Re: setting up standing orders question...

[Bruno Boettcher <bboett at adlp dot org>]

On Fri, Jun 27, 2003 at 09:42:21PM +0200, Hans Ronne wrote:
> The transport code is long due for an overhaul, quite apart from any
> standing orders problems.
uhm yeah, i still dream also of units actually following streets and
rivers.... (and my wish to be able to build and destroy roads.... is
    still there :D )

BTW is there in the meantime a possibility to enhance the standard game
to allow time and war driven growth of cities? means if a base has
survived 50 cycles and there weren't any combats around it grows to a
town etc.... ? because, erm an actual tactic : build 4-5 battleships and
flatten all coastal cities of the others, this has such a hughe impact
on their production that once they are 2-3 cities behind they have
nearly automaticly lost.... and flattening cities with such a fleet goes
realy fast....

uhm and a UI for writing games? :D dumb people like me have problems
with the description language (not enough verbose, too cryptic -> i am
    one who likes java ;)

> I never spent much time on this code, but I think the interface support is
> minimal, as you say. Certainly, things could be improved. There has not
> been much interest in standing orders, but maybe that will change if using
> them gives such a huge advantage.
hmm? i use them since they appeared? on small games i admit that there's
nearly no point, but once you have games where you use big maps, and
leave a fair amount of time to develop, you have to coordinate the
movements of hundreds of units.... 

building up the ressupply lines by hand would be a mild horror for me :D
especially since the path finding algorithm isn't allways the best
(wrong routes, still inefficient use of roads, different paths between
 units making the same trip etc...)

and a nice side effect of the standing orders: the units arrive
pinpointed at the same moment at the target, that way i can make nice
stacks of armor 6 packs to be shuffled onto the transports....

it relieves from all the micromanagment, and you can fully concentrate
on strategy, especially since you can very easily predict the resupply,
  and you don't risk losses due to units wandering around alone....

and otherwise, how do you set up patrolling ? i really don't like it to
be surprised by an attack behind my front lines.... and there's no real
sentry command in the game (or i haven't found it yet...)

now if those mechanisms were a bit smarter, that would be even better :D
in my wishlist: 

- thresholds in test means num of occupants > < >= =< == a num, 
- combinable tests
- some macros (occupants, full, empty etc...)
- to be able to write/manipulate in the same way the unit plans :i
usually spread some units for protection in an arc around my cities,
  since the occupants might suddenly vanish when the opponent has luck,
  but i want those stacks to remain at same force, so if a stack is
  aggressed, and looses units, the city behind should be notified to
  produce as next a replacement unit and to send it to this given
  stack.... don't know if that was clear :D

  on the same line, if it was possible to rewrite the standing orders on
  given situations... making e.g. if the count of cells x-z < threshold,
  call all outside stacks into the city?
  
  and last thing to this point : to be able to specify an auto-resupply
  point per unit... go resupply and come back to continue its task.. 

- beeing able to load and save separately the sets of doctrines/types of
plans and standing orders...
- grouped standing orders, uhm a bit more object oriented :D would be
nice

if there was a possibility to add to this the friend/foe detection
we could have a first draw of a system of rules which could eventually
be added to the ai...


awww this went longer than planned... hope i didn't annoy you :D

-- 
ciao bboett
==============================================================
bboett@adlp.org
http://inforezo.u-strasbg.fr/~bboett
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