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Symon -> RE: How are random leaders assigned? (6/29/2014 3:36:42 PM)
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quote:
ORIGINAL: Peever
I got to messing around with the editor after getting battered and bruised by Andy's latest Ironman scenario and I had some questions on how the game assigns leaders to units that are set to "random" by default. Does the game auto-generate a generic leader or just pull one from the "Leaders" pool that can be seen in the editor?
For a test I set all Allied ships and LCU's to have a delay of "0" so that every unit would be present at the start of the game. I wanted to see if there were enough leaders for everything at once. Everything seemed fine, and it looked like everyone had a leader, though not always the best for the job. Is it possible for the game to run out of leaders if I created a ton of new ships, and units?
It’s ‘random’ but not really ‘random’. There’s several things the code looks at – for Ships, it reaches back to the Class and looks at “Type”. For a BB (Type=5), fx, it will find a leader of a suitable notional Nation (USN, IJN, RN, etc..), suitable Type=5 (ship) and Rank=19, 28, etc.. (Cpt equivalent since a BB is in the tables as a Capital Ship).
There are tables of ‘Class’ value that work for many things, such as points, target value, torpedo expenditure, and the like, so “value” is pretty well defined. Biggies get Captains, others get Commanders, then Lt Commanders, then Lieutenants, and on down to Ensigns, according to the decreasing ‘value’ scale and decreasing ‘Rank’ scale.
The logic is ‘fuzzy’ so if a ship qualifies for a LT Commander, it might get a Commander, or a Lieutenant, if the requisite code criteria are not met exactly (more on that in a moment).
When one needs a leader, the code consults all the different data numbers and generates a list of appropriate/active leaders with the appropriate data tags, and will pick the first one that shows up. If there aren’t any Captains left (for example) it MIGHT pick a Commander. Allowability of picking outside the box, and in which direction, and how far to go, is a proprietary algorithm.
Later war, when all the listed ‘leaders’ are being used, and the code can’t find a suitable candidate, the code makes up an Elmer Fudd with appropriate rank and nationality and having stats that are also determined by a proprietary algorithm.
You guys have always wondered why you can’t have someone commanding a TF go on to Fleet HQ; or someone commanding a HQ going on to TF command. That’s because the database ‘characterizes’ each line item (leader) by the editor “Type” field. That’s the reason you often get two listings for the same individual; one typed as 04=TF, the other typed as 01=HQ.
Land works the same way, but more so.
Pretty sure Alfred will make sense of all this and be able to explain it in a more organized and rational fashion.
Ciao. JWE
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