Re: Xconq issues that I've seen

[Eric McDonald <mcdonald at phy dot cmich dot edu>]

On Wed, 2004-05-12 at 19:21, Elijah Meeks wrote:
> 
> The Treasury
> All units should be able to draw and give to the
> treasury.  

Yes, they should.

> This feature doesn't work at all in Korea
> 2006/9, and I'm stumped as to why.  I thought that
> giving and taking from the treasury was extended to
> all units (As opposed to just advanced units), which
> is the way it should be, because this is a great
> feature for fun games.

To the best of my knowledge, treasury give/take _does_ work, and I have
seen it work in my test cases. Please provide a test case where it does
not (and you think it should), or tell us how to reproduce it in the
Korea game.

Matter of fact, I recently extended the usefulness of the treasury to
include units that have no actual storage capacity for the materials
they need to build/create or for which they produce each turn. I tested
this, and it worked in my test cases.

> AI and Fire and Attack
> Specula does a lot of things the Xconq AI wasn't built
> to figure out, and it shows, and I understand that. 
> But Korea 2006/9 seems to be pretty straightforward,
> and the AI simply doesn't work.  It won't attack with
> some types of units and it doesn't use any firing
> whatsoever.  Eric recommended changing the
> ai-tactical-range, but had no luck with it.

You said you were having problems with carriers firing (they were using
firing to simulate bomber attacks, IIRC). You did not tell me that the
AI doesn't use "any firing whatsoever".

Assuming that it is not failing to fire due to lack of materials, ACP,
etc..., then this may be a bug with the "improved" victim finder that I
wrote a few months ago. I have also noticed that the AI will not try to
capture oppidia and civites in the Roman game. I will look into this at
some point.

> Unit Display in Windows
> Whenever you tell a unit to build, it should only show
> the available units to be built, just like it does on
> the Mac.  It's so much cleaner, not just for games
> like mine (And there thousands of units) but for all
> the games.

The Tcl/Tk interface does put rectangles around the available units in
the units list. In the longer term, I think a dialog window should be
added to the Tcl/Tk interface to control things like creation, building,
production, and repair. I have some ideas on this already fleshed out,
but don't when I will get around to implementing it, assuming someone
else doesn't beat me to it.

> But instead there's
> no treasury 

No offense, but I dispute that claim.

> anything that uses fire
> command (the carriers, air forces and SAMs) are just
> colorful scenery.

I wish you would have told me that no units were using fire. From our
discussion I was led to believe that you were only having carriers doing
long-ranged fires. If the fire-range was significantly greater than the
tactical-range, then that could have been causing the problem.

> Any advice?

If you can provide test cases, or the latest version of the Korea game
where you are having these problems and tell us how to reproduce them,
it would make it easier for us to track and fix them.

  Thanks,
    Eric