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That's okay, it still looks much better. ;)
And are you suggesting that Zhao Yun ISN'T popular enough for cheerleaders to travel through time and wave pom-poms behind him? XD
Blue Zhao Yun…. but that large offwhite-and-blue chunk in the lower left is plumes, so it probably should be changed from to offwhite-and-pink.
*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.
Then it's up to finding someone who speaks chinese (I know that SoSZ has some). Just don't look at me; I don't speak chinese OR japanese. ;)
Ask on SoSZ.
And if that turns out to be japanese, not chinese (which may happen), then http://jisho.org/kanji/radicals/ is slow but may help.
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.
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!
Out of curiosity, what will we do about minor forces?
Zhang Xian, for example, rebelled against Liu Biao and was able to stay independent until his death; he died in 200, yet according to Rafe he was already independent by 197.
Yet, to my knowledge, he hasn't been in even one RoTK game.
Fire up dosbox, run windows 95 (or 98, assuming it works) from there.
If you aren't really up to parsing, then don't parse. We don't exactly have a deadline, after all.
And as the other half of this project, I can always try and fill in if necessary.
