No guide yet, I might write one after the mod is 100% complete and there are no more changes.
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Game mechanics
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(August 9th, 2018, 18:34)Seravy Wrote: No guide yet, I might write one after the mod is 100% complete and there are no more changes. Ok cool. I'm starting to get the hang of it, think I've won my first game on Normal tonight. There's a lot going on and so many different strategies, now I know why I've heard people saying this is still one of the best strategy games ever made!
An idea. I can't really do anything about the various other problems ship movement has, but I can at least do something about the "same unit enters combat twice" problem. The one where you fight a battle using your doomstack, leave your ship behind, then use the ship to drag the doomstack into another battle the same turn, effectively doubling your doomstack efficiency.
It's by no means an ideal solution, but we could add a new rule of "units already marked done for the turn count as not participating in combat". Basically, they'll be carried units that don't appear on the battlefield. The downside is, if someone uses the Done button instead of patrol or nothing at all and moves into battle that way on board of their ship, they'll lose the stack and some people are lazy to save often enough... Fortunately, as units spend no movement while carried now, aside from that there is no way to accidentally run out of movement and fail to enter combat.
I think I'd avoid doing it. Either treat the ships like windwalkers, or don't. You've chosen not to. But trying to mess around in ways that accidentally get units killed (and we already lose cities or units or nodes due to moving things we didn't realize were going to move) isn't a good idea.
Even if it isn't what the game originally had, I think having movement rules that never accidentally move units (even windwalkers don't pull units over water unless told to) is the most important thing to strive for.
I see one more possibility : When a stack that contains a unit that is in "done" status attacks, the movement gets cancelled as if the player pressed "no" for the "do you want to attack" question. I'm worried there might be no space for this there though.
December 28th, 2018, 09:13
(This post was last modified: December 28th, 2018, 09:24 by Nelphine.)
That still results in your ship with 7 units that intended to attack, who have to pass through the space of 1 done unit (say the 9th unit who attacked into the trireme first who was blocking the city) being unable to attack. Without the ship that wouldn't be a problem, so it shouldn't be a problem with the ship.
I don't see any intuitive way around it unless you make ships identical to windwalkwers (except that ships are restricted to water) and pop up a message if a ship (or windwalker) tries to leave a space that would leave units behind who could drown. There's no balance reason for units needing to move full distance after the ship moves full distance, particularly since AI can't do anything remotely comparable. There's also no intuitive reason why a draconian airship and a draconian warship have completely different mechanics except one is limited to water.
I already rejected making ships work as windwalkers.
You wanted a fix for units being able to enter combat twice, because leaving the ship behind for battles enables this abuse to happen even if not intended. I offered two possible fixes. If you don't want either, we'll do nothing, but stop dredging rejected ideas back from the grave, it's wasting precious time. What should and shouldn't and what's intuitive has nothing to do with it, we can't make ships work better and you know that. You have to learn accepting some things just can't be improved.
No, you brought up that you wanted to fix two battles. I agree it's silly, but I think if you're going to leave ships different from windwalkers you must accept that two battles will need to remain an option, because anything else becomes increasingly unintuitive.
I bring up making them like windwalkwrs again, because it IS intuitive. You can disagree again, that's fine. I don't expect to ever change your mind. But each time you bring up a facet of the way ships work that isn't great, I will bring up an existing, intuitive system, that needs to add one popup at relatively rare times, to solve the problems you have previously described with ship movement.
Two battles can't remain an option, as it goes against core gameplay and design. (and contributes to the no garrison problem, although losing the ship is usually inevitable so at least it's not more zero cost battles. Still enabling a doomstack to fight more than once is bad.)
We can spell out in the documentation it's a bug and using it is cheating and leave it unfixed, or we can fix it. But we can't pretend it's an intended feature.
December 28th, 2018, 10:53
(This post was last modified: December 28th, 2018, 10:54 by Nelphine.)
Which is why I brought up windwalkers. I agree that it's not an intended feature. I believe leaving ship movement as is, and fixing two battles per turn, causes too many other issues, and makes ship movement (which already causes issues that can be as big as resulting in lost cities) even more unintuitive. For me, that's worse than allowing two battles per turn - losing cities, nodes, or units, due to movement of a unit (which may not be in your immediate control, for instance, if the ship is moving on automatic, or if you are in late game and have dozens of moves to make and so choosing the 'wrong' order penalizes you) is just bad at a fun/gameplay level, which is more important that balance.
Given that, you either accept that it's an unintended consequence, or you go back to the drafting board. |