Tides of Conquest - Successors Mod

[SteveD64]

Thanks, I actually went ahead and wrote my own code for it. I'm learning this thing! I'm now on an operational Pike & Shot project. Here's a snippet of what it looks like so far:



That soldier holding the musket is a garrison unit, if there's a garrison present then a battle is fought. If there's no garrison then it's an autovictory in the province and it falls to the attacking player, which prompted my how-to question. Needless to say I'm stripping away a lot from the original Tides and adding my own. It's versatile in many ways!

Now I'm trying to figure out an easy to implement siege system.

[Nijis]

That looks very cool. Can't wait to see how it turns out!

[SteveD64]

It's coming along slowly.

Question - how did you test the random events? My only idea would be to add one event at a time and somehow work the conditions to fire it every turn and then add another event (while disabling the first one) etc until you've tested them all.

Is there an easier way?

[Nijis]

Not that I can think of. The autorun buttons allow you to run 50-100 years fairly quickly.

In another variation of the game, I added this in Game1.Update:
if (Keyboard.GetState().GetPressedKeys().Contains(Keys.Space))
{
CurrentGlobalHistory.TurnsOfAutorun = 0;
}

This means that you can press "space" when you see the event fire and interrupt the autorun. You can also insert CurrentGlobalHistory.TurnsOfAutorun = 0 into the text directly where the event is.

You're probably aware of this Visual Studio feature, but describe it just in case you aren't, as it's extremely useful. You can click on the gray line to the left of your code, just left of the line numbers, to add a breakpoint. When the game's run comes to that line, it stops. You can resume with F5 or keep going line by line with F10. You can also set conditions (ie, yourFavoriteVariable == 3) for the break line to trigger.

[SteveD64]

You're probably aware of this Visual Studio feature

Don't ever assume this

I have never coded a line or used Visual Studio before this. It's good to know! thanks.

[Nijis]

All right then!

Well, just to supplement that, when you get the game to pause at your breakpointed line of code, you can mouse over variables in the same function to see what they currently are.

And, you can have the call stack shown on-screen. (Do this by Debug => Windows => Call Stack, though for some reason this only works after you hit Start Debug.) This allows you to see which functions are triggering which functions, and you can go backwards to see what the variables in those functions are set to.

[SteveD64]

Thanks for the tips!

This map is just about done.

[Nijis]

That's really nice! The style looks a bit like the Here I Stand card-driven GMT games.

[SteveD64]

Thanks. The game board is based on the game board from "1631" (Vae Victis magazine) with a few minor changes. The art (such as it is) is mine. It's a little gray so I'm going to tweak some colors.

[SteveD64]

Oh and if you're ever up for doing some simple AI work down the road let me know, Nijis. That is my biggest hurdle so far.