brian brian
Matrix Legion of Merit

Posts: 3191
Joined: 11/16/2005 Status: offline
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Well I have to wonder then if the program enforces advanced designating of the resources being shipped somewhere. Traditionally, if a convoy line is broken, there is nothing in the rules that forces a player to have already declared what resources are being sent somewhere. So if the U-Boats completely wipe out the convoy line in the Arctic Ocean, the CW can just declare that the Malayan resources don't make it to Russia, even if the CW has no convoy connection to Malaya at all right then. Unless, of course, I have always just Played It Wrong, which is always entirely possible with World in Flames. If they were sending Build Points and they are now sitting at the bottom of the ocean, then you don't get them. Checking that one MP receives their lending and another MP doesn't use it seems simpler than trying to compute routes across a completely not mathematical net of sea zones around the world, with break points and movement restrictions and all the rest. That sounds crazy difficult, and I have worked with data structures, a long, long time ago. So I don't know. I am about 3/4 done with cleaning out a laptop and getting it ready for a system OS upgrade, before I load any more material on it. Reading the board lately has me back to playing WiF solitaire, with Cyberboard, instead of making progress on that topic. I'll also be picking up the maps, after the discount is off, which I expect it might already be, so I can support this project. 100% rules enforcement is a nice goal. 100% not letting the owner of a game control their own game is not. Perhaps now that the product is out, it's time to start adding some things for the owners of the game to make the game do what they want. But overall it looks like we are likely 6 months or more out from having an easy to use convoy system, if NetPlay is the priority. I would like to play this game at a high level. If I can't use the Oil rules or the Lend-Lease BPs rule, then I can't. Ultimately, MWiF will have to offer players the ability to just play the game with the counters on the map any way they want. If it doesn't, why would anyone pay a lot of money for it, over the free ways to do just that? The basic combat/movement game engine will have to be separated from the scenario engine. I'm sorry that is 'feature creep', but it is a feature a lot of players will want, and will expect. NetPlay Barbarossa and Guadalcanal will be fun. Global War without Oil or BP deliveries to Major Powers in the midst of sinking, will not. (And more Allied MPs will sink if saved Oil doesn't start working). We all know a Debug feature could break the program. Not letting the customers access that is the antithesis of Open Source software, but then software is moving back to the completely closed direction with the rise of the mobile OS. Maybe giving the customers a powerful Debug override would include setting a header line in the game file that says Debug = ON. Any saved game that came in for a bug report with that line could be automatically deleted on the potential that everything is all jumbled up now. Any player that turned it on could have their NetPlay opponent, or someone loading a saved game from someone else could be notified. I don't see a huge problem with opening it. But of course, there is. It is probably yet more work to set it all up for the players to move the counters however they want. And perhaps Russia can receive a BP or resource or Oil from the Allies now, I admit I don't know. But can it receive some of each from potentially 3 or 4 separated Allied portions of the map (UK, North America, India, Australia) through 3 or 4 separate ports of entry (Archangel, Murmansk, Persian Gulf, Vladivostok) into 3 or 4 separated pockets of Russian control? Breaking the world into separate worlds is another level of challenge programming to be sure, and sounds incredibly difficult. But it can be a part of playing a game of WiF.
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