I'm creating a game with 'Abandon On', and I've been trying to figure out a way to have any neutral territory on the board replenish to it's original fill level, and I'm pretty sure it can't be done.  But before I bother Tom with a request, I figured I'd see if anyone can suggest a solution.

For starters, there's a little known Continent feature in the designer called "Universal+N".  It doesn't show up in the designer for me, but I can edit the xml to get it to work.  What it does is make the factory work ONLY if the territory is Neutral.  The problem is I don't want to add units to neutrals that already have units on them; I only want to add units to recently abandoned territories that have just converted to neutral and have no units in them.  To be clear, I don't want the neutral territory to continue to spawn units every turn with no limit on growth.

One solution I though of was to have two factories, the first of which empties the territory every turn (if it is neutral), and the second "fills" it, say with 2 units.  The problem is the engine counts negative numbers, so it works if the territory is already full and I set one factory to empty it (-2) and the other (+2) to fill it, but when the territory is recently abandoned, the first factory takes it to -2 and the second factory only brings it back up to zero.

Short of asking Tom to let the negative number feature be disabled, or to be able to place a Cap on neutral territories, does anyone have any suggestions?

What's the context? Maybe there's another way to get the gameplay effect you want with a different mechanic.

I have territories that are Mountains - when you abandon them, they still need to be difficult to climb.

Basically, I want a replenishing neutral wall that doesn't disappear after it's been scaled once.

I'm trying to come up with a simple solution to the neutral wall problem. A while back, I suggested a "Movement Count" feature, which could be applied to borders. I would make some borders count as taking more moves than others.  Such a feature combined with a limited number of moves per turn in effect creates terrain restrictions.   It would be preferable to a neutral wall system that I'm suggesting here, but it is a bit more complicated to implement.  The idea of just being able to set unit caps on Neutral Territories, or disable the negative counting feature of factories sounds like it could be much easier to implement. 

It wouldn't be quite the same, but pretty close, if you just made the mountains a negative factory bonus on themselves. For every turn players left their units there, they would be damaged. Would work well for a simulgear map, but I suppose not really for a versus-dice map where they could just move up and over quickly. Could also just put a unit cap on them and let the neutral factory do it's job up until the cap.

M57 wrote:

 

One solution I though of was to have two factories, the first of which empties the territory every turn (if it is neutral), and the second "fills" it, say with 2 units.  The problem is the engine counts negative numbers, so it works if the territory is already full and I set one factory to empty it (-2) and the other (+2) to fill it, but when the territory is recently abandoned, the first factory takes it to -2 and the second factory only brings it back up to zero.

 

Make the territory min 0

is that a global setting - and will it apply to factories?  Is it even a setting? Where is it?

Kjeld wrote:

It wouldn't be quite the same, but pretty close, if you just made the mountains a negative factory bonus on themselves. For every turn players left their units there, they would be damaged. Would work well for a simulgear map, but I suppose not really for a versus-dice map where they could just move up and over quickly. Could also just put a unit cap on them and let the neutral factory do it's job up until the cap.

Neither of these are great solutions..  The problem with the cap is that it's a cap for everyone.  Really, a Cap on the number of neutrals would be a great solution, but it would have to be on a per/territory basis, Making it global would defeat the purpose of simulating different terrain types.

I'm pretty sure having territory minimums wouldn't work because technically they would never let you abandon the territory in the first place.

Here is a possible hack, with severe limitations.  Make the mountain be an autocapture of a useless second territory.  Also make the mountain add troops to itself if neutral.  And have the second territory subtract units from the mountain if you own both and are neutral.

So if you capture the mountain, you own the second territory the next turn.  Then when you abandon the mountain, the following turn the mountain respawns, and the turn after, the mountain growth shuts itself off.

The downside is that this only works if the player can be convinced to stay on the mountain for a turn.

If you were going to ask for a new game engine feature, my suggestion would be to have factories with a fill limit.  There are lots of interesting board dynamics that could be enabled with factories that automatically shut off.

btilly wrote:

If you were going to ask for a new game engine feature, my suggestion would be to have factories with a fill limit.  There are lots of interesting board dynamics that could be enabled with factories that automatically shut off.

Factories with a fill limit.  This is much more powerful than a simple neutral cap, and it would be just as easy to code, if not easier, right?  If it's built right into the factory (rather than the territory), I'm thinking the engine doesn't have to do a check to see who owns it.

btilly wrote:

The downside is that this only works if the player can be convinced to stay on the mountain for a turn.

If they blow through, it would leave the mountain in a perpetual 0, right?

M57 wrote:

btilly wrote:

The downside is that this only works if the player can be convinced to stay on the mountain for a turn.

If they blow through, it would leave the mountain in a perpetual 0, right?

Right.

Also the mountain can be conquered slowly.  So if you want you could make it 10, and people could whittle it down over several turns.  Then after they leave, boom, back at 10.

I can only see this working out in cases where there is a prize for conquering the mountain.  Which is a very limited subset of the cases where you'd want a neutral barrier.

The other suggestion that has been proposed is to have factories that trigger only when neutral owns the continent. Currently, neutral doesn't count as a "player" and so can't have a factory; if this were changed, that would open up a number of possibilities as well, especially with the idea of a factory cap.

M57 wrote:

btilly wrote:

If you were going to ask for a new game engine feature, my suggestion would be to have factories with a fill limit.  There are lots of interesting board dynamics that could be enabled with factories that automatically shut off.

Factories with a fill limit.  This is much more powerful than a simple neutral cap, and it would be just as easy to code, if not easier, right?  If it's built right into the factory (rather than the territory), I'm thinking the engine doesn't have to do a check to see who owns it.

I have not seen the engine, so what seems easy might in fact be hard.  However this does seem easy.  In principle you change:

territory.troops += continent.production;

to something like

if (territory.troops < continent.fill_cap) {territory.troops = min(continent.fill_cap, territory.troops + continent.production);}

If there are complications, they will have to do with how you store/access the fill_cap property.  As a general rule in designing a system it is desirable to find a small number of simple ideas that can be flexibly combined, so that's likely to be more attractive to Tom than a more limited neutral only dynamic.

Kjeld wrote:

The other suggestion that has been proposed is to have factories that trigger only when neutral owns the continent. Currently, neutral doesn't count as a "player" and so can't have a factory; if this were changed, that would open up a number of possibilities as well, especially with the idea of a factory cap.

I'm able to create such a factory, at least on boards where players start with a capital.   Just make each capital the trigger for the factory.  That's how I'm able to accomplish it thus far.  I still need a cap.

btilly's proposal isn't confined to just neutrals.  I think it's the top solution so far.

Kjeld wrote:

The other suggestion that has been proposed is to have factories that trigger only when neutral owns the continent. Currently, neutral doesn't count as a "player" and so can't have a factory; if this were changed, that would open up a number of possibilities as well, especially with the idea of a factory cap.

Hrm, good point.  My hack would not work as well as I thought it might. :-(

(Though you could use a universal+n factory with a continent that would be owned by whoever left.)

But if neutral owned a continent, on whose turn would neutral get a bonus?  If every turn, then in a large game even a +1 bonus would add up fast.  If not every turn, you'd need to think through the consequences of the rule.

Minimum on a territory is a setting in the xml, and can be set as a territory characteristic. I don't know why the designer doesn't have an interface for it, but it can be specified there.  You can still abandon a territory at 0. 

The tough part is getting the factory to not empty the player out of it.

ratsy wrote:

Minimum on a territory is a setting in the xml, and can be set as a territory characteristic. I don't know why the designer doesn't have an interface for it, but it can be specified there.  You can still abandon a territory at 0. 

The tough part is getting the factory to not empty the player out of it.

Controlling the order of operations also matters.  Having a territory minimum works fine if you apply the bonuses in the order -2, +2.  However it doesn't help you if you apply the bonuses in the order +2, -2.

I have no idea what order the engine applies bonuses in.  And on general principles would recommend against depending on whatever the current behavior is because it could change.

I think we decided it does things in ASCII alpha numeric

ratsy wrote:

Minimum on a territory is a setting in the xml, and can be set as a territory characteristic.

How? Where?

The tough part is getting the factory to not empty the player out of it.

This is not a problem if the factory only affects Neutrals, right?