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Here's my proposal:
All provinces are given to their historical owners whenever possible. HOWEVER, players are allowed to create New Ruler-based forces as they so choose to, displacing the historical rulers. If they completely displace a one-commandery (or one province, or whatever we go with) force, the force's officers become free officers; otherwise, they get shunted into other provinces owned by the same force.
As for larger forces, presumably some provinces can be displaced, while others can't. 220 Wu, for example, I can totally see some of jiao being handed out to New Ruler insetad… but there's no way they can just grab the capital!
As for commanderies vs provinces, dufferent sizes are the tricky part. Yuzhang Commandery and Kuaiji Commandery each have about a third of Yang's land area…. and each of them is about as big as wealthy Yan and Yu provinces combined! It's just how regions of Alaska are bigger than all of new England, yet have much less population!
So there are five ways I can see handling that:
(1) Stretch the map like a cartogram; the southern provinces and Liang will be smaller, the more populous ones will be bigger, and at the expense of mapping accuracy a chunk of Yan will be on par with a commandery in Yang in size.
(2) Add a second, zoomed-in map for the Dense Five (Ji, Qing, Yan, Xu, and Yu), jsut as they often do for NYC (for example, http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/9/99/NY_Congressional_Districts_110th_Congress.png/1210px-NY_Congressional_Districts_110th_Congress.png ). This'll let us have both large and small commanderies, but do we really want a second screen?
(3) Use provinces in some places and commanderies in others. Obviously it worked well enough for RoTK2, but at the same time Jiaozhou, the chinese Alaska, was five areas while wealthy Yan was only one.
(4) Add scrollbars! Again, we can have both large and small commadneries…. but we'd have to scroll to view all of china.
(5) Cut off the less-populated parts of the map! This is the most drastic option; we'd be losing Jiaozhi and the less populous parts of Liang, Yi, Jing, Yang, and maybe You. We'd be able to do commanderies (or at least demiprovinces) for the physically smaller provinces, and we'd lose mostly ignored stuff. The Yong Kai and Gongsun Yuan campaigns would be gone, though, and along with their forces so would go Song Jian and Hui Ji's forces. It'd also interfere with any tribe-based relations.
Let me know which ones you think are the best choices — and if you have another choice, suggest it!
Immediate meaningful thoughts: none.
I will say, i dislike the idea scrolling the map. I hated that in RoTK 4.
Some kind of user controllable zoom, sure… but a forced closeup all time is a no no imho.
More stuff to ponder when the time comes :)
Zooming is a good idea — I didn't think of that!
And we can add an option (if the player wants, of course) to have commandery borders fade out if you zoom out — compare http://www.gamefaqs.com/pc/952508-hearts-of-iron-iii/images/gs_screen-90 and http://www.gamefaqs.com/pc/952508-hearts-of-iron-iii/images/gs_screen-86 for an example.
*drumroll*
The AI is complete! I think.
http://dragonatma.webs.com/other/Battle%20AI%20&%20testing%20materials.zip
It'll take some time to translate to actual coding, plus there may be some glaring mistakes (I can't exactly test out pseudocode!). But it should be fairly usable, and will be a decent challenge…. until any weaknesses I missed get exposed.
We've also got three maps to test on, along with recommended units — one is small (but will make sure things work), the second is decent-sized (and has awesome-stat officers all around), and the third is a huge stress test with a giant armies and a giant map (40 vs 40 on a 30×30 map!). The third scenario is larger than anything that should show up in-game even with the biggest possible battlefield, so if it works, great!
If you have any questions, ask away. If anyone else wants to look at it, go ahead — and ask away as well.
Real life got in the way, yet again. I'm still alive, still thinking about the project, etc.
Sorry bout the absence, it'll continue a lil while longer.
That's okay; we're not in a rush.
Hmm… I'm tempted to write up a rough AI for the month-to-month part based on vanilla RoTK2, but our game will wind up different… maybe completely different.
Sadly, with … what… a three month departure, it'll be back to figuring out where I left off etc. I think it was "finish up an interactive GUI, get basic math stuffs working, and let people start to fiddle".
I've fetched the AI stuff, will take a look at it and see if there's a possible way to make it script friendly without grabbing LUA or similar.
But, finish basic gui crap, get math shit shoveled in, let people fiddle. There's plenty of busy work for the project just in data entry to be done.
In other news, still have back problems but they're not near what they were.
I've raged against incompetent fucks at work for the last 4 weeks. Well, not coworkers, but a third party company we're interfacing with. Amateur hour extraordinaire.
I still don't like to sit at my desk at work, but I *can* do so. Right now there's a bunch of ammo reloading stuff all in the way from late November heh.
Hard drives are both dying on my main system (raid1/mirror, but still failing)… gonna prolly pick up a SSD for it. SSD in netbook has proven workable. Yes, project files are safe in multiple locations :).
My iMac bit the dust (dead hard drive, too. grrr). Need to tear it apart and replace the hard drive, or just sell it as parts for $100, I dunno. It's got an overheating graphics chip problem that needs a reflow but I dunno if I can be arsed to do it.
I've bought about 5 or 6 games on the cheap … maybe 14 games since 2012 started … and I haven't played a single of them yet. Too damn busy. Sigh.
Don't worry; I suck at programming, so the AI is deliberately easy to understand. Even the "incompetent fucks" (as you put it) would probably understand it.
And I know the pain of having a computer die. I also know the pain of having the backup computer ALSO die before the main computer is replaced. Gaming on a January 2003 backup to the backup computer in 2009 = not fun. Good luck in getting high-quality, low-cost replacements… and in finding the time to play your new games!
My back hates snow.
I hate my back.
Ugh. Been popping pain pills like no tomorrow :(.
Both hard drives in main system went bai bai (was a raid-1 mirror setup even).
Hard drive in mac went bai bai.
Netbook lives on though.
And easy AI understanding document stuff is handy.
Don't mind me, going back to agonizing back pain.
edit: project is on netbook btw, all is fine :)
Ouch. I'm designed for mental activities, not physical ones, so I don't like shovelling snow. Why can't we have a good old real-life FIR2 to deal with that? XD
Also ouch on losing the system; right now, my current backup computer is incredibly old.
Here's hoping your pain ends soon, and it's good to hear the project is fine; I need to take a look at my pseudocode and optimize things.
picked up a ssd for primary system, will get it up and running within the next week or so :) means will be back to stuff :)
SSD installed, OS re-installed, dev environment installed…. so…. hopefully get back started soonish.
It's as if Dong Zhuo himself is trying to stop this! >_>
A week ago, I turned the computer on, and it restarted partway through; apparently vista is so bad my computer tried to change to xp. Things are fine now, though.
EDIT: To clarify, the madness continued for a week; but the PC works now…. and it has Windows 7. Which is like replacing Song Ren with Jiang Wei.
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