Item Units

[Elijah Meeks <elijahmeeks at yahoo dot com>]

(Figured it deserved it's own thread)

Eric, you'd mentioned additional tables and we've
talked about the cow patties.  It seems like the
framework's in place for items, just add a fifth entry
to the ferry-on-entry/departure tables that's "Full"
(Or something similar).  I'd thought, when I first
worked with items as occupants, that "over-all"
would've worked, but it didn't.  "Full" would mean
that the transport paid all necessary ACP costs for
the occupant to move into the hex and load onto the
unit.

Problems:  

The AI, of course, would likely not get that these
units were useful, and would probably pick them up and
drop them at random.  An initial workaround would be
to set the ferry-on-entry to "Full" and the
ferry-on-departure to over-nothing, which means that
once the AI orders a legitimate unit to pick up an
item, it's stuck with it.  Not the best solution, of
course, but it would work.

I'd like to introduce three item types in Opal: 
Weapon, Armor and Gear.  They'd come in two flavors,
fine and magical.  So far, so good (Heck, only six new
units, I'll never reach 1000 like this).  But we've
all seen how a unit looks with three occupants,
especially when it occupies a cell with another unit
or two.  Without an occupant dialog box, it'd just be
too cluttered.

Building each magic sword by hand is also a pain.  So
I'd love to see initial-occupant and
occupant-when-created tables that call for, in the
case of the former, a unit placed with said occupant
and, in the case of the latter, an extra build to
produce, if the builder is able, the additional
occupants.  The tables would be percentage based,
especially useful with the initial-occupant table,
because then some of your swordsmen might start with
fine weapons or magic armor, adding a little
randomness to the game.  If the percentage is higher
than 100, it would indicate more than one occupant, so
that, say, a huge city could be set at:

(initial-occupant
   (hugecity magicsword 350)
)

And would always start with three magic swords with a
50% chance of a fourth.


Tablewise, occupant-adds-hit-chance/fire-hit-chance,
occupant-adds-acp, occupant-adds-damage and
occupant-adds-hp would be a great start.

And neural nets, and 3D units, and a fully 3D globe,
and XBox support, and and and...


		
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