There is a 'Producer countries - can only place units on same country' entry in my ToDo list which would cover the 'Spawning territories' - I quite like that name though :)

Once I have a few bug fixes out of the way I'd like to add a few minor gameplay additions so this one seems like a good one.

These are good ideas too.

My understanding is that the difference between Spawning and Birthplace is that with birthplace, you have a choice of where to put your armies.  With spawning as you have it defined, you will not be able to place any armies anywhere else on the board.  On the other hand, with the birthplace paradigm you can achieve much of the same effect by making all other territories barren.  In a sense, the way we play now every country is a spawning/birthplace.  It seems to me that the difference is that spawning is a bit more restrictive in scope.

No matter, however you do it -- whatever you call it, it sounds like a nice feature.  I would work with either implementation of the idea.

P.S. If you go with your spawning, you would create a pull-down menu that specifies the number armies allocated to that territory for each turn, right?  I'm just wandering if that number could optionally somehow be linked to continent bonuses?   With birthplace, this is kind of built in.

So if you didn't own any birthplace territories you wouldn't be able to place any units? And if you had multiple birthplace territories you could place any number of units on any birthing spot? Seems there is a slight difference in that if you have multiple spawning spots you can still only place the fixed number of units on each spawn spot, not allocate them as you see fit as you could with birthplaces.

Well, that is definitely the oddest paragraph I've ever typed :)

tom wrote: So if you didn't own any birthplace territories you wouldn't be able to place any units? And if you had multiple birthplace territories you could place any number of units on any birthing spot? Seems there is a slight difference in that if you have multiple spawning spots you can still only place the fixed number of units on each spawn spot, not allocate them as you see fit as you could with birthplaces.

Well, that is definitely the oddest paragraph I've ever typed :)

Are you trying to confuse us?  You make them seem almost identical..

Think of a birthplace as the norm.  The thing I really want here is the barren territory, which is simply a button that is selected as you place territories on the design page.

It follows that if you create a board like S vs. S and make all but the original two spies barren, then once your spy has been captured, the game is effectively over because you can not give birth to new spies.

Now if those spies were spawners, then the configuration from the designer's point of view is:

Bonuses: Disabled

..and creation of the spawning territory is a pull down menu on the design page.

Now I'm thinking there are a number of ways spawning could be configured.

Always place [pull down] unit(s) at the beginning of every turn. 

..or perhaps

Always place a minimum of [pull down] unit(s) at the beginning of every turn.

which would permit additional bonus armies to be placed on that territory.

The problem is that when you enable the bonuses, there's nothing to stop a player from placing units on any territory.  I like spawning, but I would really like it if it came with a barren button. Why can't we all have our cake and eat it?  Use both..  They complement each other well.

I know you like the word spawn, but personally I think birth and barren are a better couplet.

BTW, if you start the spawning country as a neutral, you need it not to start spawning until it is controlled by a player!

OK thanks for the input I'll see what I can do.

Tom, What is the status of these additions? I'm in the process of re-designing Appomattox and I'm sitting on the map hoping something along these lines becomes available. If it's a Low priority that's fine, but have you given thought to which way you might implement it? ..or are you scrapping the idea altogether?

Alpha wrote:

The question, "How did we get here?" is probably asked by every soldier fighting on foreign ground, but this is a matter for governments to answer and not for soldiers to worry about.

Politics... augh! Put on the flame suits.

But really, believing this comment is probably the source of 95% of the world's problems. Maybe more.

M57 wrote: Tom, What is the status of these additions? I'm in the process of re-designing Appomattox and I'm sitting on the map hoping something along these lines becomes available. If it's a Low priority that's fine, but have you given thought to which way you might implement it? ..or are you scrapping the idea altogether?

They're in the 'good ideas that will be implemented at some point but not right now 'cos I need to fix a bunch of bugs' category.

It will take a quite a bit of work to implement because it will require changes to the Designer, Player, game engine, board and game info pages so you're talking about touching all the major pieces of code which in turn requires testing.

Given this I'd like to see how much support there is for this idea from the other designers or if there's other features that would give more 'bang for the buck' in terms of board improvement vs development time.

Will you be considering copying over the site code to a beta test version to potentially roll out new major features on a larger testing scale? What I mean is, after you've done your initial testing / etc. would you want to make it available to some of us to test before you actually roll it out on the site? Or would this be redundant after the testing you do?

I agree I think a completely seperate DEV version of the site is going to be essential in the long run as it's very hard to separate test code within the live site. It's only really possible for brand new features (like the tournaments). Even then there is lots of stuff that has to tie back in to the rest of the codebase.

Man, that sounds messy. I know nothing about coding and all, but if you need a neophyte to help test drive things, I volunteer - especially if there are some dev tools like spawning or barren (hint hint) in the mix.

Heh heh thanks :)

I thought related to M57's desire for Barren and Spawning* territories that I don't think would be hard to implement and would be an interesting twist -

We have the option to abandon territories. And then the option to have the abandoned territories return to neutral or not. What if when the territories returned to neutral then X number of neutrals were placed on it?

I think this would lead to some fun game play. I don't think it would (or even should) get widespread use so maybe it wouldn't be worth it, but I thought I would throw is out there.

* I do have a board in mind that would incorporate restricting where the players can place units at the beginning of there turn.

If you built it, they will come.

If you create these features, the board makers will create maps that use them. I have some in mind as well.

Amidon37 wrote:
We have the option to abandon territories. And then the option to have the abandoned territories return to neutral or not. What if when the territories returned to neutral then X number of neutrals were placed on it?

+1

..a one-time special case of birth/spawning that applies to neutrals, and when you think about it, has a natural feel to it for many scenarios.  I would definitely use this feature.

I think spawning and barren should also have a carnivorous territories which eat x units per turn. At the end of your turn, or the beginning, x units just disappear. So the 4 options are standard, Carnivorous (-x at the beginning or end of turn), Spawning (+x at the beginning or end of turn) and barren (cannot place units in this territory). You could also have automatically place units in one territory, or evenly divided among a number of "place only" territories, which forces all your bonus into one or a few territories. As for "you may not place units here" territories, you can just set the maximum to 1 and then fill the territory past 1 unit. That way it won't allow you to place, but you start with a supply.

Edward Nygma wrote: I think spawning and barren should also have a carnivorous territories which eat x units per turn. At the end of your turn, or the beginning, x units just disappear. So the 4 options are standard, Carnivorous (-x at the beginning or end of turn), Spawning (+x at the beginning or end of turn) and barren (cannot place units in this territory). You could also have automatically place units in one territory, or evenly divided among a number of "place only" territories, which forces all your bonus into one or a few territories. As for "you may not place units here" territories, you can just set the maximum to 1 and then fill the territory past 1 unit. That way it won't allow you to place, but you start with a supply.

I really like Carnivorous (or dangerous) territories idea, though I'm not sure I understand what you mean by "you may not place your unit here" territories.  That's what barren is.  Are you suggesting that with some other feature you could artificially create a barren territory?

Just to be clear, my vision of a barren territory is one that you can attack to and from, can hold potentially unlimited troops, and in all respects acts like a normal territory except that you can't place units on them in the placement phase of your turn.

ap=virtual cols=80>

Edward Nygma wrote: So the 4 options are standard, Carnivorous (-x at the beginning or end of turn), Spawning (+x at the beginning or end of turn) and barren (cannot place units in this territory). You could also have automatically place units in one territory, or evenly divided among a number of "place only" territories, which forces all your bonus into one or a few territories.  

Nicely put.

Edward Nygma wrote: As for "you may not place units here" territories, you can just set the maximum to 1 and then fill the territory past 1 unit. That way it won't allow you to place, but you start with a supply.

I don't think that would do what I (and I humbly presume others) have in mind.  With your work-around you can never get the units in those countries over 1 after they are used.  I am envisioning restricting placement to territories away from the battle front, and then having to fortify to bring them up to where they are useful.  Then the concept of "supply lines" would/could come into play.

Just to give an example of how barren or carnivorous territories might be employed in a real map, I was thinking about this example from ToS: http://warfish.net/war/play/gamedetails?gid=95088522&t=m&cid=81. That's a perfect situation where not only might the designer want the territories to "eat" units on them, but also wouldn't want players to be able to place new units there, either.

The way I see some of these features working is where large areas of the map are "hostile" ground, that for tactical reasons you need your units to push through, but which sap their strength and take them far from the nearest supply depot.

A few new terms made up/thrown around in this thread, let me see if I get this traight:

'Spawning' - a territory that automatically produces X units per turn when you own it that are automatically placed on that territory.

'Carnivorous' - a territory that automatically 'eats' X units per turn down to 1 or 0 depending on the abandon settings.

'Birthplace' - a territory that allows for placement of reinforcements on your turn.

'Barren' - a territory that does not allow for placement of reinforcements on your turn.

These could be resolved down to two settings per territory:

Allow reinforcements: Y/N
Spawn X units per turn. (Where X is a drop down and can be negative)

Does this sound about right? Out of these two settings, I think that controlling where you can place reinforcements would open up considerably more game-play options than the other (although I like the other idea as well).

You would be able to implement actual supply lines, making any historical reenactment scenarios possible. Like, a valid D-Day map? Sweet! I can think of one other possible for setting for reinforcements:

Lock start positions: Y/N

Would mean that only the player who started with a birthplace territory could use it for reinforcements. I don't like the term birthplace, but then again I'm not sure if that's what was originally meant by that term.