Per territory abandon will be a fair bit of work - it's going to touch code heavily in the game engine and players and the regression testing is going to have to cover almost every type of game action.

AutoCaptureNeutral should be pretty easy by comparison - shouldn't be more than a week's effort.

tom wrote:

AutoCaptureNeutral should be pretty easy by comparison - shouldn't be more than a week's effort.

Well, that sounds like a good one to tackle first. Then tokens (territories that don't count towards your existence in determining elimination).

Tokens would give authors the ability to do so much in the way of expanding the horizon from games being strictly dice based to really allowing for the whole range of tabletop game mechanics like cards, counters, unique event triggers, etc.

So how exactly is AutoCaptureNeutral proposed to work?

tom wrote:

So how exactly is AutoCaptureNeutral proposed to work?

I guess what you're asking, and what needs to be decided is whether or not the factory "reinitializes" the territory with 0 units (+ the bonus) ..or if the bonus number adds on to the existing number in the territory.

I'm thinking the former (similar to how AutoCapture works), which would give the designer precise control of the number of units left on of the territory, but I'm wondering if anyone sees uses for the latter - perhaps in conjunction with the proposed factory caps feature that might be added in the future???

My vote is for factory caps.  See http://www.wargear.net/forum/showthread/3129p1/Max_unit_count_feature(s) for previous discussion.

On the user side, I'd be very happy with, "Undo non-random things I just did."  See http://www.wargear.net/forum/showthread/3176/Undo_T_to_A for the original cause.  (Where I hit the T button, then realize that I wanted to hit A and transfer, but it is too late.  I'd like to be able to back up to the end of the dice and retroactively do the right thing.)

Another variant of the latter is to be able to go into fortify, realize that I didn't complete an area, undo all fortification, attack, then fortify.

Basically, "For choices that don't involve dice rolls, let you make the best decision possible even if you clicked on the wrong thing first."

tom wrote:

Per territory abandon will be a fair bit of work - it's going to touch code heavily in the game engine and players and the regression testing is going to have to cover almost every type of game action.

I've always suspected this..  It's a feature that has been asked for for a long time - even before we had factories.  I remember my first attempts to 'work around' it, with boards like Appomattox, and I'm thinking that when Factories came around it in some ways amplified the lack of the feature.

For Tom to take on implementing it, there would need to be very strong consensus and the understanding that it would necessarily put a lot of other "Designer" features on hold.

The good news is 'Win Conditions' will no doubt keep a lot of  us designer types busy for a while ..and if ACNeutral hits the shelves..  Woo Hoo!

btilly wrote:

My vote is for factory caps.  See http://www.wargear.net/forum/showthread/3129p1/Max_unit_count_feature(s) for previous discussion.

and here for an overview on the Wiki..

@btilly - I cut and pasted one of your descriptions from the above thread.  Please edit if you like.. 

M57 wrote:

tom wrote:

So how exactly is AutoCaptureNeutral proposed to work?

I guess what you're asking, and what needs to be decided is whether or not the factory "reinitializes" the territory with 0 units (+ the bonus) ..or if the bonus number adds on to the existing number in the territory.

I'm thinking the former (similar to how AutoCapture works), which would give the designer precise control of the number of units left on of the territory, but I'm wondering if anyone sees uses for the latter - perhaps in conjunction with the proposed factory caps feature that might be added in the future???

OK so the basics are if a player owns the continent at the start of their then it will convert the target territory to Neutral and start incrementing or decrementing the units in that territory based on the factory count.

To be conistent with the other AutoCapture behaviors it would not zero the count - although this could be another factory type (AutoCaptureNeutralReset for example).

btilly wrote:

My vote is for factory caps.  See http://www.wargear.net/forum/showthread/3129p1/Max_unit_count_feature(s) for previous discussion.

On the user side, I'd be very happy with, "Undo non-random things I just did."  See http://www.wargear.net/forum/showthread/3176/Undo_T_to_A for the original cause.  (Where I hit the T button, then realize that I wanted to hit A and transfer, but it is too late.  I'd like to be able to back up to the end of the dice and retroactively do the right thing.)

Another variant of the latter is to be able to go into fortify, realize that I didn't complete an area, undo all fortification, attack, then fortify.

Basically, "For choices that don't involve dice rolls, let you make the best decision possible even if you clicked on the wrong thing first."

Well expressed - this suggestion has been around for a long time but I think this capture the requirement nicely.

tom wrote:

OK so the basics are if a player owns the continent at the start of their then it will convert the target territory to Neutral and start incrementing or decrementing the units in that territory based on the factory count.

To be conistent with the other AutoCapture behaviors it would not zero the count - although this could be another factory type (AutoCaptureNeutralReset for example).

Yes - Having the two options would pretty much cover everything and be preferred.

'AutoNeutral' and  'AutoNeutralReset' cuts down on the length of the name, which actually makes a difference because if the fields get too long (e.g. from long territory names), some of the far right buttons go off the right side of the page.

M57 wrote:

btilly wrote:

My vote is for factory caps.  See http://www.wargear.net/forum/showthread/3129p1/Max_unit_count_feature(s) for previous discussion.

and here for an overview on the Wiki..

@btilly - I cut and pasted one of your descriptions from the above thread.  Please edit if you like.. 

In that thread there was a clear preference for how this should play with negative factories.  So I edited the description to fit that.

btilly wrote:

M57 wrote:

btilly wrote:

My vote is for factory caps.  See http://www.wargear.net/forum/showthread/3129p1/Max_unit_count_feature(s) for previous discussion.

and here for an overview on the Wiki..

@btilly - I cut and pasted one of your descriptions from the above thread.  Please edit if you like.. 

In that thread there was a clear preference for how this should play with negative factories.  So I edited the description to fit that.

Great!  Thanks.

where was limited attacks on the list? noticed conquerclub has a 'trench' warfare option; where you can only move 1 space from where are at beginning of turn. (eg. if A,B,C were in a line and you owned A at beginning of turn 1; you could only attack to B. couldn't attack from B to C until turn 2 -- assuming you still owned B at beginning of turn 2)

weathertop wrote:

where was limited attacks on the list? noticed conquerclub has a 'trench' warfare option; where you can only move 1 space from where are at beginning of turn. (eg. if A,B,C were in a line and you owned A at beginning of turn 1; you could only attack to B. couldn't attack from B to C until turn 2 -- assuming you still owned B at beginning of turn 2)

This is the first I've heard of this as a requested feature in the way you just described it.  Regardless ..it sounds limited.

Much more powerful would be Movement Range Limits, or at least something that scales beyond the basic one territory move limit.

weathertop wrote:

where was limited attacks on the list? noticed conquerclub has a 'trench' warfare option; where you can only move 1 space from where are at beginning of turn. (eg. if A,B,C were in a line and you owned A at beginning of turn 1; you could only attack to B. couldn't attack from B to C until turn 2 -- assuming you still owned B at beginning of turn 2)

If this sounds like fun to you, then I recommend SimulGear.

I'd vote that the next big thing is something more for the Players than for Designers (even though what's for the Designers is ultimately for players too), which I would say an Achievement system.  In my own playing experience on ToS, here, and in mobile apps if there are specific Goals/Achievements then I'm more likely to play more and longer than if just a single Win/Loss/Record is present.

Would an Achievement system even be that difficult?  It would see like it's mainly a lot about crawling the data to define if a person has or got an Achievement rather than worrying about the Designer, Players, and Game.

I guess have to retract my opinion.

I responded to Tom's question as if he was asking about Designer features only, and not site features.   I guess the word 'features' has always implied the designer end in my mind.

I don't know that it's possible to determine what 'consensus' is because the two groups essentially have two different lists. There are more players than designers, and despite Yertle's observation that designer features are player features in disguise, I've never seen a player ask for a designer feature.  That said, I think it's fair to say that a disproportionate number of designers tend to be more active in the forums.

Regardless I'm a player too, and as a player I have to second the "take-back" feature, though I'm not nearly as interested in achievements system.  As a player, I'd love to see a luck stats "interpreting" score - like a z-score or a related percentile.

I'm wondering if it might be easier if Tom asked the question of the two groups separately, differentiating Designer Features from General Site Features (in two threads?), and simply deal with the two different responses as he chooses.

I would also prefer it to be token territories whereby a territory set as token does not protect from elimination, does not count towards per-territory bonuses and does not in-itself award a card if captured.

Just throwing it out there, but some players might be all for the Combined Overall Ranking we talked about here:

http://www.wargear.net/forum/showthread/1854p7/Debate:_Board_Championship_and_Global_Ranking

berickf wrote:

I would also prefer it to be token territories whereby a territory set as token does not protect from elimination, does not count towards per-territory bonuses and does not in-itself award a card if captured.

Excellent elaborations.