Question About the Battle Screen
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I hear ya @Schulz , though are you considering all solutions? You seemed fixated on the XML route, which has a lot of drawbacks. A dynamic toggle would avoid a number of those.
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They are all what I coud say about the topic after that its not my business but I would be personally happy to see any kind of improvements in this area.
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I'd really encourage us to explore any/all implications of any suggestion. Coding up such a feature is probably going to require 5-10 hours. It's a waste of valuable time if it turns out something was missed that could have been avoided with a little more design up front.
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Our map often involves highly dynamic and unusual situations that make casualty selection non-obvious. For example, our Zeppelins cost $12, have zero defense, only 1 offense, BUT can travel 8 spaces and provide +1 support to battleships, cruisers, and artillery (because of recon). Because of this, they are usually chosen early (because they are so weak) but often an attacker or defender will choose to keep them alive because they can project so much support over a wide area and are expensive (and are great for picking off undefended trains to disrupt reinforcements).
Also, when I play low luck, I manage my destroyer vs. sub casualties very carefully to preserve "groups" of guaranteed hits for first strike units (since they fire separately even on defense) in a way the default selection wouldn't do for me.
Lastly, we have several two hit units (including trenches and emplaced artillery) that require special units to be repaired. So you might actually decide to kill a cheap infantry at $2 (especially if you're managing your railroad network well and can reinforce) if you don't have a repair unit handy for your expensive artillery.
All that to say - I get that defender casualties are usually obvious for usual A&A games, but I agree with @LaFayette that we should avoid making it unchangeable for a game (unless it's deliberately part of the game design).
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One idea is to allow a per-map OOL ordering of specific units, but if a unit is not included then there will be a confirmation prompt.
For example, you could say "always take infantry before artillery", but any unit not on that list would require confirmation. To clarify, if a battle had just an infantry and artillery then the OOL ordering specified would be followed and no casualty prompt would appear. But, if any other unit were present (which are not on that simple list of two units), then OOL would be prompted.
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@LaFayette said in Question About the Battle Screen:
...Coding up such a feature is probably going to require 5-10 hours...
Idk seems like a lot of work. Think it works ok the way it is.
