Re: More Combat Options

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

Hi Elijah,

On Tue, 11 May 2004, Elijah Meeks wrote:

> Hey guys, I'm going to play squeaky wheel, now that I
> see tables being produced eight a day and all these
> new revisions to Xconq--3D units and 64-player, neural
> net AIs and, and, and...

As Hans mentioned, these were items for discussion and not 
necssarily immediate action.

> to Xconq, but I really think there should be a new
> combat system, or at least a revision to the old one. 
> If anything, I think there should be a global variable
> with Type 1 Combat (Civilization-style), something
> like, "Fight-Until-Death", so that if it's true, it
> keeps working the way that it does now, but if false,
> each combat action only has one effect.  It can
> default to true, so there's no issue with current
> games.
> 
> Any chance of this?

As Hans mentioned, the model 1 code is specifically set up to 
loop; the model 0 code is not.

What I have proposed previously is that, in the post-7.5 world, we 
may want to make the combat system modular, and the recast models 
0 and 1 in terms of the modular one. Then, designers would just 
set variables to determine which behaviors to turn on and off.

In the short term, I may add more flexibility to the way capture 
can work in model 0, and maybe do some more work with terrain 
effects, but that is the extent of my pre-7.5 ambition wrt combat.
Also, I might implement the materials attrition (and capture) 
stuff that I recently discussed with Matthew.

> Anybody have any desire to make any major changes to
> the combat system?

I don't presently. There are still quite a few bugs to fix before 
we can release 7.5.

Eric