Merentha 说:
Previously, someone asked for a general tutorial. I am beginning to think I could use one too, especially from a "tactical advisor" or someone in the Bahesier castle. Some general information on what alarm actually means, and how cities can conquer cities, a bit about the economics and strategies within the game.
Right now, I am lovign trying to figure it out, but I look at the Siviac cities and see almost no garrison (like Bahesier), but then the Lunnic or Ajarian cities have massive garrisons.
This garrison-size issue is a problem which I need to investigate further. Certain cities have a way of being seriously under-garrisoned in their first 'iteration' of hiring troops. This problem generally goes away eight hours in, with the second firing of the decision-making trigger, when they bring their garrisons up to par -- at least from what I've been able to see of it. I have a few theories about what might be causing this, but all of them point to something not really rectifiable...
I can also post a 'strategy guide' to ASLOW, if you like, but it may be a day or two before I have it up. There are substantial things in the works for the next iteration of the game...
(Also, I plan on removing the hard numbers from alarm in subsequent versions. It's gotten to be conventional wisdom in game development these days that the player shouldn't be exposed to numbers very often -- and, unlike most conventional wisdom in modern game development, I think this idea has merit.)
My question is this, I suppose. How does combat between cities work, assuming the player was absent from the equation?
At present, when it comes to actually *attacking* cities,
Colt is right -- it doesn't, and it can't.
The two governing phenomena of fights between cities are alarm level and treasury size; basically, the lesser of those two is the amount of money a city spends on military parties. Parties (excluding economic) are chosen at random; the city then pays a fixed price (in module_constants) for the military party in question. A defensive party is sent to patrol around either the purchasing city or another city that this one is trying to assist, with a chance of helping the other one based on the home city's level of alarm about it; an offensive party is dispatched to patrol around the city's currrent hostile target. The plan is for "invasion force" parties to be the only ones to directly attack cities,
Sid Meier's Pirates-style, but if I can find a way for all parties to assault enemy cities, I'll do so.
(And come to think of it, assuming that the OMS has a way of iterating over all parties of a given template, that just might be possible...)
Another suggestion: I noticed in Talchin that some archers on the walls and roofs could really have made my life hell. Is there any way to get them to spawn up there so that invading troops come under a crossfire from all directions?
Yes, it's possible -- just a matter of placing spawn points, overriding equipment (especially forcing ranged weapons), that sort of thing. The current city maps are from Vanilla, and both they and the option to fight within a city are, at present, placeholders -- proofs of concept rather than full-fledged gameplay. I plan on doing new maps at least for Baheisir and Ambrolauri, probably for a few other cities or perhaps all of them; once these are done, I'll do much more thoughtful versions of city assaults.
In the meantime, there's always 1066. (Incidentally, I've noticed some debate on the matter, but I like the Norman archers holding shields -- it contributes to the 'archaic' ambience very nicely. The same goes for the font, even if it *is* illegible at times..
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Colt:
I didn't take code from 1066 for any part of attacking cities -- if I had, I would certainly have asked your permission, or at least acknowledged you in the credits. I had figured out how to implement the basic (fighting on random map, plus occupying cities etc.) city attack on my own, though not without some trouble; as to attacking inside a city, well... there, I have to admit that I did it because I saw in 1066 that it could be done
, and because some of these maps are begging to be fought over...
However, we do have a problem in common. It *might* be possible to hack together something that *resembled* AIs attacking cities, but it would be hideous, and wouldn't get along with player attacks or much of anything else very well. Hopefully now, with two mods begging to be able to do it, there'll be support for attacking cities in the next version of the game...
(My hypothesis is more or less thus. In addition to the conventional garrison of a city, one could specify a 'shadow garrison,' a normal party set to stationary and invisible that would contain the same number of soldiers as the garrison itself. An invasion force would march up and engage this shadow garrison; when the battle between them ended, the city's garrison would be changed to match the winning party, and its alliegance would be switched to the winning party's as well. As you can see, though, this wouldn't synch up very well with player attacks on the city -- and I'm not 100% sure that it could even be done with the current state of the Module System.
Of course, this means that Fisheye or Yoshiboy's probably going to pop in and prove me embarassingly wrong...
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This might very well be it...
