04-10-1999 14:31									#1
	ToT, Solution patch for Stacking Support Apolyton, pre-order Civilization IV

Solution to Stacked Combat in ToT.

I think that this could actually be fixed in a patch, here is my solution:

There are only a few questions to ask at the end of combat-

1. Who is the winner?
2. How many hit points do the units of the winner have left?

The resolution of who is the winner is either Attacker or Defender (1 or 0)
The scenario editor can edit hit points of units.

When two armies fight, a program need to be opened. It could be called, say, combat.exe.
This program looks at a few things:

1. What the attacker has in his army
2. What type of terrain the attacker is on
3. What the defender has in his army
4. What type of terrain the attacker is on
5. What additional imrpovements the defender has on his square, (such as fortification, city walls, etc.)

Combat.exe would the open a second civmap. It could be about a 20X20 map. The attacker could start on the left and the defender on the right. If the attacker was attacking from hills to grassland, have the left side of the map generated as 80% hills and the right side 80% grassland.

The combat would go until resolved, and here is an additional interesting addition. Units such as cannons, artillery, and howitzers would do this:
-At the beginning of every combat turn, a unit would be created on top of the cannon, which would be a missile (like a cruise missile) with appropriate range (movement), attack, hp, fp, and defense. You could move the cannon and then shoot it, and not have to move it face to face with the enemy. It could be done with every range type unit, including archers and rifleman even, just with shorter ranges and firepower.

Once combat is resolved, Combat.exe tells civ 2 which side won, and how many hit points each unit has.

The only part that I wouldn’t know how to program is how to stack units on the Civ2 map.

Microprose, could this be done? It would be a fine patch.

I think that you could use most of the existing features in the game to program this. The only one that would be difficult would be to get units to stack and move together (at the slowest movement of the slowest unit, BTW).

	04-10-1999 15:59									#2
	Full PM-box? Change here!

There is no way at this point in time that MPS is going to spend that much time on a patching job (and its not really a patch, that would be adding features to the game not originally intended).

1: AI would have to be tweaked ( a whole lot)
2: Memory code would have to be re-written
3: Base coding would have to be uprooted

The whole Idea belongs over in the Civ3 suggestion section. Introducing stacked combat now is simply impossible.

	05-10-1999 11:32									#3
	Support Apolyton buy from Amazon

Perhaps you're right. I thought there might be a possibility to do it, but I am not a programmer either, so I don't know how difficult things can be...