Re: To fire or not to fire?

[Hans Ronne <hronne at telia dot com>]

>I've been working on a new game that includes tanks that can attack,
>fire, and capture (but not capture directly).  While debugging, I
>noticed that if the AI can shoot at something that it could capture, it
>will fire at it until its target is destroyed or it runs out of ammo
>(whichever comes first), and so it doesn't capture anything unless it
>has to get right next to it!  Is this an AI bug?

The capture code and the way it interacts with attack anf/or fire is
extremely complex, and also depends on the combat model you are using. I
have posted detailed discussions of this previously. My intention is to
overhaul this part of the kernel code as soon as I have time to do it.

To answer your specific question, yes, this is how things are supposed to
work, for the following reason:

1. Capture-at-a-distance is impossible, for obvious reasons. You have to be
in the same or adjacent hex. This also means that units that fire from a
distance cannot proceed to capture the enemy unit.

2. Unit that can fire from a distance are supposed to do that and avoid
close combat (where they may get killed) as far as possible.

If you want your firing units to get involved in close combat and thus
capture you can always set the firing range to 1. That would kind of take
away the whole point of having this kind of units, though.

Hans