Random number of units placed randomly at random turns?
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Hi,
It seems to be important question, so I decided to ask you in this post.
I have some ideas for a game or rather many different games, but the most important thing for me is randomnesssss...
Can I generate (or rather pseudo-player, played by AI, for example) random number of units and place them randomly at random turns? Or better, at the beginning of each round units placed by game as X player, Y unit?
In short, I'd like to make units like partisans placed randomly on the map as player nr.X, or as AI played brigands/pirates, or plague, or weather pseudo-units (1st AI player as a random event generator).
I know that players can start at random places, but can I use this system every turn or at random turns? For example in Dragon Wars and Caribbean Trade Wars you have reinforcements, but these are all scripted and set from the start. Can I do it randomly?
If not at all - is there any trick you could think of as a random generator for at last placing certain units in random places?
Thank You!
ComR -
@comr Technically, it is possible, but I wouldn't recommend it. At first glance it looks complicated, and would involve thousands of triggers and several boolean variables masquerading as invisible fake units. Don't try it without programming skills.
You could try to do something similar, which is much easier to implement: at the start of every player's turn, every territory has a small chance to spawn a set of units owned by that player. This has a chance to spawn units on multiple territories at once, or none at all. This would still require one trigger per territory per player, so several hundred for a smaller map. Placing randomized sets of units at every territory is much more difficult, and would probably cost dozens of triggers per territory per player, thousads for a simpler map.
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@alkexr Ok, thank you. could you recommend me any map using this system in any way? I'm not newbie to coding, but I have no idea what kind of coding is needed. I can make my own codes and algorithms in C#, so I could be able to convert it to Java or C++ or similar languages, but I cannot find any material how to use it. The only Idea I have for now is to read source code and see how it's made.
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You might want to look at maps like Feudal Japan and Feudal Japan Warlords as they do a lot of things with randomly placing units/territory ownership.
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@redrum Yes, I love Feudal Japan and I'm playing with it's XML, problem is, Feudal Japan Warlords crashes everytime after first round or so. Do you have the same problem? I tried few TripleA versions - older and newest ones - no luck. could you help me which version should work with the Warlords, please?
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@comr You won't need to do actual coding, but the way you'll have to use triggers requires algorithmic thinking.
Greyhawk Wars is a map uses an interesting system to fire random events each turn.
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@alkexr Great, thank you! I will take a closer look to Greyhawk too.
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@comr I'm not aware of any errors on Feudal Japan Warlords so if you are seeing some please post them and I can take a look.
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Game usually crashed just after window "do you want to hire a ninja"? Oh, yes... This time I set every AI to Hard AI and reinstalled release (I was using latest Github versions usually [last time it was 9687 - so, probably it causes problems with Feudal Japan Warlords], except for some older games). And... it works!
However, 12 Army Middle Earth doesn't work at all, no matter what version I'm using. I've got this error almost every line (around 1000 errors): "SAXParseException: game:...." and so on. However, that game was downloaded from "developer site", but I think it's very old version and I have just to move it from my games dir.
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@comr Yeah the SAXParseException probably means its an older XML that's out of date and best to remove it from your maps folder and see if there is a new version to download.
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@redrum Well, I couldn't find any newer version, so I hoped to repair the XML, but it's probably too much work. In this case I'd like to ask you. Long time ago there were 2 or three main sources of TripleA maps: TripleA few different official sites (now all of these dead, except Github, Wikia and new TripleA site, we are using now, as I can say)... is there any map list worth mentioning yet?
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@comr Only really 2 map listings still exist now. The official ones that are downloadable in game from github and @RogerCooper maps that he's converted: https://forums.triplea-game.org/topic/120/conversions-to-version-1-9
General goal is to move all decent quality maps to github so we can more easily manage and upgrade them as needed. Otherwise when any major non-backwards compatible changes are made to the XML then it breaks any maps we don't know about.
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@redrum Perhaps it might be worth while to have a topic thread dedicated to out of date maps that people may have downloaded previously and can no longer play. A spot where someone can upload defunct maps that others could look at to determine whether they are worthy of being salvage for the repository.
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@hepps Yeah or use @RogerCooper's conversion thread. Just not sure anyone would volunteer to update them but if they would or at least consider it then it could be helpful.
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@redrum True. Just thought there are probably some decent maps that have gotten lost after the dreaded crash of 2016. Was just a thought.
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@hepps said in Random number of units placed randomly at random turns?:
the dreaded crash of 2016
Did I miss something?
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@alkexr Ask Prastle one day when you have a couple of hours.
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And a few drinks...
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@redrum gigglez Let's not bring up the past
Still causes shudders in old lobby players 
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