Re: Some Misc Questions (Long)

[Hans Ronne <hronne at pp dot sbbs dot se>]

>Hans, some miscellaneous Xconq questions.
>
>1.  Do counter-attacks consume material and acp like regular attacks, or are
>they "free"?  I would like to limit unit attacks to one per turn but permit
>a unit to defend and CA multiple times, and material-to-attack may be the
>solution if CA is free.  Also, would free-mp allow a unit to advance in an
>overrun beyond its move-range but not extend its normal move-range?  I'm
>really wrestling with how to define unit acp and material to permit certain
>actions and limit others during a game turn.

I believe Jim already anwered this.

>2.  Is there a way to trigger inactive sides to active status if their units
>are attacked or their territory is invaded, or by some event or date?

Yes to the first question. If you put a side under control of the
lobotomized mplayer, the "iplayer" it will just react to invasions etc. but
not do any high level planning. So it will basically sit around and wait
for something to happen. As for things being triggered by random events or
dates, this is someting I woudl like to see, but for which there is little
if any support rigth now. You do have the possibility of adding random unit
surrender, revolt and attrition (see the manual) but that's about it.

>there a way to charge material for a side to "declare war" before they are
>allowed to attack or invade an inactive side?  Since everyone is neutral to
>each other in Xconq, this seems like a problem for any WWII-type strategy
>games unless you hardwire events into the game.

As Jim noted, it is possible to program  alliances. Check out the WW2 games
or Lord of the Rings. The Elves are allied with Gondor etc.

>3.  I'm noticing on the designer window for units that I get a single-column
>list that cuts off units at the bottom.  For features, I get a multi-column
>list which includes everything.  Is this just a bug or is there something I
>can set to fix the unit list?

Probably just a bug. I never use the tcltk interface, which I assume you
are referring to, for designing, so I am not sure. The mac interface is way
superior in this case.

>4.  How exactly does side-color-library work?  I assume you can use the same
>unit-types and unit-images for different sides, with unit-image color
>defined by the library, but I can't figure out how to do this.

Side colors are triplet of colors like this: "red,green,blue". On the mac,
the first two colors are used to specify the foreground color of the left
and right half of the unit, while the third color specifies the background
color used bor unti boxes etc. I'm not sure how it works in the tcltk
interface since it was some time since I used it with side colors. Anyway,
I think they are kind of obsolete - a remnant from the time when most unit
images were black and white icons. The new high quality gif images dont
need side colors, and the emblems are ususally much cooler.

>5.  Can random events and conditional statements be included in game
>modules, or only those currently defined in Xconq (ie, NamingMethod random,
>ScorekeeperForm if, etc.)?  It's not clear if this may be possible and what
>the syntax should be.  Example, how to check total material in an alliance's
>treasury (or some other parameter) at the start of each turn and set side
>priority based on who has more (ie, initiative).

See my comment above. To implement random events in a good way, I think we
would need a new basic type, ETYPE for event type, in the kernel. I started
to scetch on that once ...

>6.  How can you define force pools for sides?  You can limit the number of
>unit types and define when a unit type becomes available, but how could you
>increase or decrease the limits on a given turn or based on an event?

Not sure I understand this question. If your mean, can we specify when a
particular unit type becomes available, one answer is to use either
advances or tech development  (both are supported in the kernel). For a
really complicated alternative approach, check out time.g, which has a lot
of module-specific support in the kernel.

Hans

Hans Ronne

hronne@pp.sbbs.se