Poll on how Defender Retreat should work
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Thanks everyone for your opinions. I have thought about this a lot, and it is probably best if we start with implementing one set of rules and branch out from there. Otherwise there are simply too many possible combinations to do all at once. Since the North Africa game is the “official” ruleset and an already existing game that needs this rule, I think that whatever I implement should support that first. I will code it in such a way that it still leaves room for more variations later. Thoughts?
I instead think that the baseline should be some version of what you/we can devise as the simplest retreat system, have that done and tested, then adding properties and/or options for each element adding complexity.
For example, in the basic system you retreat to the same zone. Next step, with property, is retreating to an other zone. Next step, with property, is limiting retreat only to zones not under attack by land units. And so on.
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@iratoric which North Africa game? AFAIK some of the variations are mutually exclusive. I think the first task it is to identify which variations should be plausibly supported. Once done, I would like a full spec identified. Following, we can then look at the plan for how that would be encoded into XML. Doing so iteratively and not all-at-once is perfectly fine. Though, I think we should know beforehand which retreat variations we are likely to want (and also in which maps).
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@LaFayette This game: https://forums.triplea-game.org/topic/4074/north-africa-triplea-module
Here is the rulebook I've been looking at, Pg. 20
https://renegadegamestudios.com/content/File Storage for site/Rulebooks/Axis Allies/A&A_NorthAfrica_Rulebook_v8_WEB_090324.pdf?srsltid=AfmBOopVwvgEyZeJnjYp_ruRU2jn9aTpuvxW6KJfxVfl6WqGoXWC8mog -
This is my interpretation of the rules & what I coded:
At the very start of the round, if any unit has the attachment canDefensiveRetreat = true, the defender gets a prompt if they want to retreat, and to which territory. They may only retreat to friendly/neutral territories, not an enemy territory, and they can't retreat to a territory with enemy units in it, unless only enemy air is present, which is non-blocking.
If the defender chooses not to retreat, then the battle proceeds as normal. If the defender chooses a territory to retreat to, then that territory is saved and stored for later. The attackers fire at all of the defending units. Any units that are doing a defensive retreat do not fire back. Casualties are removed, and then any retreating units retreat to the destination we stored earlier. Any defender units not capable of retreating remain and must fight to the end/get captured/get removed, whatever happens normally
EDIT: I was originally going to have a property that applies to all land units, but it turns out that in A&A North Africa not all land units can defensive retreat (the truck and the supply token can't) so it pretty much needs to be a unit attachment. This offers some variation as the mapmaker can select what units they want to be able to do a defender retreat
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Defensive retreat should probably be a unitAttachment as @iratoric is deducing as some units can retreat while defending while others cannot in various games that have this feature.
One important thing to note that supply and trucks are defined as infrastructure in the North Africa module. If this cannot be coded using the unitAttachment as a basis, it might be possible to allow all non-infrastructure units to defensively retreat, as a last resort.
Retreat-to-same-zone would be useful for v2 games where there is defending submarines can retreat from combat instead of rolling (e.g. Europe 1999). It might be best to work first on this as it's probably easier. This would probably require extending the logic of submerging/retreating of attacking submarines, and make sure the decision occurs before the defending submarine rolls, and then use a boolean to skip the defending submarine's roll (just thinking out loud, haven't looked at the code yet)
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Have read quickly through this thread, noticed something about "units should not be able to use retreat to move more quickly". I am not sure what's exactly meant by this, but if we look at G40 where Germany can attack Yugoslavia using units in Romania and Greater Southern Germany, and retreats after one round of combat to Romania, the infantry in GSG also retreat to Romania and have technically moved two spaces. This should not be disallowed but is a feature of the rules. So the defensive retreat should also allow this (again, not sure if I understood this correctly).
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@lafayette Actually, I think NA and Europe are the only variations that are waiting for defensive retreat, and Stalingrad probably too once a module for that comes along (i'm talking about the A&A game, not the apparently already existing module called Stalingrad that has nothing to do with the A&A game).
Maybe Zombies or East&West?
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@VictoryFirst East & West has the ability for tanks to withdraw from a captured are in non-combat but no retreat. Axis & Allies & Zombies has no defender retreat (except for subs)
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Have read quickly through this thread, noticed something about "units should not be able to use retreat to move more quickly". I am not sure what's exactly meant by this, but if we look at G40 where Germany can attack Yugoslavia using units in Romania and Greater Southern Germany, and retreats after one round of combat to Romania, the infantry in GSG also retreat to Romania and have technically moved two spaces. This should not be disallowed but is a feature of the rules. So the defensive retreat should also allow this (again, not sure if I understood this correctly).
I pointed that out firstly. Obviously, that (as well as indeed moving faster via retreat, which could be addressed with a better retreat system or with units having greater non-combat movement) makes no sense and is silly.
You might have missed that this whole thing started (by @iratoric) as an advanced rule for TripleA games in general (not as a port of any particular existing game).
Eventually, @iratoric changed his (assuming gender) mind, and now instead he is going for supporting North Africa, thereby of course implementing existing rules. At this point, of course, it does not matter how good or bad such rules are, so you are indeed right that it is nonsense to discuss whether or not rules make sense.
I think it's unfortunate that North Africa or any such games with a retreat system exist. If they did not, this could have been a very interesting community effort to have some very good retreat rules rather than implementing and supporting this or that more or less flawed retreat system of this or that game.
However, I still hope that properties or somesuch may be made to have alternative versions of such rules rather than hardcoding it all mandatorily working as per North Africa rules or whatever. The more the system is customizabile by map-makers and game-makers, the better.
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@RogerCooper Thanks. IIRC, I think WWI 1914 also has defending submarines that can retreat.
@Cernel I think it's probably possible to implement a more customizable defensive retreat feature in TripleA, with a bunch of Game properties. Map-makers could decide themselves if they want to implement A&A-based retreat rules or come up with their own. It could be easily expanded by creating more properties.
The A&A retreat system might be silly, but I think it's even more silly to ignore it completely and make it not supported. Players that want to play A&A, want to play A&A, and not with altered/changed rules that might make more sense (not speaking for everyone here, of course there are people who like to play with house rules. But at least, the original rules should be supported).
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I don't think Properties are desired from a Engine coding standpoint. That is my understanding anyway. Dan addressed it above I believe.
Edit
So would want to limit their use -
@iratoric I know that I've been a bit negative in my previous post because I liked your original idea (making it similar to submarine reatreat) better than doing it as per North Africa rules as you eventually decided to (which are also adding complexity like the needed supplies or what they are called, been a while since I read the rules), but at the end I think that either is interesting.
Just posting here because I'm wondering if you are still onto this and what are your plans to get this done (sorry, not a developer).
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@Cernel Yes I am working on this still, life events got in the way for a bit. Currently I am working on moving everything over to unit attachments for maximum customizability. So you can have units which are able to retreat mixed with others that can't, some that can retreat on round 1 and others that can retreat on round 2. The 2 unit attachments I have right now are boolean "canDefensiveRetreat" and integer "defensiveRetreatRound".
Currently it's following the North Africa rules, where you decide at the start of the battle if you want to retreat, but it doesn't take effect until after the attackers shoot at you with impunity. However, I am thinking I will add a unit attachment like boolean "defenderFightOrRetreat" which controls this behavior. If set to true it acts like North Africa, but if set to false, then you would just retreat immediately.
I think I will just have the retreat query right at the start of a round so as to support both retreating before battle and after X rounds of combat. Because asking before round 2 starts is equivalent to asking after round 1 finishes anyway. That way I don't have to deal with the problem of reordering combat steps which seems like it would be difficult/problematic.
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@iratoric Cool. The idea of having units able and units unable to retreat is neat.
This is not really a request (because I believe you or the developers who will have to decide to accept this new feature probably don't want to go that complex at least initially), but in reality that would be mostly determined by the tactical speed of the units.
So, I'm throwing this idea as a possible future feature request (once a basic retreat system already exists).
One could have a "speed" unit option (defaulting to "movement" if absent) which determines if a unit can or cannot retreat based on what units are attacking, under the rule that all units with a speed equal or greater than the slowest attacking unit can retreat.
For example, if I have "transports", "battleships" and "destroyers", I could assign value of tactical speed of 1, 2 and 3 respectively. In this case, if I attack with only battleships a force of only transports and destroyers, the destroyers would be able defensively to retreat but not the transports (which would be left fighting alone if the destroyers retreat). In case of multiple forces, one could have (as written) the rule that for the attacker counts only the tactical speed of the unit with the lowest value, and that for the defender only the units with a value equal or greater than that can defensively retreat. For example, if I attack with battleships and destroyers a force of transports, battleships and destroyers, only battleships and destroyers can defensively retreat, but, if I attack with only destroyers (or after only destroyers are left in attack if I decide to remove all my battleships as casualties), then only the destroyers can defensively retreat (and, if they do so, the combat would proceed between the attacking destroyers and the defending transports and battleships).
Obviously, such a feature would also assure that movement 0 units cannot retreat unless there are movement 0 units in attack (normally impossible) which did not receive a "speed" greater than 0 in their attachments.
(Obviously, instead of transports, battleships and destroyers, they can be respectively corbitae, lembi and triremes or whatever.)
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