots, empty space, killing pits, stairs (including stair5 tiles which are accessible from the ground and can be used to create functional streets if one wants to)... generally speaking, if fire from the outside cannot spread onto the campfire, you are almost golden!
_Not everything else burning at once_
Why this is useful: This allows the AI to use their well-workers to extinguish a fire while a good chunk of their castle economy is still up and running, and especially to fight a fire that has a limited area. Larger fires are generally more dangerous/negative/whatever than small ones, obviously, but smaller fires are also considerably easier to extinguish even with relatively few well workers. This is in part to greater efficiency of well workers - usually, smaller fires mean shorter paths, and the ratio of the (full castle) amount of well workers relative to the (one section of the castle) amount of burning buildings is better, and "over-extinguishing" (multiple well workers extinguishing the same building, wasting water) becomes less of a problem. But also, extinguished buildings have a temporary immunity to new burning, which means a smaller area can often be more or less fully extinguished before any already-extinguished buildings start burning once again. And the "maximum instant fire spreading distance" (MIFSD), which is what the extinguishing workers have to overcome by non-instant sequential extinguishing, is limited by the diameter of a "fire-connected" section - the smaller the MIFSD, the less problematic the fire as a whole.
How to achieve this: Use gaps between different parts of your castle, to separate it into sections. Those gaps should be ideally 7, but at least 4-5 tiles wide, and can either remain empty or be filled with non-flamable material (see above).
_Nothing burning inaccessibly:_
Why this is useful: When there are any burning buildings that are inaccessible, no well workers can extinguish it. Not only does this mean those buildings will surely burn down once lit and cause fires that will usually at least burn some bypassing workers or troops in the vicinity, but they also are starting points for new fires spreading through the castle. And if anything is worse than a fire, it is one that cannot be extinguished.
How to achieve this: Simply put, make sure to have no inaccessible buildings in your castle. Or, make sure only non-flamable buildings are inaccessible (e.g. gardens or statues). Or at the very least isolate inaccessible buildings from other flamable material: A handful gallows burning "forever" certainly aren't ideal... but if they are successfully surrounded by 10 tiles of moat, for example, then no workers or soldiers will die, no other buildings will be lit on fire, and all in all, it won't be that big of a deal.