Re: New testing game

[Lincoln Peters <peters2000 at mindspring dot com>]

On Fri, 2002-08-02 at 13:48, Hans Ronne wrote:
> Are you sure that all 9 cells are being used? The number of cells that a
> city can use depends on its reach. Which defaults to zero. Furthermore, a
> reach of one will let you use only 6 + 1 cells. So you need at least a
> reach of 2 to use 9 cells.

I'm sure.  The city has a reach of 2 and no enemies were within that
reach.

> 
> Another question is if you disabled the "supply" code. It is important to
> do that in games with advanced units. Otherwise materials will be siphoned
> off elsewhere, which is not what you want.

The "supply" code is not disabled, but cities are the only units that
can even store food.  And nothing can share food.

If I disabled the "supply" code, would that prevent cities from sharing
resources (i.e. fuel) with occupants?

> 
> Advanced units currently have no limits on how much material they can
> store. The material storage tables apply only to non-advanced units. The
> theory was that a city does not have a limited storage space the same way a
> ship does. But we could add support for that if necessary.

I set the 1000-unit limit on fuel because if there was no limit (or the
limit was absurdly high), cities would probably hoard fuel and never
supply it to the units that needed it.  You might see similar things in
Colonizer and Space Civilization (any version).  Actually, the problem
is especially visible in Space Civilization because different
civilization types have different capacities for everything, but all of
the limits on basic resources (gathered from the terrain) are ignored. 
Resources produced by facilities (matter, antimatter, torpedoes) did,
however, obey the limits.

The problem might become even more noticeable (and possibly more
troublesome) in Space Civilization, as I am planning to re-write the
civilization definitions so that instead of 4 levels of civilizations,
there will be 13 levels, ranging from ancient Sumeria (around the 60th
century b.c.e.) to the 24th century a.c.e.!

> 
> >* When set up according to the game design manual on the website,
> >facilities that are supposed to increase the number of cells used by an
> >advanced unit don't seem to work.  Perhaps the manual is wrong?
> 
> I hope not. Check out the code in allocate_used_cells in run.c. There is
> certainly support for these type of facilities. I don't know that this code
> has been tested a lot, though, so there may be bugs in it. You would have
> to step through it with a debugger to find out what the problem is.

Looking at allocate_used_cells, I can see where it is all done, so if I
used something like:

(table occupant-multiply-maxcells (arcology city 200))

the number of cells that a city with an arcology should double, and if I
use something like:

(table occupant-add-maxcells (collector city 1))

the number of cells that a city with a collector should increase by 1,
right?


It also looks to me like the code doesn't check that an advance is
completed before it applies the modifier to unit->maxcells.  Am I
reading this correctly?

> 
> One limitation is that what is increased is only the maximal number of
> cells that can be used. If these cells are free from enemy units and if
> they are within the unit's reach. So these facilities will not have any
> effect if all available cells already are being used.

I did make sure that there were plenty of usable cells available, and
nothing happened when I built those facilities.

> 
> >* It looks to me like the effects of facilities
> >(occupant-multiply-production, et al.) kick in *before* the facilities
> >are completed.  A granary should not affect production until it is
> >completed, right?
> 
> Indeed. We should test for is_active everywhere where facilities are used.
> Reminds me of the discussion we had on this list some time ago when I noted
> that the supply code works for incomplete units. I thought this was weird,
> but not everyone agreed.

I vaguely remember the discussion, and I'm not sure that I want to
comment on it.