Re: Occupant Combat, Redux

[Jim Kingdon <kingdon at panix dot com>]

> Otherwise, I think it's a real problem that when units attack a place,
> they get free attacks on all the occupants in that place.

It makes attacking a transport (including, for example, a city in the
standard game) a fairly powerful move, yes.

As a defender, this means one is well served to distribute one's
occupant unit among a greater number of transports.

With respect to game balance and such, I'm not sure whether this is a
good thing or not, but it certainly is something which has affected my
strategies and tactics quite a bit.

> I know, I know, but I promise I'll pick up Lisp for Dummies next week
> and see how much I can contribute to the actual code.

On the whole, the Language Syntax section of the xconq manual
(refman.texi) tells you everything you need to know about lisp.
Unfortunately, it throws in a bit of lisp terminology here and there
and could use more examples (both things would be nice to fix, given
the number of people who know lisp isn't so great these days).  But
you don't really need to know lisp - the overlap between xconq and
lisp (chiefly syntax) is smaller than superficial impressions might
imply.

I suppose if we really want to address this perceived barrier, we
could switch to XML.  Although it isn't clear whether xconq would fit
XML as well as other uses of XML, which are more document-like (or
record/field oriented, which fits into the document model pretty
easily).