[Freeciv-Dev] Re: (PR#2329) Portattacks 7

["Raahul Kumar via RT" <rt@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

--- "Per I. Mathisen via RT" <rt@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
> 
> Some of us discussed this on irc today. What we came up with is this idea
> of units being in "layers" on the battlefield. Some units are up in the
> air, some are on ground, others are in the sea. Killstack should only work
> within one layer at a time. So if you kill a fighter, all air units
> stacked with it die, but not a mech inf. get_defender() should prefer
> units in the same layer as your own before trying to attack units in
> another layer.

I like this idea, but this is very hard to implement. Who exactly is going to
implement killstack? I haven't even seen that code, and I doubt it worked
before.

That will be a seperate patch to this in any case. Killstack can succeed and
fall on its own merits. I refuse to add killstack to this current patch. 

> The exception to this are airfields and cities. In cities, all units are
> considered "grounded", and so best defender defends regardless of which
> layer the unit would otherwise be at. Aircraft are "grounded" in
> airfields, so that ground units will defend them, and killstack will
> destroy them if a ground unit dies there.

Status quo.

<snip>
> So
>  - if you attack with a tank against a tile with a bomber and a militia,
> the tank will attack the militia, and the bomber will survive.
>  - if you attack with a fighter against a tile with a bomber and a mech
> inf, the fighter will attack the bomber and the mech inf will survive.
> attack again and you will target the mech inf (since there are no more air
> units to attack).
>  - if you attack with a battleship against a carrier full of fighters, the
> battleship will whack the carrier and the fighters will survive.
>  - etc

Air units are invulnerable to attack from non air units. Air units will not
destroy stacks of air units and ground units by killing a single unit. They
have to destroy more units. Hmmm.  

Per, I'm not clear on what happens to an air unit that attacks a normal stack
of 3 mech inf. Are we retaining the current system that all 3 die, or do air
units have to kill every single member of the stack one by one?

> As to the patch, I think the new abilities should be controlled a new
> global game option in game.ruleset. The subs change should be a new unit
> flag which says that for this unit, cities don't "ground" sea units in
> cities, thus they will be in the "sea" layer when it attacks. This flag
> can be used for normal ships too, which means they'll attack ships first,
> then other units. F_PORTATTACK can be a name.

I'm not sure if I understand this idea correctly. We're adding a new flag,
PORTATTACK, and if that unit has it, get_defender will do exactly what we
currently do for F_NO_LANDATTACK.

Where exactly is the change here from the current situation? The only benefit
from this change is Civ 2 Compatability. We get to keep the old model as is. I
don't like the old model, and I think at some point we have to say no to
compatability.

But if the maintainers insist, I will make the change. 

Raimar's idea seems far too hard for me. The idea of adding x,y,z co-ords is
too difficult for me. And subs will be 4 dimensional, requiring yet another
axis. So Sub and Air units will need at least two more axes. I don't think you
have thought this through. 

If Raimar volunteers to implement his idea, I'm all for it. But Battle Isle has
far too complex a system to be implemented in Freeciv easily. It's a good idea,
but it needs someone who understands a lot more math than I do to implement it
properly. I can't even follow Jason's pos_to_pos patches, let alone what Raimar
is proposing. 
 
> I hope I got this right. What do other people think?
> 
>   - Per

Aloha,
RK.

Research is the act of going up alleys to see if they are blind. 

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