Re: Consumption-per-fire?

[Eric McDonald <mcdonald at phy dot cmich dot edu>]

On Sat, 2004-06-05 at 09:01, Hans Ronne wrote:
> >Potential examples of capture at a distance include:
> >(1) Spiderman throwing webs at criminals.
> >(2) Starships firing tractor beams at other starships.
> >(3) Swat teams throwing stun grenades into buildings.
> 
> This I would call incapacitating at a distance. Similar to damage. 

Fair enough. Except that Xconq does not presently support incapacitation
(with the exception of ACP or speed being brought to 0 by damage), as
far as I know.

This actually raises one of the gripes I have had with capture. A
captive unit should not always be able to be used by the capturing side.
Understandably, a captured city should be able to be used for producing
on behalf of the capturing side, but a captured artillery battery,
perhaps not (the capturing side would have to invest some trained
personnel first). Perhaps this comes back to incapacitation versus
capture though.

> Capture
> is completed only when the swat team has entered the building or the
> starship has been boarded.

Ideally, yes, but given the current state of Xconq's capabilities, a
game designer might choose to approximate boarding as being implicitly
successful, if a tractor/neutralizer beam gets a hold on an opposing
starship.

However, if we want to introduce the concept of incapacitation, then I
think that's great. It would add a significant amount of realism.

>  Real capture at a distance might involve
> teleportation or long-range psychic powers. BTW, teleportation is on my
> post-7.5 list. I think it could be useful in many games.

Good, then I can take it off my lengthy post-7.5 list. :-)
Were you thinking in terms of making 'move-range' fully implemented in
the movement/pathfinding and AI code, for the purpose of allowing units
to "blink" or "phase" (to use some fantasy terminology)?
Or were you thinking in terms of "portals" or "travel gates" that cause
their occupants to be relocated to a pre-designated cell, a cell
randomly chosen from a set of pre-designated cells, or a totally random
cell (possibly of a certain terrain type)?

(What would be even cooler, but certainly a radical change/feature,
would be the ability to travel between maps. That would make
quasi-recreations of games such as "Bard's Tale" possible.)

> >Ooops. For some reason, I had thought that capture-by-attack was not
> >limited to adjacent cells (if someone was using an 'attack-range' > 1).
> 
> In theory, yes, but like many other tables attack-range is not used by any
> games. This is something we should keep in mind before adding even more
> unused tables. It is nice for the game designer to have many tables, but
> too much freedom can be confusing.

Perhaps if 'move-range' > 1 was fully supported, 'attack-range' > 1
would seem like more of an option to game designers. (I ultimately am
pondering their use with 'special-ops' in Bellum II, to simulate units
of that type being extremely "slippery".)

> >As a game designer, I generally do not even allow firing units to attack
> >the same unit types that they can fire upon. If someone does allow an
> >attack by a firing unit (which can happen easily enough by just ignoring
> >'fire-hit-chance' and using 'hit-chance' instead), then he/she should
> >suffer the consequences. 'fire-hit-chance' is there for a reason, and if
> >an unit is not intended to attack, then its 'hit-chance' entries should
> >be left at 0%. (Or, better still, its 'acp-to-attack' should be set to 0
> >against all units.)
> 
> I also do this, mainly to force the AI to use fire instead of attacks when
> possible. However, there is one case where a firing unit has to use melee
> attack and that is if it is attacked, survives and then counterattacks.
> Which is certainly a possible scenario. Think of Tennyson's Light Brigade
> actually reaching the Russian guns with ensuing hand-to-hand combat in the
> trenches.

To me, the question is: is it even worth pretending that the guns can
counterattack? They are essentially useless once the British are among
them. The guns had their juicy chance when they were mowing down the
charging brigade.... Once they are reached, I think the contest is
essentially over, and it is time to bring Florence Nightingale to the
scene.

Eric