I would like to propose a new territory type; for now we'll call them "Tokens".

They would essentially be the anti-capital. If you hold only token territories, but none others, you are eliminated. i.e. they don't count towards your existence.

This would cut down drastically on all the convoluted capital/factory timers/counters/etc that we're currently jamming together to make board-game mechanics work around non-random capital assignments.

Edward Nygma wrote:

I also have an idea to trim down the number of continents in some of the systems I'm working on.  If I could group a number of territories into a class of sorts, and then (in the XML) be able to say

members = "specific territories, any single territory in a given class, all territories in the given class, n number of territories in the given class" 

Then I would be able to make one continent that says if I own P1 capital and Any territory in the class "play area" instead of one continent per territory in the play area.

 

So territory groups to reference in continents, Any, All, None, or specific number of territories in that class when referencing territories in continents.  None would be particularly helpful (a continent that checks to see what you DON'T have).  

It would also help to be able to set multiple factories that all get the same continent bonus.  So if I have This continent, put 1 unit in Factories A,B,C etc.  

You can essentially do this with Ozy's WGAME. You'll still have a bajillion continents, but they'll be much, much easier to create. The time savings will be there, at least. You just have to make sure that all the territories you would have put into a class together have something in common in their naming schemed so that you can regex them together.

That said, your idea is much more elegant, and I am in full support.

Cramchakle wrote:

I would like to propose a new territory type; for now we'll call them "Tokens".

They would essentially be the anti-capital. If you hold only token territories, but none others, you are eliminated. i.e. they don't count towards your existence.

This would cut down drastically on all the convoluted capital/factory timers/counters/etc that we're currently jamming together to make board-game mechanics work around non-random capital assignments.

In addition to cutting down, it wold also eliminate some weird limitations.  For instance the caveats in http://www.wargear.net/forum/showthread/3211/Darkness_Falls_Dev_Journal would go away in very elegant form.

Cramchakle wrote:

Edward Nygma wrote:

I also have an idea to trim down the number of continents in some of the systems I'm working on.  If I could group a number of territories into a class of sorts, and then (in the XML) be able to say

members = "specific territories, any single territory in a given class, all territories in the given class, n number of territories in the given class" 

Then I would be able to make one continent that says if I own P1 capital and Any territory in the class "play area" instead of one continent per territory in the play area.

 

So territory groups to reference in continents, Any, All, None, or specific number of territories in that class when referencing territories in continents.  None would be particularly helpful (a continent that checks to see what you DON'T have).  

It would also help to be able to set multiple factories that all get the same continent bonus.  So if I have This continent, put 1 unit in Factories A,B,C etc.  

You can essentially do this with Ozy's WGAME. You'll still have a bajillion continents, but they'll be much, much easier to create. The time savings will be there, at least. You just have to make sure that all the territories you would have put into a class together have something in common in their naming schemed so that you can regex them together.

That said, your idea is much more elegant, and I am in full support.

A while back Tom and I were talking about a way to do it with fewer continents, to make it easier on the site.  I don't know how much lighter it truly makes it, since it still has to do the same thing.  There would just be many fewer lines in the XML, so my Flash Player could stop crashing and I may actually be able to find errors in the code more easily.

Mario Kart crashes 80% of the time I try to open it, and I think it would be much lighter with this.

Empty continents could work the same way as tokens.  If I can check to see if I have 0 territories in the group, it might function the same as tokens, but... right back at ya... yours would be more elegant for this given situation, and I'm in full support.

Both would be great ideas.

I'm just glad to see both of you guys back on the site -

Amidon37 wrote:

Both would be great ideas.

Do they accomplish different things - or do they overlap?

I'm trying to wrap my head around what they are and how/if I would use them. Cram's idea is simple enough to understand, and it hints at work saving possibilities, but I'm not sure that it actually allows for something that can't be done already.

I don't really understand Ed's idea - is it a suggestion for Ozy's machine? ..a new feature for the engine?  ..both?  Can it be used by someone that isn't exactly comfy editing xml? ..and again, does it allow for something that can't be done already?

I'm not against them.  I just don't understand.

Agree with M57.  Are token territories functionally equivalent to random capitals?  Do either provide additional features that the other doesn't?  I'm not sure which I prefer, but it seems redundant to do both when Tom's time is so short.

As for Ed's idea.  I think part of it is a XML size reduction, but I don't know how important that is.  I'm honestly not sure if everything he wants could be done through the WGAME, but if it doesn't I think it would be fairly simple to add.  And since cram's suggestion got me working on it again, I plan on adding some more features in the next few weeks, so if you have a preference on what I do  next, now is a good time to speak up.

They're very different and don't overlap at all.

Here's a very simple example for EN's idea:

You have a map that has 10 city territories and a long road made up of 100 territories.

Under EN's suggestion, you would make a "class" (a category) called "Road," made up of all 100 of the road territories. Then you can make continents of connected cities by creating a continent with territories "City A", "City B", and "Class Road". You will still have the same number of continents, but each continent will only have 3 members instead of 102 members.

This results in a few savings:

1) the map maker only has to click on all 100 of the road territories once to group them as the class. This is a huge time savings on the map-makers' front end. Ozy's WGAME already offers some saving here if you get familiar with how it works, and don't mind mucking about with the XML files in an XML editor / Excel.

The current method I would use to do this is:

1. Make a continent with 2 of the cities and all 100 of the road territories.
2. Export the XML file.
3. Copy the XML over to Excel
4. In Excel, copy the continent I made as many times as I have cities I want to have connected continents for.
5. In the member territories column of the XML file, change the territory ID in each of the new continent copies I made to match those of the connected cities. This will involve lots of scrolling up the XML file to find the appropriate Territory ID numbers. It will suck a lot. It will be tedious and repetitive. There will be swearing.
6. Copy the new continents from Excel back into the XML file.
7. Upload the XML file to Wargear
8. Hope I didn't copy anything wrong, or type a wrong TID

It's going to take a long time, but it better than clicking on 100 road territories n!/(n - r)! times (where n = the number of cities and r = the number of cities in each continent).

The new method would be:

1. Click on 100 road territories and add them to class "road"
2. Make n!/(n - r)! continents using each of the desired combinations of cities and class "road".
3. Still might be able to speed up the iterations by getting the data out to Excel and hunting down territory ID's.

Real savings would come if you also have continents made up of the same city combinations but several more classes. Then you can copy your n!/(n - r)! continents from the "Road" class and do a simple search/replace on the term Road for each of the other classes.

I expect geometric time savings for each level of complexity in the map.

2) presumably, for large maps, this results in a much lighter weight XML file, which makes the site run faster and the various player engines run smoother. In the case of very large, complex maps, it might make the difference between running at all or crashing.

I don't believe this allows map makers to do anything new, specifically, but it's a great feature for streamlining on the front end and the back end. Cuts down on XML editing dependence. The time savings may lower the hurdle for people to make more interesting maps and game mechanics.

As to Ozy, yes, this could probably be done pretty easily in WGAME, and possibly even better than in the confines of the designer. EN's suggestion seems to me to be making a regex member set click friendly in the designer.

Tokens are a replacement for the KillFactory/KeepAliveFactory work-around on Darkness Falls. They would get rid of the "handshake round" BS at the end while you wait for factories to execute their coup de grace on the same map.

They are basically the answer to using out-of-play territories and factories as switches. It makes end of game cleanup on non-standard games much more elegant.

I can think of boundless examples of uses for the ability to have players owning territories where they are eliminated if they own nothing else.

It does, also, take pressure off of the request for randomized capitals because you would no longer need to use capitals as some kind of a kill switch, and really only need a randomized capitals function if you actually want random capitals and not because you're trying to make every territory on the board a capital as a condition of using the inverse of the Tokens proposal.

All of what Cram said is true about my idea.  I edit XML similarly, but I don't use excel, I just use Dreamweaver and do a lot of Find and Replace.

When I make a game where you march around 1 army, in 1 territory, and if you lose that territory, it respawns... I have to make thousands of continents.  I have to make 1 that says If I'm player one (own player 1 capital) and I own a single territory in the play area (can be hundreds of territories that individually need to make up 1 continent), then put a negative factory in the spawn location to negate the positive spawn bonus.  So when you lose the territory on the board, you are no longer negating the spawn bonus, and you spawn units there.

If I could make the whole group one class, I could add one continent that says if I am player 1 (own the capital) and I own a single territory in the class "play area" (would only be one group of territories making the continent), then I negate the spawn in 1 continent instead of hundreds.  If I want to keep track of more than one territory at a time (so you can own 2 armies marching around) then this drastically increases very quickly.  If I could say ...and I own any 2 territories in class "play area" I now have 1 continent instead of thousands.  

The new stuff it provides...  If I own NONE of the territories in class "play area"...  This is a statement you currently cannot make.  You have to build systems to create positive and negative bonuses to the same location in order to determine if I DO NOT own it, which is really complicated and frustrating as a designer.  The only overlap that comes in between our ideas comes here, and it's just another way to solve a similar problem.  If I own NONE of the territories in this area, then I lose is similar to, If I ONLY own territories of the class "Token" then I lose.

Other things it brings to the table.  In tandem, these ideas would allow for a very simple solution to something I've been working on for a long time.  I was trying to track units in a 1v1 game, where each player controls 5 territories with 1 unit.  When one dies, it respawns, but... it's capture the flag... so if you die in enemy territory, you spawn in jail, if you die in friendly territory, you spawn back at base.  Instead of writing 2,000 continent to work around trying to find out where a unit died... it's a lot easier if I can set an area as "play area" ask if I have 1,2,3,4 or 5 territories in each area, and then ask if I have 0 territories in the given areas.  This is enough information to track units, which is currently nearly impossible without the means to check if something is empty.

Cram's suggestion, if I understand it correctly, would clean up the end game of games that require you to lose your capital based on a scenario.  The thing I'm curious about is, whether or not it checks immediately or not.  If you end a game with a factory, you need to wait until the beginning of your turn, sometimes 2 turns to register the information, so games continue even after they are finished (according to how the designer wants the game to end).  If the player checks to see if you have only tokens immediately, the game can end when you eliminate somebody, not after another 2 turns waiting for the game to register that you've eliminated them.

Re: Tokens

I prefer the term(s) Zombie or Ghost territories ..because they are already 'dead' but they have functionality.  

In that it seems like they could easily be worked into the designer (essentially they are a class of territory), I'm for them.  Beyond that, what's involved on tom's end seems like it could be a lot of work tying up loose ends, in which case I'm not so much for them - I think there are higher priorities.

Correct me if I'm wrong, but I'm guessing the feature would be installed in the Designer under "set-up" and there would have to be be two added categories.  Token/Ghost Neutral and Token/Ghost Allocated.

Edward Nygma wrote:

When I make a game where you march around 1 army, in 1 territory, and if you lose that territory, it respawns... I have to make thousands of continents.  I have to make 1 that says If I'm player one (own player 1 capital) and I own a single territory in the play area (can be hundreds of territories that individually need to make up 1 continent), then put a negative factory in the spawn location to negate the positive spawn bonus.  So when you lose the territory on the board, you are no longer negating the spawn bonus, and you spawn units there.

In the past, I suggested a a feature that sounds like it could achieve your goal.  Combinations.

If you could make a continent of 1000 territories on the board with a factory production scheme that says..  If there are any combination of 4 owned territories, place 1 on factory A.  If there are 3 (when 2 die), then place 1 on factory B.. etc.  

₄C₁₀₀₀ = +1 --> A ; ₃C₁₀₀₀ = +1 --> B; ₂C₁₀₀₀ = +1 --> C; ₁C₁₀₀₀ = +1 --> D; ₀C₁₀₀₀ = +1 --> E

Five factories would do the trick.

Edit:

Nope -- you'd need more

₅C₁₀₀₀ = -5 --> A  plus a few more 5C1000 factories to offset extra production depending on how the feature works.

Ozyman wrote:

Agree with M57.  Are token territories functionally equivalent to random capitals?  Do either provide additional features that the other doesn't?  I'm not sure which I prefer, but it seems redundant to do both when Tom's time is so short.

As for Ed's idea.  I think part of it is a XML size reduction, but I don't know how important that is.  I'm honestly not sure if everything he wants could be done through the WGAME, but if it doesn't I think it would be fairly simple to add.  And since cram's suggestion got me working on it again, I plan on adding some more features in the next few weeks, so if you have a preference on what I do  next, now is a good time to speak up.

Tokens are a way of marking off board territories used to create effects as "not really part of the gameplay".  Capitals are a way of saying, "If you have this, never lose it."  So a board could reasonably have both capitals and tokens.

I admit to not understanding Ed's idea well enough to say how much sense it makes to me.

btilly wrote:

Tokens are a way of marking off board territories used to create effects as "not really part of the gameplay".  Capitals are a way of saying, "If you have this, never lose it."  So a board could reasonably have both capitals and tokens.

Yes, primarily.

Tokens would be useful in manipulating fog for visibility that changes with game conditions.

They would be useful as true/false switches for denoting that an event has happened. For example, a territory that grants a 1-time bonus. Tokens/factories could be used to bring it back to neutral or into some other inaccessible state.

You could give someone a token territory with a limited number of units on it that can transfer to any other territory on the board, as a sort of on-screen reserve. Because it's a token, you wouldn't have to create some kind of border back to it to make sure that the player can still be eliminated even if they never put any of the reserve units into play.

There's no reason that you couldn't have tokens as an integral part of the board, too, though. Why limit yourself.

>Tokens would be useful in manipulating fog for visibility that changes with game conditions.

How would this work?  Would token factories not grant visibility in medium fog for example?

I think he's saying that tokens could have the vision borders and exist off the board... then it doesn't matter if you can't reach it, because it wouldn't count towards your survival.  You can be eliminated without losing the vision territory.

Combinations are similar to what I want, but I think my method covers Combinations and more.  It includes Choosing 0, and it could also be coupled with other territories... so if you own this AND any combination within this region etc.  

btilly.  Basically, I've created some game mechanics that require me to make continents equal to (# of territories on the board) * (number of players in the game) and often times many more, which can even add a multiplier to that number.  If instead of making individual continents for each territory on the board, I'd like to be able to group the number of territories into a category and say, If I have 0,1,2,3,4...n territories in this class...  Let's use 1 for an example.  If I own any 1 unit in this region (defined as the play area) AND this other territory, give me +1 Factory over there...  Then instead of having 1 continent for each territory in the region, paired with the "other territory"  I could just make 1 continent that says, If I have the other territory, and any 1 territory in this group of territories... produce +1 over there.  Since I want the same outcome for each case, it would be lighter on the designer and the site to just make 1 continent instead of thousands.

You would see a lot more games from me if I didn't have to write 5,000 lines of code for essentially 1 continent.  You would also see Mario Kart... if I could actually open it without my flash player crashing:

http://www.wargear.net/boards/view/3867

I'd link to the design page... but I'm pretty positive it would crash for you too, and you can easily try it with that reference number.

Edward Nygma wrote:

I think he's saying that tokens could have the vision borders and exist off the board... then it doesn't matter if you can't reach it, because it wouldn't count towards your survival.  You can be eliminated without losing the vision territory.

Exactly this.

Since you're pretty intimately familiar with Darkness Falls, Ozy, I'll go to that for an example.

All the clock territories across the top would be set up with the Token designation. The factories that progress time would be the same as they are now, but the whole KillFactory/KeepAlive factory mess would be gone because it wouldn't matter that you owned the clock territories. Once you lose all your map territories, you're eliminated. Presumably, the tokens would then revert to neutral.

Cramchakle wrote:

Edward Nygma wrote:

I think he's saying that tokens could have the vision borders and exist off the board... then it doesn't matter if you can't reach it, because it wouldn't count towards your survival.  You can be eliminated without losing the vision territory.

Exactly this.

Since you're pretty intimately familiar with Darkness Falls, Ozy, I'll go to that for an example.

All the clock territories across the top would be set up with the Token designation. The factories that progress time would be the same as they are now, but the whole KillFactory/KeepAlive factory mess would be gone because it wouldn't matter that you owned the clock territories. Once you lose all your map territories, you're eliminated. Presumably, the tokens would then revert to neutral.

 

I would probably use them for a number of my boards - if only to have things like counters not count towards standard bonuses.. Their ability to eliminate the extra victory turn is not all that important to me. - Heck, I think I've grown fond of it.

Assuming Ed's idea is doable, would it be in the designer? ..and if so, how would it look?

As it is, some of the fields go off my browser on the right because they don't wrap.  I've had to edit xml because I can't get to things in the designer.

Ed's idea sounds like it is geared towards a specific type of gameplay that is currently very hard to build.

Depending on how it was implemented, I'd be concerned about performance.  (You didn't create those continents, but in reality they exist and are created/checked each turn in memory.)  Also before creating continents programmatically I'd want to take some time to digest whether there might be a more flexible way to do so that can express more types of gameplay than the one you are thinking of.

This is not a specific criticism of this idea, just a statement that "here is the simpler generalization" improvements on ideas don't tend to strike right away, so it may be worth waiting to see if someone comes up with something better.