From: ninja@halcyon.com (Jonathan Roy)
Subject: Re: GB5.1 posted onto scam.berkeley.edu
Organization: The 23:00 News and Mail Service
Date: Sat, 10 Oct 1992 15:19:34 GMT

 - There have been no game design changes yet. The game I hope to run
 - will have changes from the posted code, but I decided to post it
 - since it works (I have just tested it out).
 -
 - -Garrett
 
Sounds good! Some suggestions for improvement... Add the
threshloading and autoscraping code from HAP. If you don't know,
threshload will automaticly load x amount of fuel or res once the
current stock his 0 (or get's a non-enough-for-whatever result). This
is great for a's and Y' and K's, so you don't have to manually
restock them, and you don't have to pull alot of stock out of the
stock pile for them. (You simply draw 2 or 3 res or fuel per turn...)
 
Autoscrap was only implemented for Y's. The way it worked was, once
the sector's eff reached 100%, the Y automaticly scrapped at the
update. This made building hundreds of Domes much more realisitic.
(Autoscrap and threshloading for Y's is awesome!)
 
Some other ideas I wanted to throw out is things like:
 
 < = > for order/load/unload/fire commands. Such as:
 
load <ship> <commodity> <amount> <optional qualifier>
load p f 1 f<1    This loads 1 fuel into all pods with less than
                  1 fuel.
unload s c 5 c>5  This unloads 5 crew from any shuttle that has more
                  than five crew...
 
This sort of stuff is useful in a bunch of ways, but my specific
thoughts are for mesos. (Since that's what I usually play. :)
 
Something like:
 
repeat 50 build p 1,1
load p f 2
load p c
order p dest /Dest1
repeat 50 build p 1,1
load p f 3
load p c
order p dest /Dest2 f=3
 
And so on...
 
Another idea would be to allow your ships to automaticly fire on any
ship belonging to a race you are at war with... You could possibly
set the % chance to hit to wait for, and the amount of d to fire...
This would even out, slightly, the massive advantage someone has by
being on at the update, if their enemy can't make it...
 
--
 
There's some other ideas floating around out there is the vacuum of
my mind, but I can't seem to recall them right now. ;) I'll mention
them another time... Autoscrap and Threshloading would be a great
improvment though... 
 
Does GB 5.1 still use morale for the Vict chart? It should definatly
use VP's instead... If you lose alot of battles right before the
final update, you place really low, even if you have a HUGE empire...
(ie: Definatly the largest, best, most powerful empire.)
 
What do you know, just remembered another idea. "Automove".
What this would be like is:

order Y automove 6
order K automove 1

And so on. For a Y, once the eff reached 100% it would atuoscrap,
and then automaticly build a Y on the space next to it, defined on the
order line.. In this case, teh square to the right. (Obviously, it'd
only build a Y if the sector's eff was under 100%.)

Automove for a K would make the K sit on a single sector until it
was 100 fert, and then move it one space, repeating the cycle. 
I like doing this more than just having Ks wrap at teh edges,
but it's too much of a hassle to survey and order, then unorder, each
K one at a time.

That's about it. Keep up the work Garrett! :)

-- 
  F F  Jonathan Roy, Vice President, Free Access Foundation.    GEnie: J.ROY18
   A   Mail faf@halcyon.com for information, or FTP to halcyon.com:  /pub/faf/
  F F  "A server is a terrible thing to waste."    Internet: ninja@halcyon.com
 "Everything that has transpired has done so according to my design." - _RotJ_