Supply and AI

[Elijah Meeks <elijahmeeks at yahoo dot com>]

I'd appreciate comments on the newest version of Cast
Iron Life:

http://castironlife.sourceforge.net/xcil-new.zip

There's a lot there:  The Union and the Confederacy
and a fun tech tree, some native populations, British
North America with a fleet, French Mexico without much
going for it and neutral Havanna.  For fighting
there's some marines, cavalry, artillery and ironclads
along with your regular infantry and militia.

The AI seems to understand the way I want combat to
occur, it can build a decent fleet or army and move it
around, but it prefers garrisoning its cities and an
drastically conservative overall stance.  If anyone
who knows how xconq handles AI has any suggestions,
please let me know.

I've disabled the supply system.  The material is all
held in the treasury, so I'd assumed it would transfer
to a unit that needs food or ammo automatically, but
it doesn't, and ships and troops end up starving. 
Again, if someone knows how to fix this, let me know.

Because of the strange style of combat, there are some
issues.  Protection gives a unit multiple attacks, and
the effects don't seem right, sometimes too strong,
sometimes too weak.  Shore bombardment, which I
designed to be damaging but not too damaging, is
almost ineffectual, heavy artillery seems the same.  I
haven't playtested it too rigorously, so maybe I'm
just misreading the results.

There's also a fatal error if too many transports with
occupants are placed in a fleet.  You can reproduce
the error by placing three Marine Divisions each into
three transports and placing these transports into a
Fleet.

So I'll call this the beta Cast Iron Life, there's a
lot to be added and a lot to fix, but overall it's
interesting.


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