The military satisfaction of a civilian is largely governed by the ratio of soldiers to total citizens. The rating ranges from 1 to a maximum of 5 points and is calculated by the following percentages soldiers Rating 1/5 : 0 Soldiers (due to rounding 1 soldier for colonies larger 100 people) Rating 2/5 : less than 8 % soldiers Rating 3/5 : less than 16 % soldiers Rating 4/5 : less than 24 % soldiers Rating 5/5 : over or equal 24 % soldiers If you want a perfect rating you should go for about 3 soldiers for every 12 citizens (including soldiers) up to a maximum of 36 soldiers for the max population of 150 people. Since the top rating has a huge impact on happiness levels it is indeed recommendable to keep the military rating of a standard citizen at 4 or 5 because the following bonuses/malus are applied for the standard citizen Rating 1/5: Happiness -12, Anger + 40, Fear + 20 Rating 2/5: Happiness -4, Anger + 20, Fear + 10 Rating 3/5: Happiness +2, Fear + 5 Rating 4/5: Happiness +6, Anger -5 Rating 5/5: Happiness +12, Anger -10 Citizens with the traits Doomed and Craven will have slightly higher malus for fear, the trait foolishly brave halves all malus and adds an additional bonus for fear. A military rating of 5 is therefore better for happiness than optimal food and drink (spirits) supplies
How long does it take for happiness to switch over? Is the change immediate, or does it check daily for military presence?
(This code will be slightly adjusted for launch version BTW - notably, Steam Knight presence and biome choice will affect safety, and the military ratio percentages per rating level are changed slightly. And traits will have an effect on whether some of these effects take place.)
Actually it would be nice to have weaponry having an effect, too. A soldier with a leyden rifle is more powerful than a soldier with a pistol.
Hmmm. I suppose one could find the gun used by each character flagged military, multiply their value by some modifer per-weapon type. It might be getting a *little* fine-grained for a 5 point scale of course...
I don't think so, the idea of having a smaller but better equipped military count the same as a larger but poorly equipped makes sense.
But on the other hand the ammunition consuming weapons would only considered twice a day...so if your barracks ran out of ammo on the start of shift 2 or 6 it would be bad even if your stockpile has masses of ammunitions...this is more tricky than i originally thought
You could do like the food thing and store a few previous values of safety and then use a moving average, that way it smooths out everything.
Having untrained soldiers count as less (e.g. half) would be a nice way of implicitly extending the negative effects of being attacked. I.e. if you have a large fight and lose a lot of soldiers, it will take some time to get your perceived force strength back up to full even if you immediately draft a load of labourers to replace the dead, thereby temporarily reducing happiness/increasing anger and fear while you train up your new soldiers.
On the topic of soldiers, I was under the impression that at some point a change was made so when the Overseer NCO dies in combat, the laborers under them don't immediately revert back from soldiers to citizens. Was that something that really happened, or did it not pan out? Also; red coat training. Do the laborers "remember" it if they get made into regular workers and then conscripted into service again?
I haven't played the most recent build, but in the previous build soldiers would immediately disband if the NCO was killed and if a new NCO was assigned they lost their redcoat status when added back into the work crew. So assuming v55 didn't change that, it's not (currently?) in game.
Soldiers must be trained to redcoats after each re-assignment. (This - and the Safety QoL - is done so that the game doesn't reward finicky micromanagement of training soldiers, assigning them to civilian projects, then re-assigning them back to military squads when danger appears, then assigning them back to civilian afterward and so on.)
Being a redcoat isn't all that important. And even more thankfully guns just teleport into your soldier's hands. Having massed numbers of hitpoints behind "Improvised Muskets" is a pretty legitimate way to beat up people especially in cases where you cannot really get to or sustain ammo for better stuff. Yeah, it's unfortunate if people die, but at least with some research training/retraining people isn't too bad.
Yeah I remember that change mentioned rather recently as well, yet oddly it's not in the game and when an NCO dies everyone insta-disbands into civvies. Wonder if the change was short lived as after colonists were made to be able to fight for themselves in a limited capacity when there is no other option it was figured that was a perfectly fine substitute and not immediately wiping troops on NCO death was no longer needed..... if so I feel that decision was a bit of a brainfart.
Maybe there can be a short cool down window of a day or some such, so while the ensuing madness and chaos of my colony aflame is being taken care of, i can reassign skilled soldiers to a new overseer?