Can't purchase any melee units?

[Wheastonian]

Playing as Japan (multiplayer session), have 2 Iron and even with my capital city with encampment and barracks I cannot train warriors or swordsmen. (I'm about to unlock Samurai but haven't yet). They aren't even showing up in the production queue blacked out, they just aren't there. Any known bugs? I will update this if restarting the session fixes it.

Update: I can train both samurai and musketmen no problem, I think what happened was that I reached a point where Man-at-Arms replaced swordsmen, but because I didn't have feudalism, I didn't have samurai (Hojo unique MaA replacement) so I couldn't train any land melee units. This is my current guess. If anyone knows for sure that reaching a new era/troop version blocks out training older ones, that might answer the problem.

[Copernicus]

Never heard of this bug before. Are you using any mods?

[Stormwinds]

Which ruleset are you playing with?

[Wheastonian]

Originally posted by Copernicus:

Never heard of this bug before. Are you using any mods?

no mods.

[Wheastonian]

Originally posted by Stormwinds:

Which ruleset are you playing with?

standard.

[Copernicus]

Originally posted by Wheastonian:

Update: I can train both samurai and musketmen no problem, I think what happened was that I reached a point where Man-at-Arms replaced swordsmen, but because I didn't have feudalism, I didn't have samurai (Hojo unique MaA replacement) so I couldn't train any land melee units. This is my current guess. If anyone knows for sure that reaching a new era/troop version blocks out training older ones, that might answer the problem.

Interesting! That makes sense; obsolete types of unit should normally be removed from the list.

I'm not entirely certain what the trigger is for each unit type to go obsolete, though. I know there have been times when I can build both older and newer units; the CivFanatic site indicates that each unit defines its own point of obsolescence, and isn't dependent on the availability of a specific upgrade.

[Lemurian1972]

The game would still give you the highest melee unit you have available and not lock you out completely. I'm unsure what is happening here.

[Copernicus]

Originally posted by Lemurian1972:

The game would still give you the highest melee unit you have available and not lock you out completely. I'm unsure what is happening here.

It seems as though each unit has a requirement for when to become available and one for when to become obsolete. So, if the requirement for Samurai to become available (Feudalism) has not yet been met, but the tech that makes Swordsman obsolete has been met (civ wiki says Replaceable Parts, but I'm pretty sure that's wrong), you'll face a situation where neither unit is available.

[plaguepenguin]

If the game were operating normally, it would lock you out of producing or buying earlier upgrade versions of the same unit line (the melee line in this case) after you had researched the tech that unlocked the latest upgrade in that line -- with one exception. If this latest upgrade requires strategics to produce or buy, as swordsmen and men-at-arms require iron, and you don't have enough of that strategic resource to build, the game again lets you build the latest upgrade version that doesn't require that strategic, while it doesn't let you buy or produce the later versions that require the strategic.

So, if you have researched iron working and unlocked swordsmen, and have at least 20 iron accumulated, warriors will disappear from both your production and your purchase pick lists, while swordsmen will be available in both lists. If you lack 20 iron, swordsmen will disappear from the pick lists, but warriors will again be available. If by "2 iron" you mean you have accumulated two iron, rather than that you own two iron mines, what should be the case if the game were operating properly, is that swordsmen aren't on either pick list, but warriors are.

The presence or absence of encampments and their buildings doesn't affect the ability to produce or buy any unit, it just makes units created by that city better, in the sense that they gain XP faster. All of your cities should have warriors but not swordsmen in their pick lists as long as you don't have enough iron, then as soon as you get enough iron, they should all flip to all not having warriors and all having swordsmen. By the way, if you have any warriors in production, the instant you accumulate 20 iron, that warrior production will automatically consume the 20 iron and switch to swordsman production.

What you describe in your update makes sense, with this exception, you should still have been able to make warriors, at least if you lacked 20 iron. Researching Apprenticeship unlocked men-at-arms, and that removed swordsmen from your pick lists. You didn't yet have Feudalism, though, so you didn't have samurai on your pick lists. That's all expected and normal game operation. Warriors , though, should have popped back up as a choice if you lacked 20 iron.

Arguably more consistent game design would have let you build warriors even with 20+ iron, but the devs apparently didn't bother to code the mechanics properly to make that possible, presumably because only Japan can get into this situation because it unlocks samurai with a civic and not a tech. The devs must have left the coding that made Apprenticeship get rid of the ability to make swordsmen, rather than recoding to make that trigger Feudalism. The game is coded to "think" you could build swordsmen with all that iron you had accumulated, so it was coded to not let you build warriors either.

[Wheastonian]

Originally posted by Copernicus:

Originally posted by Lemurian1972:

The game would still give you the highest melee unit you have available and not lock you out completely. I'm unsure what is happening here.

It seems as though each unit has a requirement for when to become available and one for when to become obsolete. So, if the requirement for Samurai to become available (Feudalism) has not yet been met, but the tech that makes Swordsman obsolete has been met (civ wiki says Replaceable Parts, but I'm pretty sure that's wrong), you'll face a situation where neither unit is available.

it's apprenticeship for MaA, replaceable parts for the second to last infantry variant.

[Wheastonian]

Originally posted by plaguepenguin:

If the game were operating normally, it would lock you out of producing or buying earlier upgrade versions of the same unit line (the melee line in this case) after you had researched the tech that unlocked the latest upgrade in that line -- with one exception. If this latest upgrade requires strategics to produce or buy, as swordsmen and men-at-arms require iron, and you don't have enough of that strategic resource to build, the game again lets you build the latest upgrade version that doesn't require that strategic, while it doesn't let you buy or produce the later versions that require the strategic.

So, if you have researched iron working and unlocked swordsmen, and have at least 20 iron accumulated, warriors will disappear from both your production and your purchase pick lists, while swordsmen will be available in both lists. If you lack 20 iron, swordsmen will disappear from the pick lists, but warriors will again be available. If by "2 iron" you mean you have accumulated two iron, rather than that you own two iron mines, what should be the case if the game were operating properly, is that swordsmen aren't on either pick list, but warriors are.

The presence or absence of encampments and their buildings doesn't affect the ability to produce or buy any unit, it just makes units created by that city better, in the sense that they gain XP faster. All of your cities should have warriors but not swordsmen in their pick lists as long as you don't have enough iron, then as soon as you get enough iron, they should all flip to all not having warriors and all having swordsmen. By the way, if you have any warriors in production, the instant you accumulate 20 iron, that warrior production will automatically consume the 20 iron and switch to swordsman production.

What you describe in your update makes sense, with this exception, you should still have been able to make warriors, at least if you lacked 20 iron. Researching Apprenticeship unlocked men-at-arms, and that removed swordsmen from your pick lists. You didn't yet have Feudalism, though, so you didn't have samurai on your pick lists. That's all expected and normal game operation. Warriors , though, should have popped back up as a choice if you lacked 20 iron.

Arguably more consistent game design would have let you build warriors even with 20+ iron, but the devs apparently didn't bother to code the mechanics properly to make that possible, presumably because only Japan can get into this situation because it unlocks samurai with a civic and not a tech. The devs must have left the coding that made Apprenticeship get rid of the ability to make swordsmen, rather than recoding to make that trigger Feudalism. The game is coded to "think" you could build swordsmen with all that iron you had accumulated, so it was coded to not let you build warriors either.

I meant that I had 2 iron mines, to be clearer. and would encampments not affect it? They cause units trained in that city to cost 1/2 the normal strategic resource.

[plaguepenguin]

I had to check the Wikipedia because I had a vague memory but wasn't sure, and, yes, an encampment in the original game, and in Rise & Fall did let you make units in that city using up only one point of the relevant strategic resource. They got rid of that benefit of encampments with Gathering Storm, and replaced it with encampment buildings each adding 10 to your strategic resource stockpiles.

[Wheastonian]

Originally posted by plaguepenguin:

I had to check the Wikipedia because I had a vague memory but wasn't sure, and, yes, an encampment in the original game, and in Rise & Fall did let you make units in that city using up only one point of the relevant strategic resource. They got rid of that benefit of encampments with Gathering Storm, and replaced it with encampment buildings each adding 10 to your strategic resource stockpiles.

this means if playing with gathering storm ruleset, right?

[rsorrell]

Obsolete units will show back up if you run out of a resource. For example, warriors will show up again if you run out of iron

[Wheastonian]

Originally posted by rsorrell:

Obsolete units will show back up if you run out of a resource. For example, warriors will show up again if you run out of iron

That was not the issue, for the entire time I could create no standard melee units, despite having what resources would've been necessary.

[plaguepenguin]

Originally posted by Wheastonian:

Originally posted by plaguepenguin:

I had to check the Wikipedia because I had a vague memory but wasn't sure, and, yes, an encampment in the original game, and in Rise & Fall did let you make units in that city using up only one point of the relevant strategic resource. They got rid of that benefit of encampments with Gathering Storm, and replaced it with encampment buildings each adding 10 to your strategic resource stockpiles.

this means if playing with gathering storm ruleset, right?

If playing with GS, the benefit of encampment buildings is increased storage capacity for strategic resources. If playing with earlier rulesets, vanilla and R&F, you don't get that benefit, instead you only use up one point of a strategic resource when producing or buying units that require that resource.

The earlier benefit is much nicer. I assume the devs nerfed it in order to make it more challenging when you discover that you lack a strategic in your territory, and to make the unique versions of a given unit that require only 10 or 6,instead of 20, of that strategic, more valuable.