Chain shipping

[teelaurila]

Not sure if I got you right, but I thought removing the moves is exactly what should happen? Ideally being carried one tile by 4move ship should cost 1/4 of every units max move, as it takes one fourth of the month to travel this long if it moves 4 in a month. And units with no moves left could not be carried. So if a land unit ends its moves by embarking the ship should stay there until start of next turn as the land unit only arrived at very end of month. But we cannot work with fractional moves.

So the idea to approximate this

Carrying reduces moves of carried units
Units without moves can be carried if ship has moves
Units already carried 5 cannot be carried anymore to cut chaining ships
When a unit in stack reaches 5 carried moves, all moves in stack cut to 0 (end of month). Also forces a transport to stay with the stack.

It's a bit counterintuitive because one could chain 1.5 triremes. Disembark often has to wait for start of next turn which is fine if ai plays by that rule too.

[Seravy]

I don't like it when I have to quote myself from the very same thread...

The units need to be able to leave the ship before the enemy attacks it - in 90% of the time the AI has naval superiority. Let's not reopen that again please.

ships are supposed to be able to transport units that have zero moves. That's the whole reason why we did the very complex "select unit with no move" solution. At this point there is no chance I override that even if hell freezes over.

[Nelphine]

Any chance of windwalkers getting the ability to move units with no movement left? Don't get me wrong, I'd much prefer if that complex solution had never existed so that it wouldn't factor in today conversation, but I'd much rather have ships and windwalkers match over almost any other criteria. Sure that opens up chain windwalking too, but *shrug* it already exists much earlier with ships. I want the game to be smoother to play, and if we can't fix the abuse, then I'm willing to allow more abuse to avoid having to remember which ship has which mechanics simply because one is an airship and one is not. Particularly when it's the later more expensive units that have the more restrictive mechanics.

[teelaurila]

Just trying to offer out of box ideas to the apparent stall... Chaining land and sea but not sea and sea is in itself inconsistent and thus issues. I'm only playing expert and there it seems not needing to protect naval transportation cheapens rather than improves the game. But nwm, I'm sure there are reasons.

In any case, you thought about ship id to limit chain shipping. Perhaps a simpler solution could be tiles transported int with a global max?

[Bahgtru]

I don't think the rule of no transportation with multiple ships ill be up in the poll. Using two transports is obviously an abuse.

If it's "obvious" then surely the result of that poll will confirm your belief. Why not put to the test your assumptions? Just try to make the questions fair, or it is no test. I can put it up but you'd get more answers.

By the way. If you reset a stack moving without transport (multiple ships but not infinite), you fix the windwalker issue you mentioned, as windwalking away would reset it as well. And if you also make endurance not apply to transports (which doesn't make any sense anyhow) then you fix probably 95% of the problem. At that point if issues are still there then we can look for a solution that currently we miss.

[Seravy]

Perhaps a simpler solution could be tiles transported int with a global max?

That still requires the movement to get interrupted when halfway done and is hard to understand for players. It's not like anything shows how many tiles the unit has remaining.

If it's "obvious" then surely the result of that poll will confirm your belief. Why not put to the test your assumptions? Just try to make the questions fair, or it is no test. I can put it up but you'd get more answers.

Because this is part of the game design? Imagine the result of the poll is chain shipping is okay, then we need to teach the AI to use it, and rebalance the entire game around that as a feature. Like how we did with 'retreat exhausted". This is a far too powerful and relevant feature to leave it at "yeah sure it's a thing players can do but it doesn't really matter."
Except, we can't do that neither for AI nor game balance so chain shipping is abuse : it's not an intended game mechanic that only the human player has access to.

Things aren't abuse because people vote for it. Things are abuse because they are possible but not intended. That is the case with chain shipping. And no matter what the results would be on a poll, we can't make it an intended feature. Not this far ahead in development and especially not without source code...

windwalking away would reset it as well.

No, the problem is windwalking would be transportation.
Doesn't matter. The issue that blocks this feature is not being able to split up a stack that had 2 ships and 2 units that moved together into two stacks of 1 ship and 1 unit still being able to move.

[Bahgtru]

If it's "obvious" then surely the result of that poll will confirm your belief. Why not put to the test your assumptions? Just try to make the questions fair, or it is no test. I can put it up but you'd get more answers.

Because this is part of the game design? Imagine the result of the poll is chain shipping is okay

That's a strawman: the poll starts with infinite chainshipping as abuse as a minimum and asks a "what", not an "if".

The fact is, you still need a definition of chain shipping. And I don't know how you don't see that moving 150 is worse than moving 5 (load, 1 ship, unload) or 8 accepting risk (load, 1 ship, another ship).

[Seravy]

I was trying to say one doesn't make polls about objective facts, it's meaningless.
Whether something is abuse or not is an objective fact. It's either an intended part of game design or not. That is my definition for the word "abuse". Chain shipping definitely isn't intended design - neither the game mechanics nor the AI is designed with that in mind, and this holds true for both the original game and the mod.
How we define chain shipping is a different topic that's more subjective.

...but since we are not going to do anything anyway, nor are we able to, there is no point in trying to define it more precisely anymore.

[Bahgtru]

Ah, that's a pity. I guess storing an array of ship IDs is too cumbersome?