Two questions for Richard & the team

[Miletus]

Hi, a couple of questions for Richard and the team:

i) For the next scenario I work on, I'd like to incorporate the facility for the single player to fight at different levels of AI difficulty, as per the original scenarios and Skirmish games. Can you give any pointers as to how to do that/where to find relevant examples of code? Is it fairly easy to do, or a complex job (aside from the issue of more testing being needed)?

ii) A more general question: what are your feelings about adding non-historical (but realistic) scenarios, i.e. scenarios that aren't based on specific battles? I'm probably going to build a few of these for my own use, to explore e.g. defence in depth using extensive battlefield fortifications, encounters between cavalry forces only, and so on. Would these be the sort of thing you'd want posted on the forum, or would you prefer to stick to recorded battles only?

Apologies if these questions have been asked (and answered!) elsewhere/previously.

[rbodleyscott]

i) For the next scenario I work on, I'd like to incorporate the facility for the single player to fight at different levels of AI difficulty, as per the original scenarios and Skirmish games. Can you give any pointers as to how to do that/where to find relevant examples of code? Is it fairly easy to do, or a complex job (aside from the issue of more testing being needed)?

Hi Jay.

The way it has been done in most (but not all of) the scenarios is to alter the amount of points available for the player to buy Unfixed units at the start of the scenario.

The points available on each difficulty level can be set in the scenario script function called FORCE_POINTS_CALLBACK(). If you look in the example scenario script SCENARIOTEMPLATE.BSF in the main directory of the game installation, this is in lines 156-183.

So all you have to to is place enough units on the player side for Easy level (the second from the left), or perhaps a few more than needed so that even on Easy the player gets some choice, and make enough of the units Unfixed so that you can set different amounts of points to purchase them for the middle 3 difficulty levels, which for the sake of discussion we will call Easy, Normal and Hard Modes. (Very Easy and Very Hard modes have built in troop quality modification effects, so you don't need to code additional points differences for those).

ii) A more general question: what are your feelings about adding non-historical (but realistic) scenarios, i.e. scenarios that aren't based on specific battles? I'm probably going to build a few of these for my own use, to explore e.g. defence in depth using extensive battlefield fortifications, encounters between cavalry forces only, and so on. Would these be the sort of thing you'd want posted on the forum, or would you prefer to stick to recorded battles only?

I would prefer scenarios at least loosely based on a historical action, though a fair amount of artistic licence can be accepted, especially when available information about an action is very limited. It must be possible to find historical actions fitting the situations you describe, even if very little information may be easily available about them. You can fill in the gaps.

There are plenty of historical battles between cavalry forces only - though except in the East, many were relatively small affairs - e.g. Powick Bridge. However, it is easy to adjust the representational scale so that you can have a reasonable number of units on each side, using

SetUniversalVar("StrengthMultiplier", percentofnormalrepresentationalscale);

See line 61 in SCENARIOTEMPLATE.BSF

[Miletus]

Thanks Richard