Over the past days I implemented the last missing sub-feature of the military feature : attacking enemy regions. This was something I pushed back and forth all the time, cause before implementing it I had to be sure that the values and properties of military units would be final, and recently I made a third draft of what properties those units should have and how they would affect combat. The first draft (back in 2003) was too detailed with a lot of different units, which would have been to hard to balance. The second (and most recent) draft was very simplified and after thinking about it again too simplified, so I also scraped that one and made a final draft for military units that isn’t to complicated but still distinguishes the different units from each other. After writing down that new draft I directly started to implement the automatic battle calculation, which will be one of the two methods to fight for regions in the final game. The other method (that I’ll put into the game at some later point, as it isn’t crucial) will be the hexagonal round-based one I showed you in my last posting. You can see the window where all this happens on the screenshot above, so the feature is in and working! And with a strong army under your command you can now finally take over enemy regions. And though the screenshot isn’t looking too spectacular, the most important additons were made within the code itself and that window is only a basic way (and also not finished, I’ll add some graphical extras to it later on) of showing what happens when you attack a nation. So all the calculations for units fighting against each other are implemented, and when your army crushes the defending units it’ll move into that region and claim it for you.
Now this all doesn’t sound too earth-shaking, but with the addition of the possibility to take over enemy regions I finally have implemented all the features needed to actually play the game like it was supposed. And this means I’ll soon start to implement computer-controlled enemies (aka “AI”)! I already wrote down my ideas on the AI in my game design document and I plan on using different personalities that are assigned random to your enemies when starting a new game. This way each game should play different as you never know how your enemies will react.
This will be a very interesting part of Project “W"s developement, and you can bet that I’ll let you know about on my blog!