Re: [Freeciv-Dev] group

[Greg Wooledge <wooledge@xxxxxxxxxxx>]

Martin Willemoes Hansen (mwh@xxxxxxxxxxxx) wrote:

> Umh this feature is in civ:ctp right? .. How do they do it there
> exactly? I think they have something like: you should mix your group
> with attackers, defenders etc for max force.

They have a stacked combat feature, yes.  It's one of the nicest new
features of the game (IMHO).


Peter Schaefer (schaefer@xxxxxx) wrote:

> It''s not done extremly intuitively in CTP AFAIK;
> I''m missing the feature to assign numbers to the army groups.
> (it's a mess when two groups enter one square).

The stacked combat part is intuitive enough, once you've had some
practice with it.  But the rules of CTP (*all* the rules, not just stacked
combat) are somewhat hazy; I'm still in my first game of CTP, and just
learning the ins and outs of the new stuff.  With the sparseness of the
documentation, a reverse engineering of this game is going to be tough....

What you're complaining about, really, is the interface for unit
selection.  CTP gives you the ability to choose individual units, or to
"go to the next unit (group)", but it would be nice in many cases to be
able to select a group from the list of groups currently on the tile.
(As the game currently stands, you must either hit "next unit" until you
get to the group you want, or select and deselct units to reconstruct
the group.  The latter messes everything up, but may be easier in
simple cases.)

In Civ 2, there's a different problem: there's a limit on the number of
units the game will display in the popup box when you click the stack.
If you've got a Fortress with more than a dozen or so units in it, you
may actually be unable to select the unit you want to use.  (Then you
must activate the whole stack, unfortifying units you wanted to remain
fortified, in order to wake up the units who are sleeping so that you may
"next unit" your way through the whole list....)

(I have a growing list of complaints with the CTP interface, which
is brilliant in some areas and mediocre or worse in others.  It was
obviously designed by a team/committee, not a single visionary leader.
But I'll refrain from further comment until I've had some more time to
play the game -- maybe I'll be pleasantly surprised by features I simply
haven't uncovered yet.)

> Game rules in CTP make it so it makes sense to build army groups,
> while with original civ1.0 rules it makes sense to have at most 
> 1 defending unit and one attacking; 
> civII rules (units may survive, but may be damaged) 
> allows about 2 defending units and a few offensive.

Yes, this is extremely important.  There's a major shift in the way combat
is handled among these games, and one must choose tactics accordingly.

But it is possible -- even desirable -- to have many units on a single
square in Civ 2.  This is accomplished by using a Fortress (which the
AI will typically scatter all throughout its empire for your convenience).
Because of the way Civ 2 handled tile improvements, it's even possible to
do this:

  * Unload units (including 2 Engineers) into enemy territory on a
    tile which is connected by roads to the target.

  * Move the 2 Engineers along the road to a square next to the city
    (forest/mountain/hills preferred).  Tell them to build a Fortress.
    The Fortress will appear as soon as you tell the second Engineer
    to start.

  * Move all of your units into the Fortress (and fortify the defensive
    ones).  You're inside a Fortress, so you get double defensive
    strength, and you'll lose only single units, not whole stacks.

  * On the next turn, all your Cannons will be next to the city with
    full movement points and ready to attack.

(This doesn't work as well in Freeciv, because tile improvements won't
appear until the end of the turn, so the group with the Engineers will
have to survive the attacks of whatever's in the city for 1 turn with
no Fortress to protect them.)

Anyway, I guess the point of all this rambling is this: you can't simply
graft features from CTP onto Freeciv without completely destroying
the game.

-- 
Greg Wooledge                    | Distributed.NET http://www.distributed.net/
wooledge@xxxxxxxxxxx             | because a CPU is a terrible thing to waste.
http://www.kellnet.com/wooledge/ |