Re: Major bug and what to do about it (long)

[Hans Ronne <hronne@comhem.se>]

>What I also meant is that it sounded to me that you were suggesting the
>use of overrun, which would imply engaging _all_ units (or, as many as
>the attacker had ammo and ACP for) in the cell, would it not?

Not at all. This is how the current overrun code works (at least in model
0), but it is one of the things that I propose to change. One attack with 1
acp and 1 round of ammo should hit one enemy unit, not all of them.

>>I've given it some thought,
>> but I don't think it is a big problem in any existing game. Units that you
>> really would like to hit with a high priority, like cities, frequently
>> occupy an entire cell.
>
>True, but this is not always the case. With what you are proposing, I
>could always escort tankers with destroyers, and ruin a sub's day
>because it would be unable to target the tanker. Not good.

Well, to turn the argument around, naval escorts would for the first time
work in Xconq. You would be forced to take on the escort before you could
hit the valuable target. You would also for the first time be able to group
high-offense and high-defense units together, and know that the former
would benefit from the latter's defense. Just as in Civ2, where you would
group chariots together with a fortified phalanx, to give one example. My
feeling is that it would make most games more fun to play. You would
certainly have to give much greater attention to tactical unit deployments
than with the current code.

However, if you want to have a game where subs primarily hit tankers, there
should be ways to achieve that. What would happen if subs only can hit
tankers? Should the presence of units that it cannot hit at all block an
attack? I don't think so. Interestingly, there was a very similar problem
in the first version of Civ2, where putting a bomber on top of a city would
make it immune to ground attack. This was of course fixed in the first
patch.

These are important questions, and how the target selection is done is
clearly the key point. Just picking the unit with the highest defense value
might be too simplistic, I agree with that. Perhaps the hit-chance against
different units should also play a role.

>Model 1 uses attack and defense values, but model 0 has much more to
>consider, such as range, hit chance, protection, damage, minimum HP
>against a given unit type, etc....

This is how model 0 attack originally worked. But it now uses computations
(real_attack_value, real_defense_value) that are just as complex as those
in model 0.

>At this point I would suggest that a 'defense-order' unit property might
>be called for. That way we can let 'stack-order' pertain to unit views
>as was intended. And this also gives the advantage that the game
>designer can rank for himself/herself what units defend first rather
>than trying to fight with a calculation.

I agree. However, I suspect that this is what the stack order was supposed
to be used for, though it was never implemented. The stack order has no
practical consequence right now, so we could certainly give it a role in a
reworked combat code. My concern with the unit view code was trying to
maintain a faithful copy of the stack order for unit views. However, I am
not sure if this is necessary or even desirable, which is why I didn't make
it a high priority.

>And, I think that 'defense-order' should only apply in conjunction with
>units than cannot do selective attacks. I do think, as I have already
>argued, that the ability to do selective attacks should be kept though.

I agree that it would be nice, though getting rid of unit pointers in the
AI code would be even nicer. However, I asked myself yesterday: when did I
last use a unit-specific attack in a real game, i.e. walk up adjacent to a
unit, and then put the cursor on top of it, followed by pressing 'a'. It
turned out that I couldn't even remember, which I suspect is fairly typical
for the average Xconq player. I know that I tested this functionality a few
times when i was debugging the Mac interface, but this is about it.
Clicking on a unit is so much easier.

Hans