On Sat, 18 Aug 2012 04:48:03 PM Michael Vehrs wrote: > I see the similarities. We will also need to create a random new player > for the purpose of owning the mercenaries until they are delivered.
Quite so. Thinking about it a bit more, repurposing another nation's REF is
probably no good as we can not guarantee there will be a suitable one
available--- all the other nations might still be in the game and hostile
towards you.
> And
> what about foreign relations with that player? Can another player
> declare war on it and send your precious mercenaries to the bottom of
> the ocean?
I see no reason to disallow that, and it might even be more work to make it
impossible:-). Given that these mercenaries appear during the revolution, I
would expect at least that the REF the rebel player is fighting to be at war
with the <mercenary-supplier> from the point it is created. We could take
care to create the convoy at an entry location where it is likely to be able
to sail in and disembark its land units in the least amount of moves[1], but
the rebel player might have only a few colonies located well away from the
high seas so we will never be able to guarantee that the mercenaries will
arrive unchallenged.
Unless of course, we implement the mercenary force entirely in the server as a
sort of `special effect', with it sailing in, dropping off the land units, and
sailing away all in one hit without any players having an opportunity to do
anything about it, and reckless disregard for unit movement limits:-). Highly
artificial I admit, but probably saves work on what is not that big a feature.
Whichever way this ends up going, some server support will be needed for the
bit where the land units change owner. We currently can not do this at the
player level, a ChangeOwnerMessage would be needed to be invented. It would
be a nice feature to make such functionality generally available. There have
been games where I would have liked to send a bunch of artillery to an ailing
buffer state. Indeed it was possible briefly when I had trading of units
working (BTW a patch to fix broken goods trading is happening slowly in the
background).
Cheers,
Mike Pope
[1] Something like this, but probably should find a path to a land tile near
the colony, not to the colony itself.
paths = {}
for all rebel colonies
if colony-is-port
paths += findPath(man-o-war, getBestEntry(colony), colony))
if paths.isEmpty
return null // no port => rebel has lost
paths.sort(shortestPathComparator)
for path in paths
if ! path-gets-too-close-to-hostile-naval
return path
return paths.get(0) // tough it out
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