Re: New Windows Installer and Source Tarball

[Jim Kingdon <kingdon at panix dot com>]

> I also think that it is mentioned somewhere that Elephants are
> considered to be an archery platform. If so, then perhaps Joinery (the
> advance needed for Archers) should be required

Makes sense.  I don't remember in what order I was in the habit of
doing Joinery, but perhaps not at all (it appears to be a dead-end
advance, since Horsemen are just as easy to get as Archers, and
generally as good or better at combat).

> some sort of construction advance should be required, since I seem to
> recall images of elephants with little towers on their backs.

Joinery already depends on artisanry and carpentry.  Barring a new set
of construction advances, I don't really see anything else which fits
the bill (it needs to be 4th generation, at least the way the rp
values are set now, because 3rd or lower will be easy to get by the
time one is thinking of going for Elephant, which is 5th generation).

> Additionally, there is the animal training/guidance aspect; perhaps
> some animal guidance skills (like a caravan) should be required.

That would appear to be already covered; elephant depends on a whole
line of animal advances (horse, donkey, camel, etc).

Another thing to tweak is construction points.  Right now the game
board quickly gets overrun with units, and it is really tedious to
move them all.  There are some commented out values for construction
points in advances.g which I thought were an improvement, but Hans
didn't like the slow start to the game.  The slow start could be
speeded up by making a few early units cheaper (say, slingers and
spearmen - I'd probably leave colonizers kind of expensive as they are
the source of the exponential growth).

We shouldn't go too far overboard on elephants; since Elephant is a
dead-end advance, it does make sense for the units to be kind of
powerful.  Making the player choose between Elephant now (for
short-term gains) or setting themself up for Phalanx some turns from
now is an interesting trade-off situation.  I suppose if we really
wanted to take this to an extreme, we wouldn't seek to have Elephant
depend on existing advances like artisanry, but instead to have its
own set, which don't mix with the advances which take you towards
Phalanx.