Rating PD

[HoneyBadger]

Before anyone starts ranting and crying about how that's too much gold, too much PD, boo hoo hoo, I *like* playing big games with big limits and big objectives-that's one reason I don't post here very often anymore, aside from Gandalf Parker, too many people thinking small.

So, if you're going to reply along those lines, now you don't have to bother. I get it. It's not "practical". It would never work in multi-player, etc. etc. etc.

There, that saves you time and me a depressing read.

[Jack Simth]

What I would really find interesting is if PD was more of a "budget" than a set grouping of types of troops - it wouldn't exactly be a small change to the engine, but imagine being able to choose your PD leaders and chaff from your purchaseable national troops, each point of PD translates to a particular amount of gold/recources for the army, you set up a troop purchase order, and formation priority, and script them like you would an army. With, of course, some kind of translation for whenever a nation doesn't have any actual national troops.

[HoneyBadger]

I'd like that too-and it's a great idea-but I have a feeling it would be a nightmare not only to code, but in terms of computing/memory resources. Especially in multi-player.

[MaxWilson]

My programming experience leads me to believe the computing/memory resources required would be low. The game already has to generate PD for the defending side for each battle, and once they're generated they play just like any other units. If the troop purchase order is a build queue, it's trivial (computationally) to calculate which units get generated for each nation/battle. I'm not saying it would be trivial to code, because I have no idea how Dom3 is written internally, but CPU/memory resources aren't any kind of a bottleneck.

How would you "purchase" the second commander, Jack? Would it still happen at a set PD, or what?

-Max

[Jack Simth]

Honeybadger: I did say it wouldn't exactly be a small change.

MaxWilson:
I was honestly figuring on doing this at the national, not province, level - you have a purchase que much like normal for buying regular troops, but in this case, Commanders go in there too. Attached, you've got a battle map similar to the normal one for troop positioning; you hit the set/reset button, and start placing troops into the formations (in order - so Commander 1 (AKA "Unit 0" you must purchase at least 1 commander!) goes at the top, you assign units 1 through X to group 1, X+1 to Y to Group 2, and so on, then when you hit the next commander (position Z) in your que, units start being assigned to that commander based on your selection; so Z+1 through A are assigned to group 1, A+1 through B assigned to group 2, and so forth. And you get to script commanders, and such.

When you buy points of PD, it tracks how far along on the setup that puts you - so at the national level, Abyssa may have it set so that 50 PD is a Warlock (Cast Spells) with ten lava warrior bodyguards, and a Demonbred (Pheonix Power, Fire Shield, Cast Spells) with thirty humanbreds set to Hold and Attack (then it repeats itself completely if you have 100 PD, and halfway through again if you're up to 125 in a province - a looping purchase algorythm). If you only buy 30 PD in the province, you might end up with a Warlock with 10 lava warrior bodyguards and a demonbred with a single humanbred (they ran out of funds; you of course wouldn't set it up quite that way, because in the 30 PD province, one humanbred's death means everyone routes....). In a province with only 1 PD, you don't get anything (the Warlock might effectively cost 5 PD - they don't have the budget for him).

You don't set it up on a pure cash basis - recources need to come into play at some conversion factor; for nations with national summons, you'll need some kind of gem conversion - but essentially translate the amount of PD into a "budget" that's used to fill a national Province Defense template.

That's how I envision it working, anyway - you set your PD up once at the start of the game (possibly coming with a default), change it whenever your situation changes, and all your provinces where you assign province defense fill it out as they are able from their budget. Balance the PD the same way purchased troops balance.

[HoneyBadger]

I don't know if everyone has noticed this or not, but I thought I'd point it out anyway. Concerning PD: One type of PD is applied to ALL eras of atleast some nations. Example: Abyssia even in Early Age gets humanbred PD. That doesn't make too much sense to me, since humanbreds supposedly haven't even been *bred* at this point.

At bare minimum, I'd like to see every appropriate nation recieving a tailored-to-age PD. Even in a mod. I think that's only reasonable if we don't get anything better.

I'd also like to see nations have some "PD only" troop-types. I'm thinking something along the lines of Highland Scots and National Guardsmen-they're only coming out and fighting if the nation itself is invaded. You can't recruit them (but maybe you could set them up as a "standing guard" which gives me another idea...)

Maybe nations have the standard PD they do now, but in provinces you can set up units as a "standing guard" (or National Guard if you prefer). The way this would work is: you could "purchase" national summons in your capital-province only as "standing guards" for an appropriately high price in gold and resources, as well as gems. They serve and act *only* as PD, otherwise. In any castle, you can purchase capital-only national troops as PD-only standing guards. In any province *without* a castle, you can purchase regular national troops as standing guards. This would sortof represent equipping the local militia, adding experienced officers, magical defenses and guardian-creatures. In addition, PD-only troops would then be available as National Guards, atleast to specific nations.

Standing guards/National Guards would cost atleast some upkeep, but not as much as regular army.

[Gandalf Parker]

An interesting thing about this idea is that it gets around a thematic problem. PD should be made from local units, not national ones. But the problem was that the way PD is done, you have to develop huge arrays of what shows up for each level of PD. As it is now, thats done for each nation. To do it for each type of population would also be huge. But if PD was shifted to a queue as if you were purchasing new units then it would make PD more thematic. (It might also allow a new map command for setting the defence level of a province that is held by independents and Im always eager for more map commands).

It would involve dupicating the queue for a PD one, and maybe duplicating the formation/scripting screen (Im considering that optional). That might add to the games size but probably not cpu needs. Im not sure if it would involve 1500 arrays (max number of provinces). And Im not sure how much this system would involve processing thru all 1500 provinces each turn which extends hosting time.

[Gandalf Parker]

PD only troop types is also a good thought. The type of units and the equipment that would be provided if that nation (and that era) were to recruit locally. Kindof roman-like. Local people but with roman equipment.

[Foodstamp]

Gandalf Parker said:
An interesting thing about this idea is that it gets around a thematic problem. PD should be made from local units, not national ones. But the problem was that the way PD is done, you have to develop huge arrays of what shows up for each level of PD. As it is now, thats done for each nation. To do it for each type of population would also be huge. But if PD was shifted to a queue as if you were purchasing new units then it would make PD more thematic. (It might also allow a new map command for setting the defence level of a province that is held by independents and Im always eager for more map commands).

It would involve dupicating the queue for a PD one, and maybe duplicating the formation/scripting screen (Im considering that optional). That might add to the games size but probably not cpu needs. Im not sure if it would involve 1500 arrays (max number of provinces). And Im not sure how much this system would involve processing thru all 1500 provinces each turn which extends hosting time.

If you were wanting to do the PD according to the local pop type, instead of doing 1500 arrays for a 1500 province map, you could do one array with 1500 entries, or an even more efficient way would be to do an array containing each pop type.

Have the game access the array according to the poptype. The parameters would be stored in the array according to the poptype, then sent to a method/function that would process the PD according to the parameters stored in the array and the amount of PD the player/AI has bought. I think this method would be very light on extra processing and achieve the effect of having truly local passive defense.