Battle and supply support

["Ari Rabkin" <asrabkin at twcny dot rr dot com>]

    OK, you asked for people working on games to submit requests for
core-game support.  It seems to me that one extremely useful thing to do
would be to support battles.  I know this has at least reached the
unfinished-but contemplated stage: and I think I have a specific use
for it.
    I've been doing a fair bit of reading about the napoleonic
period, and have played the "napoleon" game (and the 1805 scenario) through
a few times: it's a bit dissapointing.  The biggest dissapointment is the
total lack of sieges, which were an extremely important part of warfare of
the time.  It seems to me that a siege could be implemented as a special
type of battle; the defense should get progressively weaker as time goes
by, and much quicker if the attacker has ample artillery brought to bear.
    I'd be happy to have a go at some of the needed C coding, but the
prospect of doing the entire batte system on my own is a bit daunting.
I suspect that a lot of the dirty work WRT battles can be handled by the
combat system, and if ever a scenario needed one, napoleon does.  The
cavalry seem a bit useless, and the battles to indecisive.  And there's
no artillery!  I think that we should make cavalry, infantry, guns (perhaps
make siege and field pieces separate) into supply types, and let the combat
code figure out what it does.  The point is that an army is more than the
sum of its parts: which is a concept foreign to the default battle model.
    The problem with doing this is that having supply types determine battle
odds is unsupported; and the interface for supply-type production is totally
undocumented; although I believe it exists, I'm not sure what it is.
Could we have units produce supply exactly the way they do units? (That is,
with the acp-to-produce table, and all that at the code level, and through
the production dialog at the interface level.)
    There should also be better support for explicit supply transfer:
perhaps when the user hits "transfer supply" from the unit menu or somesuch,
a list of possible units should pop up, with widgets at the top to say how
much of what to transfer.
    Note, btw, that the basic battle code, and the new supply code will be
of general use, and the supply code in particular will solve a *major*
problem: the basic code is very bad at logistics; it is very hard to build a
trail of supply dumps and get the supplys moving smoothly, as the AI lets
each one fill up before starting to pass down the chain.

    Is this practical?  Easy?

    Ari Rabkin.