I still like the idea of HOSTILE ALL. You can never be sure of what might
wander in your path and you may end up losing a fairly large stack just due
to attrition. I think it's probably the only way to be a successful pirate
because the odds on ending up in the same sea square as a <victim> are pretty
low.
--------------------------------------
Date: 9/19/94 10:35 AM
To: Russell Boggs
From: design@pbm.com
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Posted-Date: Mon, 19 Sep 1994 10:09:18 -0700
Message-Id: <9409191709.AA00984@sun-dimas.aero.org>
To: design@pbm.com
Subject: Various Things
Date: Mon, 19 Sep 1994 10:09:18 -0700
From: Scott Turner <srt@sun-dimas.aero.org>
* Maybe "LEARN" could be an alias for "STUDY"?
* On a recent turn, I made the mistake of doing:
move xxxx
build xxxx
To move into and resume construction of an inn. The order parser
didn't catch this, although the turn came back with an error:
4: Don't know how to build 'xxxx'.
I think either (1) the order parser should catch this error, or (2)
an alternative syntax should be allowed for resuming construction on
a thing.
* About HOSTILE ALL...
Initially I was in favor of this modification. It provides a way to
be a "pirate" / "highwayman", and I think that's a good thing. On
the other hand, it makes life all that much easier for the
aggressive side in Olympia, and I think that's a bad thing. As
we've discussed here before, aggressive units already have a big
advantage.
Currently, if you want to be a pirate in Olympia you need to work at
it a little bit. You need some spies/lookouts to spot likely
targets, make some good guesses to vector in your attack forces, and
then get your timing right. Since you probably can't devote all
your forces to being lookouts, and since you'll make some bad
guesses sometimes, you'll probably miss some targets.
But with HOSTILE ALL it becomes fairly mindless. You make a big
mean stack, turn on HOSTILE ALL and sit it somewhere victims are
likely to come along. Or better yet, you move it on a circuit so
you can cover 2-3 provinces a turn. What's the fun in that?
I have the same complaint about HOSTILE NPC. Being a beastmaster
becomes somewhat mindless: just sweep through the countryside with
nary a pause, collecting beasts.
On a purely mechanical side, there's also the question of how
HOSTILE ALL works in terms of repeated attacks. If you auto-attack
a stack, it breaks and leaves a survivor stack, do you immediately
auto-attack again?
I have a different problem with HOSTILE <faction>. Since generally
speaking I don't know the faction of a unit by looking at it, how
can I know it in order to attack it? Or does HOSTILE <faction> work
differently than I presume?
-- Scott T.