Wish List: Routing

[Psientist]

I've played other turn-based strategy games like Civilization, Call to Power, and Warlords that have had one nice feature that reduces micromanagement: army routing.

1. select an army / commander.
2. click / drag a route to a destination, which may take numerous turns to traverse.
3. The army follows that path on its own without the player having to babysit them every turn.
4. When the army arrives, the player gets a message.


Wouldn't that be a nice feature?

[merlinme]

Yes, a very nice feature. Anything which reduces micro management is a good thing, in my opinion. However it would require building some route finding into the program (taking into account the speed of the army, any difficult terrain, whether the army has flying or sailing, etc.)

Also the programmers have to decide what should happen if the route gets blocked for some reason (i.e. a province changes hands). Personally I'd be happiest for the unit to stop moving and tell you why, rather than attempting to find another route, let alone launching an attack!

Conversely a much quicker route may open up if you capture a province, but in that case I think it's up to the player to realise and change the moving unit's orders.

Maybe we'll get something for Dominions 4...

[Graeme Dice]

merlinme said:
However it would require building some route finding into the program (taking into account the speed of the army, any difficult terrain, whether the army has flying or sailing, etc.)

This is a trivial programming problem for a system where your units don't block each other. An A* search is simple to implement, and takes into account all of these factors.

[Gandalf Parker]

That would be alot of thinking on a pbem system. Anything that carries beyond one turn would be pretty involved to put in since its just not setup for multiple turn actions. It took us forever to get simple "memory" things that just carries it over to the next turn and treats it as the same command given again with no extra thinking (like monthly casting or build queues beyond one turn).

I wouldnt mind that much thinking and file handling on an MP game. I dont care how long the hosting takes since Im usually in a "one turn a day" game. But on a solo game with lots of provinces and AIs, or a blitz game with lots of players, I think that would be too long a hosting for even me to put up with.

[Graeme Dice]

Gandalf Parker said:
That would be alot of thinking on a pbem system. Anything that carries beyond one turn would be pretty involved to put in since its just not setup for multiple turn actions.

Why on earth would you worry about saving path information between turns? You run the pathfinding algorithm every turn for every unit. Pathfinding in a system like Dominions is simple, since the best path is not affected dynamically by the current position of other units. This is especially true for a sparsely populated graph like a typical Dominions map. I'll use a concrete example to illustrate how you don't understand the issues involved. Civilization 3 & 4 are games which have similar numbers of individual units to Dominions, and which have far more densely populated graphs (8 possible movements for every single square). In a single turn of either of these games (Or just about any other strategy game), every single unit can be told to find a path to any legal destination anywhere on the entire map, with no noticeable slowdown.

Further, the real blow to your claim that pathfinding for human players would somehow add overwhelming computational time, is that the AI already performs these calculations every turn. As any player of Dom3 would be able to tell you, the "AI thinking" phase of turn generation is by far the shortest phase.

[Gandalf Parker]

I dont think civ 3 and 4 are written as pbem. Much of those games involves multi-turn actions. But I didnt say it wasnt possible. Just that its not something that the game has support for.

So you are recommending that each unit have a variable stored for a target-province (as in "I want to go to province 498") and then each turn refigure the next move to get it closer to province 498 (if its still possible that turn). And of course a message for any unit which becomes unable to complete its movement such as something taking out the connecting provinces it would have to move thru.

That would work of course. And if multi-turn tracking was instituted then there would be many many suggestions that we could get into the game. Turn recognition for map and mod commands for one thing, which would be fantastic for scenario creation.