Re: Uses for change-type action?

["James R. Dunson" <jdunson at vt dot edu>]

At 08:27 AM 8/23/00 -0700, Stan Shebs wrote:
>Xconq's code has long included an action change-type ...
>So my question is: are there any other uses for change-type?
>I'm especially interested in uses in existing (commercial or
>free) games, since I couldn't find any that actually gave the
>player a choice of different types to change a unit into.

  Mostly they are naval-type games, where hulls are expensive 
and/or slow, so you rearrange the contents every so often.  
The two I can think of are both space naval games.

  Master of Orion II: Battle at Antares (and possibly the original
MoO, although I've not played it in long enough that I'm not sure) 
allows upgrade of any ship to any other ship design that uses the 
same size hull.  

  Space Empires III, a shareware game (although the author's web
site appears to have vanished recently), has a different retrofit 
basis, but the effect is the same in that you can have multiple 
types of, e.g. destroyers, and choose which to retrofit any 
destroyer hull into.  

  Civilization (II+) does *not* have a choice, but I've occasionally 
wished it did.  The Leonardo's Workshop will auto-upgrade units, 
and sometimes there are two possible choices; however, the game 
can only handle one fixed "successor" unit, and will always upgrade
to that.  IIRC my Frigates can end up converting to Galleons, which 
improves their cargo capacity but looses their combat ability; if I 
was using them for strike rather than transport, I might have rather
left them as Frigates, or taken them to Ironclads.  Note that this 
is not intended to be a *realistic* use of upgrading, as opposed to 
the above two, which at least vaguely attempt to model swapping the
contents out of a fixed hull; however, it is still irritating.

** James **
-- 
James R. Dunson (jdunson@vt.edu)
Network Administrator, Center for Wireless Telecommunications
436 Whittemore Hall, Virginia Tech     http://www.cwt.vt.edu/