Do queued units need to be paid salary?

[RedKnight]

I've been playing with growth rates of my cities (as per this thread) and the question occurs to me - do units that are queued, need to be paid a salary?

One way to suppress runaway growth is to "lock up" a lot of bodies in the build queue by always having 10 peasant units there. (One can clearly see that they are subtracted from the city pop even when they'll be built in the future, i.e., when they're deep in the queue.) I also notice that the income for the city goes up when you put peasants in a queue - because salary paid from that city goes down - presumably because it's all tied to how much population each city has, and you just reduced the population of that city when you put a bunch of people in a peasant queue.

But I can't see my overall population readily, etc., to see if it's not somehow masking (or simply not taking into account immediately in Details) whether guys in the queue need to have salaries paid. One wouldn't think they should be - but then again, I never would've expected them to be subtracted from the city pop until they came to the head of the queue.

Does anyone know for sure?

Thankee kindly!

[motorhead]

I would load up an old savegame and then hit 'f' to bring up the projected financials for next year. I'm certain it falls when you prune your garrisons of troops (done it), so if you are getting charged salary for "future" troops queued up, I'd think odds are good it will show up there. Write down projected support costs (that covers troops salaries), then load up queues with some troops and see if that number increases.

[therother]

I've been playing with growth rates of my cities (as per this thread) and the question occurs to me - do units that are queued, need to be paid a salary?

No, they are not paid until they are trained. That may not make much sense, by the fact remains...

[sapi]

It wouldn't make much sense if they did...

[RedKnight]

Thanks, motorhead. Good to see you again, dude! But since TO already answered...

Cool! - and thanks! - if you're sure, therother.

I think that CA wanted to avoid the complication of folks putting things in the queue that they weren't able to build realistically due to lack of people. In other words, they took the simpler way out as opposed to holding up the troops if you got to a point in the queue where you didn't have enough population, much less a more sophisticated but problematic 'future warning' functionality.

Anyway, as long as you're sure - now I know. There wasn't any reason why they had to make the second shoe a pain, just because they made the first shoe simple for themselves, eh? They can only do so much when there's 10,000 things to do.

Thanks!!

[therother]

It wouldn't make much sense if they did...

Well, I suppose it depends. The men are removed from your settlement. They no longer count in terms of population growth or any other population based statistic (tax, squalor, garrison bonus, advancing governance buildings), and you have to pay for their training and equipment immediately. It only takes one turn to train a unit. So where do they go? Limbo?

What are those 1000 or so men doing whilst they are queued? Wouldn't it make more sense if they were only ghosted out of the population, i.e. they remain part of the settlement for all intents and purposes, just that they've been earmarked for possible training in the future. Perhaps you could have two statistics for population, one the actual population, and the other the manpower available (population-400-queued units).

[therother]

Cool! - and thanks! - if you're sure, therother.

Absolutely certain. Just doubled-checked for you.

[RedKnight]

Right, ty, therother! Relative to what you said to Sapi - again I would think CA was just keeping it simple. They took a simple way of not letting folks queue up more than a city could do at the moment. They can only address so many things when they have so many interactions between the many factors in the game. You can see in some of their design where they very consciously tried to dumb things down a bit to appeal to a wider simpler audience, to the extent that it fell on its face a bit - the 'total city net income' value being the prime example of this. (Not that I'm knocking them; nobody else has tried such a complexly interacting game). Still I would've preferred if they just let queued stuff sit there and not be built if the city didn't have enough men at the moment, as opposed to forcing them to be pulled out of circulation, in order to ensure that it could build them. It's easy to be a critic, laugh.

[motorhead]

Good to see you too RedKnight . Glad to see you here on the RTW boards. You came in near the end of MTW, but the research and testing you did on some tough areas was outstanding.

[RedKnight]

Very kind of you to say, motor! Thanks!! But I daresay therother is champing at the bit, and more power to him. As for me, I'm slow but good, just ask my dates!