More Thoughts on Cross Water Invasions

[Martin Gühmann]

Originally posted by Zaphod Beeblebrox
another thing i really dislike is that (afaik) you can only send in the groundtroops from one ship at one time when attacking cities/stacks directly from the shore. i'd like to see combined stacks of marines (or older amphibious assault units like in cradle) from several ships assisted by helicopters, planes, whatever

Group the ships and your problem should be gone.

-Martin

[The Big Mc]

I think the problem in some instances could be solved in the later two ages of the game with the development of amphibious units.

in the mod I am doing the Messiah virus (a nasty piece of programming made by me) has access to the death walker unit a kind of advanced war walker that has the ability to enslave as well as the ability it be amphibious now in sea maps the virus gets me early on because my sea cities are virtually undefended for the first few turns well I start to make an army.

[Peter Triggs]

In the thread that led up to this one, TheArsenal wrote

I am finding the AI will send out a few naval units to pillage, but will only, occasionally, land units on your soil in stacks of one or two. ...

It sounds as though getting the AI to launch amphibious assaults is very difficult (I know ZERO about modding) but is it possible to get it to produce more naval units and patrol its shores more vigilantly? The naval aspect of the game is one of my favorites.

Very difficult? I've almost given up on this (more than once). But with a bit of luck I may be on to something:

[Peter Triggs]

Six turns later and the invasion is well under way:

[Immortal Wombat]

Anything I say here will sound stupid.

[Peter Triggs]

Liverpool fell to the Chinese. Because of the way these sea tactics handlers work, only one AI player gets to use them at a time. The Chinese can now pursue the war from their Liverpool base but the Hebrews are also both at war with me and in a position to launch a cross-water invasion. (Actually, they can get at me over land but it's faster by water.) So, a few turns later it was their turn.

Known problems: Lots. It's very fragile and I have a feeling that something unexpected will happen and my global arrays will collapse like a house of cards.

[Pedrunn]

Can we see your code? Or is it a secret?

[TheArsenal]

Wow. Excellent. And frightening.
It sounds like there are quite some things to hammer out before this goes live. But wow.

[Locutus]

Well, I know of a simple thing to say that isn't stupid: how?

Did you just increase the number of naval units built? If so, when, how many, with whom, where? Did you just change the strategy files or did you also create custom SLIC code?

It looks like a MedMod game. I've had naval invasions happen before in MedMod (although less challenging than Cradle, the AI seems much more intelligent there) but only in games where I was in all areas (especially militarily) inferior to the AI. Did this play a part here?

(BTW, just for the heck of it everyone should try playing a few games at the worst of their ability from time to time: you can see amazing things from the AI that you would never see when playing at your best).

[Locutus]

Oops, forgot to refresh the page after leaving it open for a couple of hours (was watching a movie ). So you did code SLIC. Could I have a look at the code? I'd love to see what it'll take to make those arrays collapse (and how to prevent it)
Plus, if it can be coded to work for one AI, there's no reason why it can't be made to work for several (though it will no doubt be tricky)...
(And I have a whole weekend to spare - a luxury I can rarely afford these days).

[tlatoani]

I say:



Even if it's still a pre-pre-alpha, it's a huge breakthrough.

[Peter Triggs]

OK, here's the current mess. But you're not going to be able to do anything with it except read it because it builds on stuff that I've been working on for about the past two years.

[Locutus]

Having a first glance right now...

'Not able to do' as in you wouldn't want that, or as in it's so complex you'll never understand it? In the latter case, don't underestimate the power of a few billion Borg drones putting all their computational power together

[Immortal Wombat]

I'm guessing as in "requires shed-loads of other CtB SLIC code which hasn't been publicly released"

[Peter Triggs]

IW guessed right.

One of the first things I did was to develop a system that measures how 'close' one civ is to another. This can be used to affect their strategies and provides data that is also useful for tactics.