Re: thoughts on a new scenario

[Hans Ronne <hronne at pp dot sbbs dot se>]

>I'm writing a new scenario, named Lincoln--the American Civil War
>at a comparatively high level--
>week long turns, division sized units, etc.
>
>A few questions:
>    1) how do I get a good map?  world-50km is just not detailed enough.
>Any good ways to generate a detailed map of the eastern US at 10-30 km
>scale?  Given the terrain, I can add rivers, cities, etc.

You can draw it yourself using the built in game editor. It's very simple
to use, but here is some quick help:

1. You start an existing game and then launch the editor by picking "Design
Mode" in the Edit menu. This brings up a small design palette.

2. You can control the size of your pen, so you don't have to draw one hex
at a time. You do this by using the popup menu at the bottom of the design
palette on Linux and by alt-clicking (increase brush size) or
shift-alt-clicking (reduce brush size) in the palette's Brush field on the
Mac.

3. It's eaiser to copy a map from an atlas if you turn on Meridians in the
View menu and pick a suitable interval.

4. When you are done, you pick "Save Game" from the File menu. This brings
up a dialog where you can pick what features to save. If you already have
your own game module, all you need to save is the map itself. On the Mac,
the save dialog also has a "Resize" button for changing the size of the
map. In Linux you are stuck with whatever size you start with. You should
consider this when deciding what existing game you start with.

More on this and on game design in general can be found in the designer's
manual. Anybody who tries to write a new game will find it very useful.

Finally, if you are lucky, Stan might have what you are looking for. I
think he was working on a US-based game last year. I don't know if he got
as far as drawing a map, however.

>    2) to accurately simulate the blockade and southern raiders, I need to
>simulate trade with europe.  Civ-2 does this rather well...any way to
>represant something like Civ-2's trade in Xconq?

We don't have anything like the Civ trade code yet in the kernel. What you
could do is to put some useful materials over in Europe that either side
can fetch using merchant ships.

>Lastly, it'd be cool to have something like Civ2's events mechanism--
>something like (trigger (condition) (effect))
>so that under some specified condition, some piece of GDL could be
>evaluated.
>    This would allow cool things like, if Atlanta is captured, then
>suddenly southern attrition rates rise.
>    Could this be added to the kernel?  It would help many many games.

I agree. I've been thinking about adding this to xconq for a long time. It
certainly could spice up many games. There is already some support for
random events. Check out "Adding random events" in the designer's manual.

Hans

Hans Ronne

hronne@pp.sbbs.se