The issue with local deployments and overlapping bonuses comes up when you think about deploying. When players deploy an army to a territory that is part of two bonuses and they control both of those bonuses, the game would need to know which bonus you want to take the army from.
Imagine three territories: 1, 2, and 3. There’s a bonus A made up of territories 1 and 2, and a bonus B made up of territories 2 and 3. Both bonuses give 1 army per turn and therefore the player gets 2 income. Imagine a player controls all three territories (and therefore both bonuses), and then tries to deploy an army on territory 2. The game needs to know if it should allocate that army from bonus A or B.
There are a few strategies it could use to decide:
Strategy 1: It could just pick one at random. The problem is if it picks the wrong one, then the player can’t deploy to the other territory of that bonus. For example, it if picks bonus A and then the player decides to deploy their second army on territory on territory 1, the game wouldn’t let them and the player is confused and doesn’t know what’s going wrong.
Strategy 2: It could stop and ask the player which bonus they’re trying to deploy to. This is confusing to new players, weird, micro-managey, and breaks the flow of the game. It’s counter to WarLight’s idea of being a simple-to-play game when you confuse players with these kind of micro-management details.
Strategy 3: It could just pick one at random, then later if the player decides to deploy somewhere that would have been legal but isn’t because of our random choice, go back and re-allocate previously deployed armies to make the new deployment possible. I tried to write this algorithm back when local deployments was being introduced but unfortunately I could not get it working correctly and ultimately had to abandon it. It may still be possible to make this work but it needs more thought and development.
The issue with local deployments and overlapping bonuses comes up when you think about deploying. When players deploy an army to a territory that is part of two bonuses and they control both of those bonuses, the game would need to know which bonus you want to take the army from.
Imagine three territories: 1, 2, and 3. There’s a bonus A made up of territories 1 and 2, and a bonus B made up of territories 2 and 3. Both bonuses give 1 army per turn and therefore the player gets 2 income. Imagine a player controls all three territories (and therefore both bonuses), and then tries to deploy an army on territory 2. The game needs to know if it should allocate that army from bonus A or B.
There are a few strategies it could use to decide:
I agree this would be a huge improvement! I think the hierarchy of bonuses should be based on size, so that you allocate to the bonus with the fewest territories first. This would be intuitive in the common case of macro bonuses, as it would function the same as how anywhere does now, saving the most flexible allocation possible. On maps with complex semi overlapping bonuses, you could still get what you want, you just have to figure out the precedence. In the case of overlapping and equal size, could just default to alphabetical or something the user can figure out. Since this is an edge case compared with macro bonuses, I don't think this is that big a deal and the user can still get to anything they want!
anonymous
AdminFizzer
(WarLight Creator, WarLight)
responded
I agree this would be a huge improvement! I think the hierarchy of bonuses should be based on size, so that you allocate to the bonus with the fewest territories first. This would be intuitive in the common case of macro bonuses, as it would function the same as how anywhere does now, saving the most flexible allocation possible. On maps with complex semi overlapping bonuses, you could still get what you want, you just have to figure out the precedence. In the case of overlapping and equal size, could just default to alphabetical or something the user can figure out. Since this is an edge case compared with macro bonuses, I don't think this is that big a deal and the user can still get to anything they want!