Re: Consumption-per-fire?

[Hans Ronne <hronne@comhem.se>]

>>  Real capture at a distance might involve
>> teleportation or long-range psychic powers. BTW, teleportation is on my
>> post-7.5 list. I think it could be useful in many games.
>
>Good, then I can take it off my lengthy post-7.5 list. :-)
>Were you thinking in terms of making 'move-range' fully implemented in
>the movement/pathfinding and AI code, for the purpose of allowing units
>to "blink" or "phase" (to use some fantasy terminology)?
>Or were you thinking in terms of "portals" or "travel gates" that cause
>their occupants to be relocated to a pre-designated cell, a cell
>randomly chosen from a set of pre-designated cells, or a totally random
>cell (possibly of a certain terrain type)?

I was thinking of portals. No decent space game should be without
wormholes. And portals would also come handy if somebody decided to write a
Diablo II module for Xconq :-).

>(What would be even cooler, but certainly a radical change/feature,
>would be the ability to travel between maps. That would make
>quasi-recreations of games such as "Bard's Tale" possible.)

Yes. I think this was discussed on the list last year. Somebody wanted to
write a multi-level D&D type game to Xconq. I suggested walled of sections
within one big map, with yet to be implemented portals as the only
connections between them.

>> I also do this, mainly to force the AI to use fire instead of attacks when
>> possible. However, there is one case where a firing unit has to use melee
>> attack and that is if it is attacked, survives and then counterattacks.
>> Which is certainly a possible scenario. Think of Tennyson's Light Brigade
>> actually reaching the Russian guns with ensuing hand-to-hand combat in the
>> trenches.
>
>To me, the question is: is it even worth pretending that the guns can
>counterattack? They are essentially useless once the British are among
>them. The guns had their juicy chance when they were mowing down the
>charging brigade.... Once they are reached, I think the contest is
>essentially over, and it is time to bring Florence Nightingale to the
>scene.

True. But the xconq attack code does permit counterattacks, though only of
the melee type. That was the point I was trying to make.

Hans