Myrmidons spawned by Hera’s unique tech “Argive Patronage” are always produced/queued last in the “global” unit production queue, creating situations (especially lategame, where the Zeus player has a lot of military production and lots of units prequeued) where none will spawn at all.
Trigger Event:
Deleting/Losing pop (units/vills) while having units prequeued and fortresses with the tech “Argive Patronage” researched.
Repro Steps:
Start game with Zeus
Go to age4 with Hera
Create unit production buildings (barracks, stables, etc) and fortresses.
Create enough villagers/units to get pop-capped.
Research “Argive Patronage” and wait for the spawn timer to finish.
Now prequeue military units.
Delete a number of units that matches the pop-space of prequequed military; i.e: delete 10 Hoplites if you have 10 or more Hoplites in queue.
No myrmidons will spawn, even though their spawning timer was already finished and they are technically “first” in queue - instead any prequeued unit will spawn.
==> Myrmidons will ONLY spawn if the player deletes/loses more pop-space than he has currently pre-queued in any (military) building.
This makes this tech a lot worse, especially in the later stages of the game where the player has more military production and tons of prequeued units.
(jump to ~4:30min and watch how I keep deleting 10 Hoplites and no Myrmidon are spawned (note: I prequeued the Hoplites AFTER the myrmidon spawn timer was already finished). Later on I even add some Petroboli which are also produced instead of spawning any Myrmidon. Only after I delete a significant amount of units at the same time (= more units/pop-space than is currently prequeued globally) I get any Myrmidon at all.
Proposed solution:
Myrmidon spawned via “Argive Patronage” should be treated as prequeued units and enter the “global” production queue.
Just tested this with the upcoming June Update (100.18.31850.0) - its still not working; Myrmidon will only spawn from fortresses if there is more free pop space available than the total pop space of all pre-queued units or villagers (i.e. 160 of 210 pop while having 10 hoplites in production). This happens because they are treated as “last in queue” at all times when it comes to determining which units will be produced instead of entering the global production queue whenever the spawn timer finishes.
This means 0 myrmidon will spawn if the player pre-queues enough units/vills and their units are not dying fast enough (which is basically the average age4 gameplay experience with Zeus), making this tech much, much worse than it seems.
Sometimes you might be waiting a while these bugs. They seem very selective in acknowledging them, and to date none of the bugs I’ve reported have been fixed (8+ months later).
Adding to the description of this bug, part of the Issue with this tech is that if you have 1 population space (ex 234/235) you can manually build a hippeus or even a Myrmydon and get to 236/235 popcap. With the argive patronage myrmydon tech you will not spawn any units unless you are 232/235 and end up at 235/235 popcap. This is not consistent with how other units in the game are produced with population available.
I’m not sure if this is the primary Issue causing the observed behavior or just something related.
Any dev feedback in this ? - If this is supposed to be a tech that simply wastes resources then at least add a description to signal how it works (and that it is far, far worse than it seems).