Indirect cXP awards?

Indirect cXP awards?

[Lincoln Peters]

Consider this hypothetical situation: A cruiser encounters a
fully-loaded enemy aircraft carrier, escorted by several destroyers. 
Before the carrier can launch any planes to attack the cruiser, the
cruiser launches a missile (a unit that can detonate itself) at the
carrier.  The missile detonates in the cell occupied by the carrier and
sinks it, and the blast also damages some of the nearby destroyers.  The
cruiser should gain a cXP award.

I don't see a way that the actions of one unit can result in a cXP award
for another unit (though I imagine that such a thing would involve the
"unit control" mechanism).  Is there a way to do this?  Is this
something else that has yet to be implemented?  Or has such a thing even
been considered yet?


(This kind of mechanism would not only be applicable to ships carrying
missiles.  It could also be applied to starship firing photon torpedoes,
wizards firing fireballs, and all sorts of other things.  And, since the
attack is supposed to affect units in multiple cells, the firing
mechanism is inadequate.)

---
Lincoln Peters
<sampln@sbcglobal.net>

Q:	How do you stop an elephant from charging?
A:	Take away his credit cards.

Re: Indirect cXP awards?

[Eric McDonald]

Lincoln Peters wrote:

> I don't see a way that the actions of one unit can result in a cXP award
> for another unit (though I imagine that such a thing would involve the
> "unit control" mechanism).  Is there a way to do this?  Is this
> something else that has yet to be implemented?  Or has such a thing even
> been considered yet?

I hadn't considered this before. I think you may be right in that the 
unit control mechanism should be involved for "missile units".

I have thought about the distinction between guided, seeker, and simple 
missile before, but the particular cXP consequence of using a guided 
missile had escaped my attention. This is an interesting consideration.

> (This kind of mechanism would not only be applicable to ships carrying
> missiles.  It could also be applied to starship firing photon torpedoes,
> wizards firing fireballs, and all sorts of other things.  And, since the
> attack is supposed to affect units in multiple cells, the firing
> mechanism is inadequate.)

I think the concept of spread damage (as opposed to point damage), which 
has been discussed on the list several times before, may be one way of 
modeling the explosion. I also think that this would probably be easier 
to implement than to link a missile unit's cXP back to the unit that 
launched the missile. In the case of spread damage, I am not sure that 
it makes sense to award cXP for each unit damaged, but simply to award a 
fixed amount if there was a chance of a hit.

If I get tired of working on the SDL interface this weekend, I will 
probably look into the spread damage (and possibly some other 
combat-related) stuff.

Eric