Re: A more sophisticated demonstration of change-type

[Lincoln Peters <sampln at sbcglobal dot net>]

On Sat, 2004-05-29 at 10:14, Eric McDonald wrote:
> It turns out that the 'acp-to-attack' problem you were seeing is related
> to this. The 'atk1', 'atk2', etc. are also lists of lists; i.e., 'atk1'
> expands to:
>   ((knight-1) (knight-2) ... (knight-6))
> instead of:
>   (knight-1 knight-2 ... knight-6)
> Placing an 'append' in the definition solves the problem:
>   (define atk1 (append l1 l2 l3 l4 l5 l6))

Thanks, I'll do that.

> 
> Other notes:
>   I played the game for a while last night. I think it has a lot of
> potential, and I already found it to be rather enjoyable, in spite of
> its early stage of development. It seems that 'knight-1' units are
> becoming 'knight-2' units at about the right rate. However, I am not
> sure that 'knight-2' units are becoming 'knight-3' units fast enough. Of
> course, I didn't actually encounter the enemy, so I didn't have a chance
> to engage other 'knight-2' units, but laying siege to independent
> 'thorps' with gangs of knights was (a) fun, and (b) not rewarding enough
> in terms of advancement to ranks higher than 'knight-2'. Maybe the
> transition from 'thorp' to 'hamlet' could be accelerated so that the
> independent 'hamlets' would appear and produce opposing 'knight-2' units
> sooner. I think this would also make the game a little more entertaining
> in its early stages; people might feel more compelled to play if the
> earlier advances happen more rapidly before they become distracted by
> more fulfilling aspects of game play such as slaughter, carnage, and
> wrecking mayhem on an active opponent.

I've noticed the same things during testing.  I might re-do the level
advancement so that less CXP's are needed to advance (or more CXP's are
gained after each combat round), or (less likely) I might make it so
that the CXP's earned depend on what you're fighting (the more powerful
the opponent, the more CXP's earned).  I may also change the growth
threshold for city types from 25 to 10.

One thing that I suspect could make it more playable is semi-automatic
AI control; some kind of mechanism by which I could easily give a task
to a group of units, for example "Capture the independent thorp at
x,y".  Especially when you consider the number of units you could be
dealing with before the end.  On the other hand, I doubt that any such
mechanism will be implemented when so many bugs are left to squash.

I also noticed that the knight-8 through knight-20 units don't show up
in the list, even though I could conceivably acquire them by making a
knight earn enough CXP's.  On the other hand, all of the city types
appear on the list.

---
Lincoln Peters
<sampln@sbcglobal.net>

Make sure your code does nothing gracefully.