> Suppose I cruise into a province with my Big Killer Stack and I want
> to capture/kill the Unfortunate Victim Stack. If I expect to win this
> battle and I'm smart, what I'll do is issue 10 or so attack commands.
> If I win the first battle, I'm very likely to win all the ensuing
> battles, and in those ensuing battles I'll capture anyone who escaped
> the first battle. And if I lose the first battle, my force is
> probably in tatters anyway, so I might as well kill it off with the 9
> subsequent attacks before the next turn, when the Unfortunate Victim
> Stack is going to retaliate before I can flee the province.
Well, in the current implementation, once you start losing, you will
fairly quickly be captured. So this isn't as bad as it was in the old
days. For a while, if you recall, Rich played with having the loser
depart the province for somewhere else. But that doesn't work well
because it might move you somewhere stupid, and you can still be
attacked in the current implementation until you arrive at your
destination. The best "fix" for this, if one is needed at all, would
be to add a "fleeing" flag. When you lose a battle, this gets set. If
set, you can neither initiate attacks nor be attacked. It gets reset
at the end of the turn.
> A second problem is that it takes a long time to leave a province.
> Even if the Unfortunate Victim Stack somehow manages to avoid capture,
> the Big Killer Stack is going to hammer it again at the beginning of
> the next month unless Unfortunate Victim Stack just happened to be
> leaving the province the month of the attack.
This problem would still exist. Hm.
-- g