Xconq module redesign, which games work? damage dice specs, tanker refueling

[Stan Shebs]

   From: "Eli Salmon" <globalfun@email.msn.com>
   Date: Fri, 10 Sep 1999 14:09:35 -0700

      Which modules besides the standard game are actively played,  Or if
   shorter,  the list of the ones that are under construction?  I noticed a
   very scanty discussion along these lines around Jan 99.

Pretty much all of them are under construction in one way or another.
The most actively played ones are typically the standard game and its
variations - many people have their own "house rules" versions that
they tinker.

   By the way any
   comments on taking a tactical  game module like panzer and designing a
   scenario which gives the computer  prepositioned units with a defensive AI
   posture and/or 0 mobility and set up a decent solo game?

That's the idea of "magnusvew".  I hadn't really considered the idea
of actually tweaking the AI's unit speeds so as to force them to sit
still, it would be interesting to see what effect that had.  In
magnusvew, by the time the Russians pop out of the woods, they are
usually within range of quite a few German units, so the mplayer seems
content to sit and fire away; in fact, that's probably its failing,
because if the Russians are willing to leave a lot of wreckage on the
field, enough units will always get through to capture and hold the
town.  I don't know if that's because the scenario is unbalanced or
if the mplayer needs to do some kind of clever elastic defense.

It's this kind of thing that makes me appreciate the credits in the
commercial games, where they may have 2 programers and 10 level
designers (and 40 artists!).  Good game and scenario design is plenty
hard.

      I am in the process of editing the module empire.g since most of its
   features, such as combat, material transport, and raw material production
   don't work.

Definitely an incomplete game!  It's one thing to define a bunch of units,
quite another to fill in all the tables...

   Because the default hp of units was 100  I have set up damage
   tables with damages in the range of around 35 to 120.  The game game gave me
   error messages for a damage of 25d3 or any larger number of d3's.  The error
   message was:

   Warning: empire:513-745: table damage value 51584 not within bounds 0 to
   32767, skipping clause.

   Also 12d19 was read (without an error message) as 2d3 according to the
   help.  This occurred with several other dice values as well.  I was unable
   to
   locate the section of documentation dealing with the acceptable values for
   dice specs.

It's in the first section of the reference manual, under "Lexical
Conventions".  The largest value you can have is 7d15+127.  It would
be a good idea to report overflows though!  BTW, I've been thinking
about removing the 16-bit limit on values, its original motivation was
to get Xconq to fit in 2MB on old Macs, nowadays the only rationale
would be to do a Palm III port, and its screen is really too wimpy to
make a useful map display...

     I realize I can reedit the hp's to smaller numbers or use damage values of
   35 or 120.

     I also am wondering about the best way to handle refueling using a tanker
   or tanker plane.  Since under default settings the fuel seems to stay in the
   tanker- and this is very bad for the refueling plane.  For now I redesigned
   the tanker to be able to contain a plane which can then "take" the fuel.
   This seems a little too complicated.  I suppose giving the tanker a fuel
   in-length of -1 might help.

It would be fairly easy to extend "taking" to also apply to units in
the same cell, or out to a given range.  I can also see setting up a
doctrinal thing so you can explicit set the amount of fuel you want
a tanker to automatically hand out to passersby.

								Stan