Poll on how Defender Retreat should work
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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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@iratoric Awesome! If you are planning to make the retreat rules match those of North Africa, I suggest you also create an option mustDefensiveRetreat, alongside canDefensiveRetreat. This forces the unit to retreat after X number of rounds (I am alluding to the scout cars right now).
I also suggest renaming the boolean defenderFightOrRetreat to defenderRetreatInsteadOfRolling. This is more clear and can be used both in Africa as well as Europe (1999) with the submarines. For the latter, the code must probably extended for submarine submerge retreats as well.
I am going to check out your PR and test. I'd love to assist you in this.
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I just did a combat with infantry having the ability to defensively retreat in North Africa and it is looking really neat! It is working almost exactly as intended.
I discovered a minor bug though and that is that units are able to retreat to territories they are not allowed to enter because of relationships. All the territories in capital letters are controlled by the player Mines, which is neutral towards the British. I am able to select such a territory and retreat to it. This should not be possible:
For the attackers, this is working correctly.
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Also, minor request but it would be nice if the decision for the defender to retreat is displayed here if it's made at the start of the combat round, so that it says "British decide to retreat units" as the first entry in this battle history.
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Another bug, air units don't retreat along with the other units. They just stay in the territory. I think it is copying the logic for attacking air units. But retreating defending air units requires the same logic as retreating land units.
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Also, you get a NoSuchElementException when doing a battle with the UK-aaGun unit:
In this battle, I gave the British infantry, tank and aaGun the ability to retreat on the first round of combat.When choosing to retreat and selecting a territory, it immediately throws NoSuchElementException and the game crashes. I think that is caused because there is a phase where the aaGun shoots at the air units and that comes after the phase where the British decide to retreat. This results in a phase where the aaGun cannot shoot at the air units. I think it's better to move the decision to retreat for the defender after AA fire, according to the North Africa rules.
In other words, "British withdraw?" should come below "Germans notify AA casualties".
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