vengeance of the dead, how it works with 1000+ ?

[Gregstrom]

Err, from JO's post earlier, the death on escape happens because the assassination is a battle occurring on a province with no neighbours and not because assassinations run on a special instance of the battle code.

I dislike the 75-turn death feature because it's apparently the cause of many of the kills against even well built SC's. After a certain point it's impossible to kill that many soulless in the requisite time period and death is guaranteed even when it's otherwise unreasonable. The doubling up feature on VotD accelerates a process that can happen anyway.

[vfb]

Oops ! I shouldn't have made that assumption. I still think it would be easier to simply use a flag indicating that the battle is an assassination. We need that anyway so assassination battles can ignore any scripted Retreats.

I can see why you and other people dislike the 75-turn thing. I'm in the "death is part of the game" crowd on that issue though.

[Gregstrom]

I agree that death is part of the game. The death at turn 75 thing is, well, inelegant. And perhaps a bit too arbitrary. Past a certain kill count, it turns VotD into a Mind Hunt that specifically targets that SC you really want to kill instead of the chaff commanders surrounding him, and the casting mage can't even be caught and Feebleminded by other Astral mages. All for 3 gems.

Actually, you might not need the assassination flag to disable retreats. Just tell the AI 'if the province has no neighbours, don't retreat'.

[Loren]

Gregstrom said:
I agree that death is part of the game. The death at turn 75 thing is, well, inelegant. And perhaps a bit too arbitrary. Past a certain kill count, it turns VotD into a Mind Hunt that specifically targets that SC you really want to kill instead of the chaff commanders surrounding him, and the casting mage can't even be caught and Feebleminded by other Astral mages. All for 3 gems.

Actually, you might not need the assassination flag to disable retreats. Just tell the AI 'if the province has no neighbours, don't retreat'.

No--this opens up the possibility of an infinite battle. What happens when you have two guys who can't hurt each other? I've seen it happen--two casters who never did anything to each other. One was summoning skeletons, the other was smiting them.

My take on it: So long as the number of real hp's (critters that entered the battlefield, not summons) on the battlefield goes down the battle continues. If nothing is happening then you retreat those who can retreat. You only kill if retreating doesn't resolve the situation.

[Jack Simth]

Loren said:
No--this opens up the possibility of an infinite battle. What happens when you have two guys who can't hurt each other? I've seen it happen--two casters who never did anything to each other. One was summoning skeletons, the other was smiting them.

My take on it: So long as the number of real hp's (critters that entered the battlefield, not summons) on the battlefield goes down the battle continues. If nothing is happening then you retreat those who can retreat. You only kill if retreating doesn't resolve the situation.

That'd do it. You'll want to put a turn count on there before it starts checking for nondecreasing HP, though - you don't want your entire army routing on turn 2 because nobody happened to be in range to shoot at the other guy...

[Loren]

Jack Simth said:

That'd do it. You'll want to put a turn count on there before it starts checking for nondecreasing HP, though - you don't want your entire army routing on turn 2 because nobody happened to be in range to shoot at the other guy...

I was thinking to start checking at maybe turn 50 and it should be a peak over 10 turns, not round by round. After all, you can have a case of hurt, healed, hurt, healed. So long as the peaks are declining the battle will eventually resolve.