Re: Concept: Compound (hierarcical) units

[Elijah Meeks <elijahmeeks at yahoo dot com>]

"There really is no support for dynamically adding
unit types once a game is underway (except by possibly
merging with another module)."

In a way, if we could change around the occupant
combat model (And get the AI to recognize it), you
don't need to create dynamic units.  You can just have
a single, "Army" or "Division" unit that holds each of
these brigades, and instead of the "Army" or
"Division" unit attacking, it's the individual
occupants that attack and defend.  That's the way Cast
Iron Life works.  The two major problems it runs into
are 1) The AI sure don't like it, and has a hard time
dealing and 2) Every successful attack against an Army
results in an attack on each of it's occupants, which
multiplies your attacking brigade's power by the
number of enemy occupants.  There's a workaround, by
making all units use the Fire command instead of
Attack, but it's even more screwy for the AI to figure
out and it allows for no counterattacking.  It kinda
bothers me, though, because Jakob says this idea's 10
years old, I thought I came up with it...

What's cool about this system is that you suddenly
have smaller units to work with so that if anyone was
ever ambitious enough to integrate a Master of Magic
style tactical combat engine into Xconq, you'd have
the necessary pieces to pass into it.


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