Re: GDL Questions

["Steve Schacher" <srschacher at my-Deja dot com>]

Hans,

Thanks for your instructive reply.

You are right that I intend for units to have fist-fights.  This would be a last resort option, though.

The use of material-type cocked-gun is meant to be a one-time use -- I have not added the consumption piece yet.  The fire action would consume 1 cocked-gun, which would then require the gunfighter to produce another cocked-gun before firing again.  This is the single-action nature of old-west guns.  I may try to simulate double-action guns later, where the gun cocks and shoots automatically.  The penalty would be a less accurate fire attempt.

You may not have noticed that I was also attempting to use acp-debt to simulate the delay in some actions.  If each unit has an acp-per-turn of 1, but an acp-debt of -2, then some actions will cause the unit to be inactive because some actions take longer than others.  This would be more evident when I add additional capabilities to the units.

The hit-probabilities currently are just mock-ups to get started.  The final probabilities will be higher, but with reduction modifiers for distance.  In essence, I want to increase the chances of a hit based on aim, but decrease the chance based on distance to the target.

Ultimately, I would like to model different types of weapons.  This would not affect probabilities, but would affect damage resulting from a hit.

Finally, I was hoping to create a pool of characters that could be used to create typical scenarios, such as bank robberies, claim jumping, indian raids, jail break-outs, etc.

I am slowly grasping the impact of the nature of xconq being more Empire-like and less boardgame-like.  I understand the main hit mechanism is probability of unit1 vs unit2, instead of attack-strength minus defense-strength indexed on a differential table.  So I'm trying to emulate some old games that don't rely on combat differentials (or at least back into unit-to-unit probabilities somewhat). This is difficult since most boardgames will allow a stack to attack as one unit, summing up their attack strengths into one value instead of making each individual unit attack separately as xconq does now.

All these ideas are swirling around in my mind right now.  There are many more that I haven't gotten to yet.  I'm basing what I'm doing on what the design manual says is possible.  I hope that, one day, the code will catch up to the manual, because it looks like this is a wonderful tool.

Thanks again, and I look forward to more communications.

Steve Schacher


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