Re: Scalable Players on Set Games

[Hans Ronne <hronne at comhem dot se>]

>Would it be possible to have a setting for gameplay
>that collapse control of certain units onto less
>players than are available for a game?  I ask this
>because I'm going to write 2, 3 and 4 player versions
>of Korea 2006 (It's got 5 playable sides), which, for
>example in the 2-player, simply involves throwing all
>the units in China/N. Korea into ChiKo and US/South
>Korea/Japan under a USSoJa player.  Now, if I want
>differentiation, I need to subdivide units into "South
>Korean Army" and "US Carrier Group", which isn't so
>much of a problem (I love making more units, one day
>I'm going to run into the new unit limit, it's like
>32,000, isn't it?) but I wonder how easy it would be
>to implement a "Dynamic-Sides" option, that would base
>the control of units on the number of players
>attaching to a game.  I ask this because it's easier
>to get one friend to play a game than four, and maybe
>this would make certain multiplayer games more fun for
>smaller groups.

It could be done, but not easily. For one thing, it would require a lot of
new interface code (extra buttons in the player setup dialog etc).

What you can do already now is to change the number of human players in an
ongoing game, and have the AI run whatever sides are left. So you can start
a game with 5 players, save it, and resume it with only two players. See my
two posts on how to save network games:

http://sources.redhat.com/ml/xconq7/2003/msg00930.html
http://sources.redhat.com/ml/xconq7/2003/msg00931.html

Hans

P.S. I am almost done with a major revision of the save game and module
loading code. It will soon be much easier to save and restore network
games. No email will be needed any longer.