Re: scorekeeping and materials

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

Hi Matt,

On Sat, 8 May 2004 mskala@ansuz.sooke.bc.ca wrote:

> First issue: I can't find a nice way for combat to involve capturing
> materials from the enemy unit.  The best I can do seems to be for failure
> in combat to always result in being wrecked or captured instead of
> destroyed, and then have wrecks automatically surrender, making their
> materials available to the winner.

To clarify: you want to capture materials from a unit that is 
still alive after a combat action in which it was hit?

> of the "m" property.  I don't know the correct syntax for that.  (There
> are, of course, other serious problems with scorekeeper syntax
> documentation - this is just the one that seems worst.)

There are many places where the documentation is "out of sync" 
with the code. As I have encountered them, I have tried fixing 
them, since those who worked on the code before seemed not to give 
a rat's posterior about keeping the documentation up to date. It 
is a very serious issue with Xconq; I know your frustration.

I have been aware that the scorekeeper docs are quite deficient. 
When I first joined the Xconq project and was working on creating 
a game, I found that it was hard to infer correct syntax due to 
the documentation's scantiness. At some point, I intend to 
reconcile what the scorekeeper code says with what the docs say 
(and provide a little clarification and amplification), unless 
someone else wants to do it first (patches always welcome 
:-). I have had other things on my platter the past 9 months....

> of trees.  You can do that, but it'll take damage.  Well, the existing
> "attrition" and "accident" systems are evaluated only at the start of a
> turn - so you can go through damaging terrain with impunity as long as you
> are careful not to end the turn there.

I take it you are not interested in wrecking the unit or making it 
vanish, but merely want to damage it?

>  The damage should ideally come specifically from
> *movement*.

I can't argue with that.

>  Maybe it would be reasonable for this kind of damage to be
> associated with border terrain? 

Why specifically border terrain? Border terrain is just a subset 
of terrain, and I think that a change to these features would be 
better left generalized. If I have an 18th cetury army moving 
through a swamp (cell terrain, not border terrain), then it 
should receive attrition from malaria each move in the cell 
terrain....

> One problem there is that Xconq crashes
> whenever I try to save a handmade file containing a border terrain type
> (not the supplied files, but I haven't been able to figure out what's the
> difference), which makes editing difficult.

Thanks for the crash report.
Do you have a stack trace? And can you send us the file in 
question?

> Is there any hope?  

<yoda>Always hope, there is.</yoda>

> advanced scorekeeping just an unimplemented feature and that's it?  Kind
> of annoying if that's the case, because advanced scoring is documented in
> several places as a significant feature of Xconq.

I share your annoyance. I'm not always that happy to clean up 
after other people's poor documentation practices.

> My thought on how to solve my immediate issue is to maybe represent the
> scarce substance as "token" units that can be carried by other units,
> captured, etc.  Then I can give the tokens a point value and use the
> implemented scoring system.  That's likely to get annoying really fast,
> though, if I have a unit carrying twenty or more tokens.

I'll give some thought to your feature request regarding the 
materials.... I won't be able to get to dealing with it right away 
though. If you felt up to creating a patch in the interim, that 
would be quite welcome.

Eric