RE: More revisions to exploring_worth

[Lincoln Peters <peters2000 at mindspring dot com>]

On Tue, 2002-07-23 at 15:07, Hans Ronne wrote:
> I think the best solution might be to add support for absolute attack and
> defend values in combat model 0. This would give us the best from both
> models. And it is actually similar to how Civ III works. I started to look
> at this a few months ago, and it did not seem like an Herculean task.

Maybe that's not necessary.  Maybe it would be possible to write a
script that would read through a game module and create a hit-chance
table based on all of the attack/defend values.  For example, if an
attacking unit x has an attack strength of 6 and the defending unit y
has a defense strength of 6, the hit chance would be 50%.  If the
attacker was instead unit z and had an attack strength of 12, the hit
chance would be 75%, and the hit chance for the defender hitting the
attacker would be 25%.  And so on.

Another way to do that might be to use a script like the one described
above, but make the hit chance always 100 (or whatever the designer
specifies) and make the damage done a dice spec based on the
attack/defend strengths of the units.  In the previous example, that
might cause a successful hit from unit x against unit y to deal 1
damage, but a hit from unit z to unit y would deal 1d2 damage.  In the
case that an attacking unit would do less than 1 (but more than 0)
damage to certain defenders, the damage could be rounded up to 1 but the
attacking unit would incur a penalty to its hit chance.  For example, if
an attacker's strength is 1 and the defender's strength is 6, the
attacker would have a hit chance of 17% and a successful hit would do 1
damage.


Either of these scripts might produce some surprising behavior in the
existing combat model 1 games (e.g. in 3rd-age.g, pikemen would be hard
to hit but otherwise easy to kill), but as long as all of the combat
model 1-specific tables could be made to work in combat model 0
(encounter-result, occupant-affects-attack, neighbor-affects-defense, et
al.), it would probably work.  Although as I think about it, tables such
as occupant-affects-attack might need to be replaced with more specific
tables such as occupant-affects-hit-chance and occupant-affects-damage.