Re: Game customization

[Stan Shebs <shebs at cygnus dot com>]

   Date: Tue, 5 Oct 1999 23:07:51 +0100
   From: Hans Ronne <hronne@2.sbbs.se>

   >ehhhmmm what about adding an mplayer for each indepent city??

   This would of course make the independents truly independent. They would even
   fight each other, which is not possible now.

Another reason why independent units should be handled in the kernel;
the mplayer code isn't designed to make its units fight each other.

   However, I strongly suspect that
   running more than 100 AI sides would bring xconq to its knees, particularly
   during network games. Right now, the upper limit on the number of sides is 32,
   I believe.

Yes, there is a side mask that is an integer.  It could be turned into a
small array or struct, but there are many iterations over sides that
assume there are only a few sides in a game.

   [...]
   This was with a fully enabled mplayer running the independent side, and the
   barbarian invasion was pretty overwhelming (just as in real history). My
   expectation is that a lobotomized mplayer will produce behaviour similar to
   that of the barbarians in Civ - units would about semi-randomly and attack
   anything in their immediate neighbourhood.

If you really wanted to do Late Roman era barbarians (which would be
interesting, wish I had the time to try my hand at it :-( ), I think
you would want to have a number of barbarian sides, each with multiple
units.  Although the Romans were pretty dismissive, the "barbarians"
weren't that far behind technologically or organizationally; they just
didn't use a system of writing to extol their own virtues. :-)

The tricky part is to set the motivations correctly.  Each barbarian
horde should consist of a number of mobile units, some with a
relatively high rate of construction, and all with stacking limits,
representing grazing requirements.  One could also make some kinds of
terrain result in slow starvation, while others are healthier.  So
population pressure forces the barbarians to spread out while looking
for good places to live.  Because they're on sides, each horde can
spread out in a semi-organized fashion, contending either with each
other or with Romans, whoever is in the way.  You could have different
unit types to get different speeds and "fiercenesses" of hordes.

Although it would be amusing to introduce some sort of random side
generation during a game, it's probably not necessary; 30 barbarian
hordes, each with from 10-100 units, would be quite a handful for even
the best Roman general.  It would be especially nasty if the
barbarians got combat experience bonuses from fighting, so just
waiting for them to trash each other would be a losing strategy...

								Stan