I have another question..

[douglas]

Grandpa Kim said:

Not quite right concerning the seek order. If player one is seeking player two, he is sunk. He will move onto player two's fleet and then player two's fleet moves away. If player two is seeking player one, then player one will move and player two will move onto him (assuming he is still in an adjacent sector). In theory all players move simultaneously. In fact, the program handles everything one at a time. Welcome to the digital world.

I have seen the mechanism I outlined regarding seeking in action several times. I assure you it is correct. In test games and one actual single player game, I have observed fleets with the same speed and orders to seek after each other exchange places without combat each time they got to move. In a current PBW game I am in, a fleet I sent on a riot run was able to evade all pursuing forces with ease simply because all ships involved moved at speed 10, and every time the pursuing fleet moved to attack my fleet, my fleet moved out of the sector at the same time and no combat occurred. Note that I am player 11 of 11 in that game, and many times the sector I was moving to was also adjacent to the starting position of the pursuing fleet.

Edit: That's strange. I just tested it, and it worked as you described, but I remember very clearly seeing two fleets behave as I described in a single player game. Maybe it only works like that if the AI is controlling one fleet.

Edit2: After further testing, I have established that which player can flee with impunity is determined not by player number, but by order of construction of the ships involved. The player whose earliest-built ship in the fleet was built last gets to move second. Actually, it depends on the internal ID number of the ship, but as long as no ships have been destroyed it makes no difference - not that that situation is likely to last in a real game.

[Grandpa Kim]

I have not done a proper test, I am just working from experience. I find your test enlightening and the results actually a good thing. Since it's pretty hard to tell who has the oldest ship, this will eliminate a rather cheesy exploit.

Good work Douglas! [img]/threads/images/Graemlins/icon41.gif[/img]

[Rathar]

Some awesome testing here!

Ok, so it turned out wierd..

Due to there being a 1000 units in space rule the planet being blockaded by 53 baseships and dreadnaughts was unable to launch both its mines and fighters. ( you are so lucky... 4 sweeping components is not enough for a fleet..)

First apparent action by said planet was to launch all the fighters it could.

This initiated combat with the pile of ships overhead.

In this combat the only things slain were a couple of his ships and all my fighters... (wow my fighters rock if 70 of them can kill 2 ships versus 51..)

Question 1. why didnt my planet fight? Yes, I am still having the no combat review problem so I cant actually tell you what happened..

The reason I ask becomes more apparent now..

After a few other messages of things that happen at the start of the "month" I get my various ship caused combat messages.

One of the first if not the very first announced was the combat between his now 51 ships versus my planet in which he lost approx 6 ships and I my planet.

Again, why didn't my planet fight in the first battle? I am not complaining that it got annihilated, heck, I am complaining that it didn't!

I would really love to get combat reruns and look at what happened but I loaded his ship set (only other one besides my stock one in system) and still no dice.

I understand that this is the nit pickiest of nitpicking but..

At least I discovered that 11 of my baseships versus 51 of his ends in the death of 6 of his and all of mine.

He is certain to die with those odds! (wait till I get say, oh, 30 ships together!)

/cough, I.E. in the first system galactic south right now...

Pretend edited to be rude to Alarik

/rude

[AMF]

douglas said:
Edit2: After further testing, I have established that which player can flee with impunity is determined not by player number, but by order of construction of the ships involved. The player whose earliest-built ship in the fleet was built last gets to move second. Actually, it depends on the internal ID number of the ship, but as long as no ships have been destroyed it makes no difference - not that that situation is likely to last in a real game.

Actually, that sort of makes sense from a programming point of view, but obviously not from a "realism" point of view. That doesn't mean I don't like it. I think it's, frankly, a perfect way to do it because one can't take advantage of it really...If you are really going to have simultaneous movement, you can't tie it to player order - you need something based on intrinsic unit abilities (like "speed" or "dexterity" of the ship, or experience rating or something), OR just plain old randomness. Build order sounds like a decent compromise to me, and I suspect that it's due to the game being written in C++ or some other object language, with each ship being a separate object. How else could one order them aside from build order? (I'm thinking while I'm typing here, so bear with me) The list is created and appended with new objects in the order they're built, no doubt...hmmm..I suppose you could have a ship-movement routine that did it differently, but I can't think of a good one off the top of my head that isn't essentially the same as the current, unless it was truly random...again, randomness isn't satisfying either...nevermind...I'm babbling...

[Fyron]

You need some sort of hash table that prioritizes the ships by their "iniative" rating, which depends on speed and other factors. Down with the list!

[dmm]

No, no, current way is realistic.

Age + guile always beats youth + skill.

[douglas]

dmm said:
No, no, current way is realistic.

Age + guile always beats youth + skill.

Actually, it's the newer ship that has the advantage here. Also, it's not quite by build order. Suppose you have ships 1, 2, 3, and 4. Ship 2 gets destroyed and another ship gets built. The new ship will not be ship 5; it will take 2's empty slot.

[Fyron]

But what if you have youth + skill + guile, huh? Beats old + guile any day.