Brit

Yeah, something like that. The AI sends a message telling you to remove your units within a certain number of turns. Also, the AI could detect if your units move towards anything valuable, and get less patient if you do.

That information is old now. The limit is 10 players. The other 9 can be any combination of humans or AIs.

Sounds like what the game of Civilization did. It's a reasonable system. It gets a little odd when the borders expand and suddenly your units are inside the enemy's territory. In the Civilization games, I've had the AI declare war on me because his borders expanded, and suddenly one of my units was inside his territory, and he acted like I moved into his territory. The other issue is related to the fact that players setup unit-orders to move into unexplored territory. Units (including aircraft) would have to update their course during a turn to avoid crossing those boundaries. I'm sure I can find some decent solution to this. You don't get any bonus for doing sneak attacks. They allow you to attack an enemy player without giving the warning of a declaration of war. So, you get the advantage of not letting the enemy know you're coming, but that enemy will probably dislike you more. I can understand that, but it gets odd if any of the transports get sunk en-route. For example, if you're moving 3 transports, and they've got 2 infantry and 3 tanks, what happens if one of the transports is sunk? What ground-units are lost? I suppose I could setup a system where some random combination of ground-units gets destroyed. I don't know.

Hm. I wasn't able to reproduce this.

Just a small update. - Added 'Airforce Base' to the tech tree (just after 'biplane'), so cities can build it - Fixed some scenario/unitset link problems - Fixed a crash that occurs in "City View" (Rowley, 10/29) - Added flags for Denmark and Iceland - Fixed an exploit that would allow too many units in transports (by using UnitGroups) - Fixed an exploit that would allow illegal units in transports (by using UnitGroups) - Fixed the 'beached ship' problem (hopefully)

With the release in the near future, I think what we're going to do is just push ahead with that. I don't know what will happen with the demo. We'll certainly want a demo available for people that doesn't end on December 1st. Whether we'll change up the demo at the same time the release happens, I don't know.

I added some more code to try to avoid this problem in the next update. Let me know after the next update if this is still happening.

Hi Jonah. Yes, there was a bug that would allow you to create unit-groups inside a transport and there would be no limit on the number of units they can contain. This is fixed in the next update. I'll take a look.

The AI runs on a different processing thread than the player. This means that the game should make good use of a dual-processor system. I don't think three or more cores would be an advantage over two, though.

Sure. I'll either get out a new version or hand-off the updated ruleset. (The ruleset is where the fix to this problem is.)

Ah, the beached-ship problem again. Seems like I've gotten quite a few reports about it lately, so it must still be a problem. I'll see if I can reproduce it.

Yup, yup, and yup. The AI needs to be smarter about these things, and a good AI is essential for a good single-player game.

Hi Rich. I'm certainly willing to add features to the game, even after release. Sure, why not? There are a couple places these options could be surfaced - on the Game-Setup window, inside the scenario editor (they would only apply to that scenario), or in the ruleset system. Dropping it under the "Rules Modifiers" in the Game-Setup window would probably be the easiest of the three. Sure. My only concern about this was memory usage and processing time (larger maps take more time to process). Although, I guess that depends on the user's individual system. The AI runs slower on larger maps as well, but that's something that will certainly be fixed, so that's not really an issue in the long-term. Sure. I recently added some options to the scenario-editor so that players can't make peace with each other, and this isn't too different, although, I'd have to add it to the Game-Setup window.

Hi Sivodsi. Are you using the latest version of the game? I ask because this was a problem in earlier versions, but I thought this was fixed in later versions. (Maybe it's just less common in later versions.) The current version of the demo is 0.97.10701. Let me know if you're using that version.

I had added them to the install for the full version of the game. I decided to just leave them in the demo because I thought it might be useful to let people see the thumbnails of other maps playable in the full version.

I ran some tests putting a battleship against artillery. It's true that the battleship is going to win against a single artillery, but if you look at the 'production loss' on the bottom of the combat simulator, the artillery function about 50% better against battleships than with the old rules. Under the new rules, battleships take about 60 production worth of damage and artillery take about 60 production worth of damage in a fight. The artillery would be dead, and the battleship could sail back home to get repaired (*which is, at least, a good way to get battleships out of your territory and take them out of the game for a few turns until they get repaired), but things would be a little different if the artillery-player built a lot more artillery. (Note: A battleship costs about the same as five artillery.) Under the old rules, the battleship would've taken about 40 production worth of damage. Also, none of these numbers take into account the terrain defensive bonuses that artillery would get. The strategic bombers now preferentially target cities now. One of the problems with the old combat system was that strategic bombers would often target the units inside the city. When strategic bombers do that, the units get a counterattack, and often destroy the strategic bomber. Now that the strategic bomber targets city-improvements, in-production items, and population, those other units don't get an automatic counterattack, which improves the strategic-bomber's survival. You can open up the combat simulator and pit a bomber against an infantry. The bomber doesn't survive very well. Now, hit "add location" and add a city. Now, the bomber is targetting the city, rather than the infantry. They do a lot better. The infantry doesn't really get much of a counterattack against the bomber because they're not setup for that. But, if you drop-in a flak gun, the bomber does worse again.

Yes. The way the rules system is setup, your old games continue to use old versions of the rules. There are some cases when you'd want to use the new rules, but some other cases when you'd want to use the old ones. For example, if some of the names of the units, buildings, or technologies change, it can mess things up. (Today, I changed the name of the "Airbase" city-improvement to "Airforce Base" to avoid confusion. If you had built an Airbase in a city, and moved up to the new rules, the game would've magically erased your Airbase from the game.) I also wanted to prevent cheating - since players can change the details of a ruleset. This would be especially important during multiplayer games. So, I just set it up so that old games (and scenarios) are linked to whatever game rules they started with.

Ah. You're right. I remembered to bump-up the damage of nukes, but forgot cruise missiles. I tweaked a number of units in the last ruleset update. The AA units should be a little better, and artillery are better at fighting ships. I don't remember what other tweaks I made. (I guess I should've written it down.) Yup, you're right. It looks like I forgot to set it as 'initially buildable' and it's not in the tech tree.

Strange. I'll take a look. Thanks!

- Changed the unitset for more predictable, more regular combat results --- This was done by doubling the HP of all units and doubling the hit chances ----- Some effects: ------- Fewer surprises from combat ("I lost three infantry against his militia") ------- Combat time is more average (fewer very short or very long combat times). ------- Repair rates are the same, so repair effectively takes twice as long - Doubling the HP of aircraft means that they can be damaged. --- The "airbase" city-improvement repairs aircraft (1 HP / 2 turns) --- Aircraft carriers can repair aircraft. --- Airfields cannot repair aircraft. - Made aircraft attacks more predictable (strategic bombers go after city improvements, etc) - Tweaked some of the combat numbers - Increased the cost of building airfields from $20 to $32 - Added a x0.3 turn-replay speed - During the city-needs-orders popup phase, I moved the build window to the left side of the application, centered the visible map on the city - Added a button to trigger city-needs-orders popups - Added player restrictions to the scenario editor (cannot offer or accept peace, cannot declare war) - Added functionality to the Combat Simulator to handle ranged-combat - Added map labels - Added 'rounder' continents (listed as "Large Continents" in the game) - There are now three (optional) victory conditions: capture all cities (only player/team with cities left), capture 90% of the population, capture 80% of the population - Fixed some upload/download problems

If they're all inside a city, you can drag and drop them (as N3rull shows below). If they're out at sea, and they're separated, you can select ship #1, then right-click on ship #2. This will cause the ships to join together. Unfortunately, there's a little bit of inelegance here - you can't give the group orders until the units have combined into a group (which means you will lose a little bit of time). When a group of your units goes into a fight, the enemy units will randomly target your units. This means if you have a group of transports, damage will be randomly distributed among them. If you have cruisers and transports, the damage will be randomly distributed among them as well. (Although, cruisers are less likely to take damage, so the transports in the group will end up with more damage than cruisers.) In all of these cases, it's better to have a group of transports or a group of cruisers and transports than a single lone transport because a single transport will take all the damage and probably sink. When damage gets distributed among ships, it means they'll be damaged, but each ship is less likely to take so much damage that it sinks.

Yeah, it's been kind of quiet in here the past few days. I plan to put out an update tomorrow, maybe that will wake things up a bit. Yes, I still get feedback from people everyday through the bug-report system.

(nod) Think it will be the end of this week.

I don't know if I want that solution exactly. There might be some other ways around this. Right now, you can turn-off the automatic city popups, but (even though cities are in the left panel) it's a little more difficult to make sure all your cities have orders. I suppose another option might be: don't show any city popups until I click a particular button, and then the popup sequence starts - might be a good middle-ground. That way you're controlling when the city popups begin appearing, rather than having them automatically appear at the end of turn replay.

Something like this? By the way, the size of the application in the screenshot is less than 1000x700 pixels, which means it should work for most people. Yeah, I see no reason not to do that for optional rulesets.