[Freeciv-Dev] Re: Expirience points for units

[Marco Colombo <marco@xxxxxx>]

On Fri, 1 Sep 2000, Dalibor Perkovi[ISO-8859-2] æ wrote:

> 
> No, I'm not crazy for replying my own mail, I just thought of some other 
> stuff...
> 
> 
> >another example:
> >Again, mech.inf. vs. warriors :) The mech.inf. does something 
> >really stupid and *almost* gets killed. But it manages somehow 
> >to kill the warriors, but loses 90% HP in the process. 
> 
> When I think of it, my system enables a unit to even *lose* XP for such 
> stupidity.

Which is not true, in RL. Every mistake you make makes you better (if you
recognise it).

> As for getting too much detailed, I think we should get as much as detailed
> as possible while making rules, in order to make im as realistic as possible.
> After that, we should make them as simple as possible to be playable. But 
> those
> two things don't exclude each other.

Oh well, of course the more generic the game engine is, the better.
But I think a more sophisticated combat engine is very long term.
I was just supporting the idea of xp as a replacement for veteran status.

> In the meantime I thought of another example. Suppose a unit defeats an 
> opponent
> having no losses. How come? Maybe they just got lucky, or maybe they are 
> "talented".
> (some people say they don't believe in luck, but I don't feel like discussing
> it). Suppose they're talented. Shouldn't they gain expirience more quickly?
> To put it in a different context, why punish such unit by giving it less XP
> than to unit that did the same job and almost got killed in the process, only
> because the other unit lost some HP?

because they learned less. Xp are a matter of fact, not a reward.
The harder the battle, the more you get in being there. If you are talented,
and victories are easy for you, you don't get experience from them.
The first time you are in real troubles, where your talent is not enough,
you are likely to fail.  Talent/skill are expressed as attack/defence
power in the game. A talented unit has higher stats.

I would be nice if a player could build 'elite' units paying them more
than normal units. A 'elite' riflemen unit that costs 60 points instead
of 40 (and has, say, 8/6/1 as stats). That would map the fact that you're
taking more time in training (and selecting) your men. But if you look
at it from the gameplay side, it adds nothing but a new type of unit.
Not a big enhancement. In theory, the approximantion of reality is better,
but in practice nothing changes. I think the game has already a good 
choice of units. The elite riflemen I've describe above are just like
Marines, in the end (despite they can't attack from sea).

> When I think of it, I even start to believe that a unit should get more XP if
> it loses *less* HP! It means that they already *are* more expirienced, or will
> gain their exp more quickly, than those who lost half of their men performing
> the *same* task...

The more experienced you are, the harder is to get more experience. That's
how it is in RL, I think. Think of a chess player. The better you are,
the more difficult is to find a real challenge. Repeatedly playing
against lesser players (i.e. easy victories) won't make you more
experienced at all.

Life gives you 'lessons'. They can be easy ones or hard ones. You learn
more from the hard ones, I believe...

I think we should quit this thread, since we're discussing of philophy 
and nobody else seems interested. My previous answers weren't private by
mistake. B-)

>       ?
>      /|\                           Izitpajn
>     /?|\?                       pdalibor@xxxxxx
>       |
> 
> --
> Besplatni e-mail - http://www.iskon.hr/mail/
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.TM.
-- 
      ____/  ____/   /
     /      /       /                   Marco Colombo
    ___/  ___  /   /                  Technical Manager
   /          /   /                      ESI s.r.l.
 _____/ _____/  _/                     Colombo@xxxxxx