hi all

A quick update on what I'm up to as it's been a while. The Simultaneous play changes are coming along well, the Designer and Player changes are almost done, all that is left after that is the game engine (turn resolution) code update. Hopefully it will be done in a couple of weeks.

I made a few decisions along the way that I thought I'd keep you abreast of:

1. The chance of an Attacker / Defender killing a unit are expressed as percentages - e.g. 75% vs 60%. Border modifiers are also expressed as percentages (+/- change to this figure). I think this step will make understanding attack / defend odds in Simultaneous play a lot easier.

2. Fatigue is expressed as x% per y turns. So, if this is set to 5% fatigue per 10 turns this means that every 10 turns an attacking unit’s chance of successfully killing a defending unit goes down by 5%.

3. There will be a hard order limit setting (e.g. max 5 orders per round) if fatigue is not enough.

4. Phases are split into:

a.    Place – guaranteed to happen first
b.    Reinforce – guaranteed to occur before the attacks / fortifies start (equivalent to Pre-Transfer on ToS)
c.    Attack / Fortify – these are ordered so you must plan which attacks / fortifies happen first and all attacks are subject to fatigue settings.

I split Reinforce and Attack/Fortify out to make Simultaneous play more noob friendly. Functionaly all the above will be identical to ToS with the default settings.

5. There will be a switch to allow / disallow Attack moves from reinforcements – this in effect allows units to move and attack in the same turn.

6. There will be a switch to allow / disallow attack overloading – this just means allowing / disallowing attacking to a territory with a unit cap with more units than are permitted to occupy the territory, e.g. attacking with 50 units to a territory that only holds 10 units max.

7. There will be a switch to allow / disallow unit pumping – this was the trick on ToS which allowed you to attacking into a territory after it had been reduced to a small number of units but still attack out with the original number of units, hence effectively allowing your units to attack twice.

If you have any violent disagreement with any of the above now is a good time to let me know :)

Tom

Question: Does fatigue affect all attacking units, or only those ordered to move following the 10th order? Does fatigue come into affect on the 10th order or on the 11th? Can the x% and y turns be author/host adjustable?

By "a switch" you mean a Rule?

I think I like it all, if those switches are Rules they are nice that they are toggle-able, although somewhat add to the confusion process too.

Can't wait till this happens. I am very happy with your plan to go with percentages - on another site, the first thing I always did was change the dice to 10 sided to use as percentage scores.

Fatigue is a new one to me, interesting.

Ok, so I love the idea of fatigue although I admittedly do not fully understand it. My main concern from my limited understanding is about end game clean-up. I realize the percentages for fatigue aren't huge but is there a chance it will make clean up take even longer?

Cramchakle wrote: Question: Does fatigue affect all attacking units, or only those ordered to move following the 10th order? Does fatigue come into affect on the 10th order or on the 11th? Can the x% and y turns be author/host adjustable?

Yes x and y are both designer adjustable.

Fatigue set to 10% / 10 turns means:

Turns 1-9: no fatigue
Turns 10-19: 10% fatigue
Turns 20-29: 20% fatigue

That's true about slowing down the endgame I guess Risky, not sure what can be done about that.

All sounds great, but fatigue confuses me.

Is fatigue a global occurrence?
How will a player know if units are fatigued?
If I place 6 army on a territory with fatigued units, do the fatigued units die first?

I sure I can ask more, but I see what that gets first.

out of curiosity, what is the benefit of fatigue as a feature?

I think combing simultaneous play with capital city scenarios is a pretty good way of eliminating clean up in some cases... I even like the concept of unit assimilation in a simul game better...

Fatigue deals with turn order, not necessarily specific units. The object is to prevent turn "padding", making junk orders so that your real attacks come later.

Ah, this is the breakdown of a round so turns are stacked orders for that round. Always good to know what the words mean. Thanks Yertle.

makes a lot of sense now.

ooo, Cumber, does that avatar pic, mean what i think it means?

The Player / Designer updates are done, just started working on the game engine bit. Sorry this is taking longer than expected!

Will all boards be playable with this engine? ..or will designers have to "activate/calibrate their boards for it? ..where perhaps there will be a separate editor? I'm assuming a completely different set of stats for players..

I wouldn't think there would be the need for a separate editor (Board Designer tool).
Another set of stats would be nice to see tracked, although for the most part Rankings should be integrated/seemless whether Turn Base or SimPlay IMO.

It's the same Designer, the only difference is the Simultaneous Rules tab is enabled so you can set all the options. In theory any board could be enabled for Simultaneous play.

Setting Border Modifiers has to be somewhat different between Dice and Sim% doesn't it?

Yes well OK that bit is different too :)

So will these values be auto-magically computed, or does the designer need to go in and re-assign them?

Well if you were adapting an existing board you would need to change any border modifiers to whatever you wanted them to be. Blimey you want me to do all your work for you ;)