Buddy/Ignore List
Hawk,
This is a bit difficult to answer. We have our old time players that want things as they were. And we are about to that point where (finally) we can leave Classic alone, with the migration to the new platform pretty much done to a fine point. Just fixing anything we think is not as intended, and I think we are close on that. Believe me, I personally haven't wanted to spend all these many months getting "final 2nd cycle changes" done. For all these 28 years, we have never published brigade values, etc.
In Classic, as it came back from NC, yes, there was essentially one value, so brigade strength was the determinant of defensive value. This is not what I intended, but I honestly can't recall how I left the Symphony program with Phil about 1990. I know better how we resolved combat in Fall of Rome beginning 2004.
As we have made the adjustments to combat, we have altered the defensive values some, especially for "The Bigs". A reason I suspect that in NC changes like RD brigades having archers, cavalry and infantry instead of dragons, was to fit into the original model of troop types I did when first constructing Alamaze. So each brigade type would have a certain number of 4 kinds each of missile, cavalry, and infantry. For example, infantry might be light, medium, heavy, or guards. Each subclass had a different value. The composite of the number of each subclass and their values would determine values per phase. This however ended up penalizing brigades like Red Dragon, and even Giants. When we started making adjustments in Clipper, I learned in the migration some were made in Clipper and some weren't, so the Giants had a major defensive bump and the Red Dragons did not. We have fixed that in java. We also have adjusted various other values for defense strength of some brigade types, breaking from the strict calculation of how many expert archers or medium cavalry to more reflect the kingdom. But in 2nd Cycle, we have only done that for a few kingdoms and not that big a departure. The ranking I showed above is based on the product of brigade strength and defense. So the Red Dragons, at the top, have something like a 5000 strength per brigade and a defense of 4.0, to give them a product of 20,000 for comparative purposes. The Giants may have a brigade strength of 4350 and a defensive value of 3.2 for a product of 13,920. The "product" is not actually used anywhere in the code, its just a means for me to evaluate the overall strength of a brigade. Again, the product doesn't consider terrain, defensive adjustment, leadership, morale, etc.
In The Choosing, I will be making more changes to these values. I don't favor posting a complete table as I hate the idea of Alamaze being reduced to working a spreadsheet. It was incredibly difficult to invent the entire method of infinitely variable text results to communicate battle phases and outcomes with text only instead of just posting numbers. I'm not inclined to change the entire character of Alamaze by just posting every value in every aspect of the game. Players should play the game as intended = as an adventure fantasy campaign with lots of uncertainty and incredible variability.
This is a bit difficult to answer. We have our old time players that want things as they were. And we are about to that point where (finally) we can leave Classic alone, with the migration to the new platform pretty much done to a fine point. Just fixing anything we think is not as intended, and I think we are close on that. Believe me, I personally haven't wanted to spend all these many months getting "final 2nd cycle changes" done. For all these 28 years, we have never published brigade values, etc.
In Classic, as it came back from NC, yes, there was essentially one value, so brigade strength was the determinant of defensive value. This is not what I intended, but I honestly can't recall how I left the Symphony program with Phil about 1990. I know better how we resolved combat in Fall of Rome beginning 2004.
As we have made the adjustments to combat, we have altered the defensive values some, especially for "The Bigs". A reason I suspect that in NC changes like RD brigades having archers, cavalry and infantry instead of dragons, was to fit into the original model of troop types I did when first constructing Alamaze. So each brigade type would have a certain number of 4 kinds each of missile, cavalry, and infantry. For example, infantry might be light, medium, heavy, or guards. Each subclass had a different value. The composite of the number of each subclass and their values would determine values per phase. This however ended up penalizing brigades like Red Dragon, and even Giants. When we started making adjustments in Clipper, I learned in the migration some were made in Clipper and some weren't, so the Giants had a major defensive bump and the Red Dragons did not. We have fixed that in java. We also have adjusted various other values for defense strength of some brigade types, breaking from the strict calculation of how many expert archers or medium cavalry to more reflect the kingdom. But in 2nd Cycle, we have only done that for a few kingdoms and not that big a departure. The ranking I showed above is based on the product of brigade strength and defense. So the Red Dragons, at the top, have something like a 5000 strength per brigade and a defense of 4.0, to give them a product of 20,000 for comparative purposes. The Giants may have a brigade strength of 4350 and a defensive value of 3.2 for a product of 13,920. The "product" is not actually used anywhere in the code, its just a means for me to evaluate the overall strength of a brigade. Again, the product doesn't consider terrain, defensive adjustment, leadership, morale, etc.
In The Choosing, I will be making more changes to these values. I don't favor posting a complete table as I hate the idea of Alamaze being reduced to working a spreadsheet. It was incredibly difficult to invent the entire method of infinitely variable text results to communicate battle phases and outcomes with text only instead of just posting numbers. I'm not inclined to change the entire character of Alamaze by just posting every value in every aspect of the game. Players should play the game as intended = as an adventure fantasy campaign with lots of uncertainty and incredible variability.