Re: Moving Through Multiple Provinces
 

But you didn't really take LA R'lyeh next, did you? Did you?

Re: Moving Through Multiple Provinces
 

LA Ermor: gets freespawn units, must summon all its commanders, all population is killed in their dominion rather quickly.

LA R'lyeh: gets freespawn units, can also recruit commanders, but lots of population is killed in their dominion automatically

Everyone else except PERHAPS EA R'lyeh: recruit all their units and commanders with gold (they gather from population), conquer more provinces, growth/death scale taken during pretender creation doesn't have noticeable effects before a province has been under your dominion for 30 or so turns. After some research and site-searching, may start replacing their normal armies with summons and supporting their normal mages with summons.

Re: Moving Through Multiple Provinces
 

You might also avoid the Maenads spawning version of Pangaea.

Re: Moving Through Multiple Provinces
 

But you didn't really take LA R'lyeh next, did you? Did you?

No. early Age. I have enough water and air to outfit my mages with air breathing items. Interesting nation. I am going to try MA Ulm next, to see what develpoing a land army is like, and play withthe item creation options.

Re: Moving Through Multiple Provinces
 

I got to thinking about this. A simple move-to-<x> command would not need to alter the saved game format at all.

If <x> could not be directly reached you take the best move to head towards <x> with the provision that if <x> is friendly it will not attack an enemy to do so and if <x> is not friendly it will always prefer friendly provinces.

If <x> can't be reached you'll get a message in the results.

"The army heading for <x> stopped in <y> because no acceptable path could be found."
"The army heading for <x> stopped in <y> because we no longer control <x>."
"The army heading for <x> stopped in <y> because ownership of <y> changed."

By doing the pathfinding calculations each turn there is nothing that needs to be saved and it will react better to changes.

This would *NOT* cover fancier things like picking up the troops on the way or the like but it avoids the headaches of changing the file format.

Re: Moving Through Multiple Provinces
 

Non-issue. Algorithm (I hope the line wrapper leaves this alone!):

Data structures: An array with one cell per province. Each cell holds a turn count and a pointer to a province. Queue of provinces and turns used. Inner queue of provinces & movement remaining.
Load the stating province into the queue.
Repeat
Read province from queue, add to inner queue.
Repeat
Read province from queue.
Iterate across neighbors, add them to the inner queue along with remaining movement.
If the province in the map is empty, fill it with the turns used and the origin of the current move segment. Add the province to the outer queue.
Until inner queue is empty.
Until the target province has data or the outer queue is empty.
If the target has data:
Current = Target.
While Map[Current].ComesFrom <> Origin do
Current = Map[Current].ComesFrom
Move the army to current.

Runtime: This is linearly dependent on the number of provinces * the average number of provinces you can reach in one turn.

Recalculate every turn.

The simple answer, albeit with a file format change wouldbe to add two movement modes:
Gather like--the commander attempts to add any units that match what he's already got. They are added to the same groups.
Gather any--the commander picks up any troops he can.

See my previous approach. Run the calculation as above twice. Once normally, once rejecting a province if adding the current army to the already-planned contents of the province would result in starvation. If the second run is no more than one turn longer simply use it. If it's more than one turn longer look at what's eating the supply--if it's armies on move orders then wait, otherwise take the longer route. (Actually, internally you would do both calculations at the same time.)

This handles almost all cases. It will fail in a case where you need to distribute the armies through multiple bottlenecks--they'll all queue up for the shorter one and won't optimize the food use (Say, A needs 100, B needs 80 and C needs 60. The province feeds 160. This approach makes A go first, B & C wait.) It will also fail if two armies are trying to pass each other in opposite directions through a two-province bottleneck where neither province will feed both armies (This case will be detected, though, and you'll get a message.) Such bottlenecks are rare and armies crossing like that is also rare.

In a situation like this an exhaustive search is a realistic option. The only time I've seen pathfinding problems in a game that could use such an approach involved fog of war issues or improper handling of an impossible route. The army came along and found the path blocked. It turned back to take another route, once it got far enough away that the blocker was lost in the fog it turned around to take the short route again. (The real culprit here was mishandled fog of war--stationary items in the fog should be as you last saw them, not vanish.)

Re: Moving Through Multiple Provinces
 

The basic problem is that it doesn't attempt to rank targets, it's using too simplistic an approach.

It shouldn't be too hard to build a table of precalculated odds: Current search level, terrain type and path being searched. The mage should consider each province and cast at the one with the highest probability. Terrain type capital would have a zero probability.

Re: Moving Through Multiple Provinces
 

Loren, that's very cute, but I'm afraid it still won't make this feature be implemented any sooner.

You'd probably have a better chance of convincing JK to make the AI scriptable and then implement the exhaustive province movement algorithm yourself. Which still is a very dim chance, if any at all.

Re: Moving Through Multiple Provinces
 

Nice pseudo coding Loren.
It might have stood a chance in the early days. But it does show that a change would not be fast and simple as the other things we have been getting in patches.

Re: Moving Through Multiple Provinces
 

Mea culpa. :)

-Max