Join me in Conquest of the Empire

[TylerChuit]

Response to first answer: um, ok.    I guess I'll just have to move out the ship I don't want being loaded, then move it back after the other one goes.    I guess it wouldn't matter if I was planning to load both ships, since I could just load the generals first, then assign them the appropriate troops after, but since I just have the one general...

Just had a thought.  I know nothing about programming, but since there is no "Load ship" button when the territory has no ships, would it be possible to have a button for each ship labeled "Load ship X"?

Response to second answer: a 'shopping cart' would be aces!  As for the other thing, even just the ability to undo your last action would go a long way to prevent hair pulling mistakes like double clicking the wrong thing.

Response to BTdubs:  That almost sounds worse!  It probably wouldn't matter as much if we had unlimited generals, but I would hate to have say a 14 man army get chewed alive by 4 cannons and not have the option to stop the carnage and also lose 2 generals in the process.  But if you think it's a good idea to start shoving meat into a grinder and then not be able to stop if you reach fingers, go right ahead!  

[TylerChuit]

Then again, I could always accidentally load my Ceaser onto the boat by accident and not realize it until after I'd sent him out on his own... that could happen.

[Dragon]

OK. I'll fix it for you. I'm guessing you're talking about Game XVII. Which general were you trying to load onto the ship?

[Dragon]

Response to first answer: um, ok.    I guess I'll just have to move out the ship I don't want being loaded, then move it back after the other one goes.    I guess it wouldn't matter if I was planning to load both ships, since I could just load the generals first, then assign them the appropriate troops after, but since I just have the one general...

Just had a thought.  I know nothing about programming, but since there is no "Load ship" button when the territory has no ships, would it be possible to have a button for each ship labeled "Load ship X"?

Do you prefer the separate button because of confusion with drop down menus? I could do either one.

Response to second answer: a 'shopping cart' would be aces!  As for the other thing, even just the ability to undo your last action would go a long way to prevent hair pulling mistakes like double clicking the wrong thing.

Even just being able to undo one move would require quite a bit to be added or modified in the system. The only "Undo" that is possible in this system requires you to hold your mouse button down when you click it and slowly drag the cursor away from what you clicked on before releasing it. Of course, that's probably more dependent on browser behavior.

Response to BTdubs:  That almost sounds worse!  It probably wouldn't matter as much if we had unlimited generals, but I would hate to have say a 14 man army get chewed alive by 4 cannons and not have the option to stop the carnage and also lose 2 generals in the process.  But if you think it's a good idea to start shoving meat into a grinder and then not be able to stop if you reach fingers, go right ahead!  

Remember in Futurama, the captain that sent "wave after wave" of troops against the kill-bots until they reached their maximum kill limit.    Seriously though, eventually the options would be expanded to retreat after losing a percentage of your original force, with options being 25%, 50%, or 75%. If you think it would be better to have those options in place before putting in the new battle system, I'll work on that... With that in mind, I guess I should make the new Battle To Death system an option for each game, in case someone prefers the original single round battle system. If you remember, the combat system from the original board game had each player rolling one die alternating until the attacker gave up or died.

[TylerChuit]

Even the percentage thing doesn't sound ideal.  What if I have it set to 75%.. my 16 troops attack your 10.  kill, kill, kill... death, death, death... I have 4 artillery left and you have 1 infantry.  If given the choice I would of course keep going, but if I had 4 infantry and you had 6 artillery, I'd stop.  It's not about the percentage, it's about the odds.  Sure, we can always make more kill-bots, but we only get the 6 generals. 

What about adding a checkbox on the die result screen for each battle.  Then when you click a "continue" button, all the battles you have checked keep going another round, and you get another result screen.

For the load ship buttons, my idea was just a suggestion, but either is good.  No preference.

Oh, and don't worry about the Ceaser, I moved a lot of things I wouldn't have after I made that mistake... he is yours to capture. "TC out!" means just what it sounds like.

[Dragon]

Thanks for the ideas. I'll look into this some more.

Here's an idea, that might make too big of an impact on the game to keep the original feel, but what if we could buy more generals? That might fix the effect that you're worried about from the Battle To Death system. I was thinking that we could set the price higher than the Artillery (Catapults), just to keep them them from flooding the game, but it might also encourage more trading between players if the cost of a captive general was less than "training" a new one.  I'd have to look through the code to see how difficult it would be to implement... but anyway, what do you think?

[Dragon]

OK guys. I've put in a couple more updates. Since Game V is one of the oldest running games, I'm not sure how many of the comments that are posted as messages in that game are still an issue, so if you come across a problem, please post it here on the forum.

A couple updates that I made tonight should allow you to chose the ship that you want to load your troops onto, in case you have multiple ships but they are on different sides of the territory. The other change might not have been something that you'd notice, but previously, in a game with more than 2 players it was an issue. The game wouldn't skip over players who had been killed off, so now at the end of the turn, when determining which player will go next, those are only selected from players who still have their Caesar.

[Dragon]

Hey Chris, hopefully you haven't started on the images for the territory pages that we talked about last month. I've got a different idea for how to handle it - a popup box over the map page. I was playing Risk on the iPad a few days ago and got thinking about how that and other video games handle selections, and it just seemed like it would be a more intuitive manner of handling it. I've been working with some JQuery dialog boxes at work and it just seems like those would fit the bill nicely.

By the way, I'm still in the process of updating the combat system. I'm planning to make all three combat systems as separate options for any game - to be chosen at the start of a new game. The original combat system will be called "Hit and Run," then there will be the one I'm working on - "Fight to the Death." I really think this one needs to be done just to get all the code restructured enough to handle the "Choice is Yours" system, which will give the attacker the option to continue a battle or retreat after each round of combat.

Also, after reviewing the combat system from the Eagle Games edition of "Classic" rules, I can definitely say that it won't work for this type of online game play - there is too much to choose for both the attacker and, more importantly, the defender, who is generally not expected to be online at the same time.

[Dragon]

There are now two options for the Battle System. The original version, now called "Hit and Run," which does a single attack for each unit in the attacking legion, then, if the Attacker is still alive but failed to kill off all of the Defender's units, the Attacker will retreat. or the "Fight To Death" system, which does not allow any retreats. In the "Fight To Death" system, each unit will attack and then the attacks will start again at the top of the list, starting with Artillery, then Cavalry, then Infantry. Die rolls will alternate between the attacker and defender until only one side remains.

Hopefully by the end of the year I'll have the next Battle System in place, but until then, I hope you'll enjoy this one.