Re: Computer Aided Raid

From: Ed Tonry <etonry_at_niu.edu>
Date: Mon, 20 Jan 1997 22:40:51 -0500


Hasni says:

>It would be VERY helpful to have a program that would take a
>database of fifty humakti with their attack, parry, armour, and
>hitpoints and slam it into a similar database of Bad Guys and
>tell me who lives and who dies."
>
> However, maybe somebody out there has come up with something
>similar.... So, does anybody have anything remotely similar to
>what I'm looking for? Anybody have any desire to whip off
>seventy lines of code and email it to me? ;-)
>

I think we'd all like a copy IF it could be done, especially in _only_ 70 lines of code. (That would be one truly Moby hack!) But I don't think it can be done without losing the natural flow of mass combat.

What I mean is this: suppose the PC's 50 Humakti get lucky in the first round and get 5 fatal criticals on the bad guys. Now you've got 50 against 45, and the 5 extra Humakti will double-team 5 of the baddies. This increases the chances of the PC party winning the battle. Of course, the bad guys might get lucky first, too....

But if you can't reproduce this dynamic of battle, all you have is 50 individual fights, with no relation to one another, and that's not a battle.

This is not to say that it can't be done. I've played games which involve automatic double-teaming by the computer, so the algorithms exist. But it's not going to be a small, simple program, either. Too bad.

Ed Tonry


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