Blade Edge

Transposed from Gaiiden’s Scroll

Well it’s been a busy week but I finally found some time today to get back to GC. I’ve been working for almost 3 straight hours now (4-7, I posted this later :P) and I finally have the basic Imperialism gameplay nailed down and functional. W00t! Like I said in my last entry I had wanted to wait till I had illustrations to help explain the concepts, now I do. So here we go!

Aiight this is the start of an Imperialism game. Since this is the first time a player is placing his peice, he can select any spot on the board (unless the map already has territories shaded)

Okay the two players have staked out their initial territory. From now on they can place their peices only in systems marked by their color

Here they’ve grubbed up the entire board. Note that their percentage scores are still at 0 – they haven’t started taking over one another yet. At this point Blue is trying to take out 9 of Red’s systems and Red is trying to take out 7 of Blue. It would seem that Red has the advantage but poor strategy can doom anyone

Blue strikes first, taking out 2 of Red’s systems. That nets him a gain of 2/9 = 22.2%. Since Red hasn’t taken over any of Blue’s systems, that mean Blue just advanced 2 systems into his territory. Now Red has 9 Blue systems to overcome. My how the tables have turned.

Red strikes back and takes over one of Blue. That means Blue has a gain into Red of 1/9 = 11.1%, as does Red into Blue. If Red were to take over another 2 of Blue’s planets, Blue’s gain would drop to 0, plus he’d lose a system to Red, so now he’d be fighting to overcome 10 Red systems.

Uh oh – Red isn’t looking too good…

And the proof is in the pudding. Despite the constant back-and-forth taking over of territory, when Blue’s finally wiped out Red his score is 100% (the victory condition was set for 100%)

Now it’s important to remember that in this game mode you’re not looking to conquer a certain percentage of the map, but a certain percentage of all other player’s combined territory. To illustrate this have a look at this shot

Here you see Red has cornered Blue. Note how some of the systems are not controlled by anyone.

Red takes out Blue (revenge!) and if you look at his score it is at 100%, because he has taken over 100% of his opponents territory.

Sooooo that’s the deal folks. Like I said earlier this is still basic implementation. I haven’t started taking into account controlling special systems yet. It’s nothing different just I have to insert some more code in order to get them to cooperate properly in this game mode.

After this I’ll be implementing the Blitzkreig game mode, which is easy because it’s just one of the 4 other game modes except you have a 2 min game timer and 5 sec turn timer. So when the game actually starts although you have Blitzkreig mode selected, internally the game will function as one of the other 4 game types with the game and turn timer restrictions (i.e. Domination and Equilibrium won’t have planet counts).

GC is being demoed this weekend at the NJ IGDA chapter meeting, so I expect to have these last two game modes implemented by then. After that it’s time to work on the AI. I expect to have the AI up and running by GDC. After that… well I have ideas but we’ll see. That’s far enough ahead for me right now.