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Re: Countries
Hans Ronne wrote:
Hans,
Thanks for the info; I'll add it to my 'designer's notes'.
It would seem that the easiest way to add provinces, is to simply treat them
as 'sides' that are allied to one or the other main side. then, one simply
allows an infinite # of sides (v. hardcoded limit). But, I don't know all
the ins & outs of this. Would that work?
I'm afraid not. MAXSIDES could be increased from its default setting of 15
to 30, but anything beyond that is currently impossible. See config.h.
And in practice, games with 10 sides are already pretty unwieldy to
play, so there's been zero motivation to try to push the side max
above 30.
Besides, the side with all its overhead is not what you would want in this
case. Rather, provinces would be best implemented as a new type of extended
unit that can occupy more than cell. Or perhaps as a completely new data
type.
Another thing to think about is the real purpose of the concept in
the game. For instance, in strategic games it's often worked very
well to model areas as an assemblage of towns/cities, so the state
of the game is represented by who owns which at any moment.
But if the situation involves a strong centralized government, such
that the entire region surrenders if the seat of government is taken,
that situation doesn't have a good way to be modeled now except
via sides.
However, we do have a concept of terrain cells used by a unit, and
I could see extending that to arbitrary ownership, so if the using
unit is captured, all the cells it uses are also captured. Then if
you have units such as towns and bases surrender if the underlying
terrain changes side, you would have a mass surrender upon capture
of the capital.
Stan