Xconq bugs

[Stanley T. Shebs]

In article <896 at banzai-inst.SW.MCC.COM> wex at banzai-inst.SW.MCC.COM (Alan Wexelblat) writes:

>I was glad to see the new version of xconq; however, I am disappointed by a
>number of core-dump-producing bugs I have seen so far.  In particular,
>several of the periods do not work at all, simply core dumping without ever
>starting up (beirut & conquist in particular).

There will be a set of patches soon, although coredumps in beirut are news
to me.  What system are you using?

>It is also possible to produce a core dump by saving a game and restarting
>it with a different list of displays than the original, eg: [...]

The save/restore problem I just noticed myself for the first time today,
so that's something else to work on.

>I also get core dumps if I'm playing with another human and the other human
>starts to read the help screens when it's not his turn.  If the help screens
>(which are very nice, by the way) are still up when it becomes his turn,
>xconq gets an IOT, tries a panic save, and core dumps.

This is also one I haven't heard of before, but then nobody at Utah ever
seems to read the help screens. :-(

>I'm also disappointed at the stupidity of the robots.  They don't have any
>aggressiveness; for example, if I have a unit sitting next to one of their
>cities which contains units they don't even attack my unit.  In the starwars
>period they don't do *anything*.

Smart machines are incredibly difficult to write, and I think some weightings
got bolixed in the last round of experiments.  Even so, attacking someone
you're next to is not always a good idea.  In the current release, the
machine player forms units into groups, each with a specific goal.  They
seem to be a little too single-minded about the goal right now, that should
probably be weakened.  If anyone has implementable suggestions that work for
all periods, I'd love to hear about them...

To start to understand the workings of the machine players, use -D with two
machine players against each other, and run the output into a file.  Be sure
you have plenty of disk space available!

>It also seems odd that one infantry unit (standard period) can destroy two
>infantries and capture two armors just because they happened to be sitting
>in a town.  It ought to be harder to defeat units in a town, right?  And you
>ought not to be able to capture a town while there are functional enemies
>inside it.

There is a parameter called "protect" that you can use to make infantry
protect a town.  In the standard period, its only use is to reduce the chance
that hits on a city affect the occupants, but adding a line like

	10% cities [ i a ] protect

will do what you want.  I didn't put it in because I figured armies in town
were too busy partying to be of any use in defense. :-)  If you don't like
the settings in the standard period, they're very easy to change - that's
why I spent so much time on the period machinery!  Keep in mind that a lot
of the parameters in the standard period were honed after many hours of
playing, and that protection of occupants was hotly debated for some time;
but then I wouldn't expect everybody in the world to agree on the correct
values.

							stan shebs
							shebs at cs.utah.edu