17-10-2001 22:24									#1
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This thread is a continuation of some issues discussed in Countdown to D5. Since I feel that a full resolution of the issues will not involve D5 I thought it better to have a separate thread.

From Mark:

quote: 1. The econ hierarchy now works Directly using the govt hierarchy. I made those changes a few weeks ago with the GovernmentEntity change we went over. I may be missing your meaning here... since at present the only linkage is that each GovernementEntity has an Economy object associated with it. It may be done poorly in the new fashion, but I agree the old econ parallel hierarchy should be history, and from now on economy objects should attached directly to, and derived from the Civilization, Province, or MapSquare they're associated with

In general I agree with the simplified structure that Mark proposed. On the other hand, it doesn't answer the main problem I had. This is that there is no mechanism for a province (or even any part of it) to change hands permanently.

quote: 2. I don't have time or brainpower to work on the code tonite, so I will just ship it off to you. I brought back Civ.addTerritory for my own uses, and also modified Province.setControllingCiv and MapSquare.setControllingCiv. It seemed to work, but I think its probably best to just refactor the ownership hierarchy. One thing I am sure of, is that adding a square should be done at the civ level, because the civ will need to choose which province (or a new one) it wants to put the square in. This will become important when we go to a fully-populated map as opposed to the cities-in-a-void we have now.

It is my view that, for D5, we leave it the way it is now.

I have modified the AI so that a conquering army will always leave a garrison, no production will take place, and the mini scenarios we have provided do not really need anything more complicated. This, in turn, means that we don't need to fix it just yet.

quote: I wanted to mention a further fact that's relevant to my post above. I have thought that it would be useful for the player and AI to have an intermediate level between province and the whole civ. Such Regions would be groups of provinces, and would allow for management of economic and governmental concerns at a level more detailed than the civ, but not down to the province level. One quick example would be to divide your civ's provinces into the core of the civilization, and the marches. Or core, border, and recent conquests could be a three-way division. (Border being long-held provinces but that were on the border with a likely enemy. This could allow higher levels of defense spending in the border region without needing to change commands for all the provinces in it.

Personally, I would add the extra command level between Province and map square and call it "District". These districts could change hands quite readily, and I can easily imagine a method of doing so.

One of the difficulties we have is a more general one of command structure versus physical existence which I will comment on in a later post, since it has wider implpications.

quote: The possible future inclusion of such a feature is IMO a further reason to try and use the GovernmentEntity hierarchy more in refactoring the code. That way if we do go the regions route it would be trivial to stick in another layer in the future. Yes, Gary, I know you hate coding with 'futures' in mind .

I would add the other layer now, so it wouldn't be a future.

Cheers

	17-10-2001 23:24									#2
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This post is my real reason for starting this thread.

Command and control appears in two areas of Clash. There is the command and control of the land itself, and there is command and control of military units (and other possible future non-military units).

The way the system is stuctured at present, there is no distinction between actual physical objects and the control structure. Thus the control structure for a map square is a province that is also treated as a physical object (and actually is). However, the command and physical object are in no way separated.

Similary, the present structure for military units (which, to my everlasting grief are also task forces!) which have a physical existence (and hence, importantly, a location) is that they can be grouped into task forces. A task force is also treated as a physical unit, causing quite a bit of confusion in the requirement to make sure things like location match up. Although the code allows task forces to contain task forces (other than units) there is absolutely no provision in the ai or gui for this to ever happen. Also, task forces are restricted to a single map square, so the multi-level task forces have no utility at all. There is no provision for an overall command, or any command structure greater than about the army level (provided the army is all in one square).

The governement system is not as bad, in that the physical nature of a province is much vaguer. Its only impact at present is that there is a province economy object. The only thing this does is accumulate resources over the individual map squares, in order to build things too large for a single square. In effect, this is a command function, and does not imply a physical existence for the province, though presumably it needs a capital at which the new unit (or whatever) is built. Similar remarks apply to the civilization level economy (which also has a treasury).

The comments above are just a summary of the present position.

My personal preference would be to keep physical things apart from command structures.

In the government case, I would allow two civilizations to "own" the same province. The amount of actual control they have will depend entirely on the number of squares they control. As the preponderance shifts, so does real ownership, until one civilization controls all of the province, in which case the other civilization's province object is deleted. This mechanism provides a good basis for partisan warfare, and insurrection or civil war.

A civilization has things unrelated to geography, which are properly part of its nature. I would also give it a command object which consists, essentially, a list of provincial commands as described above. The civilization would have no physical, territory related existence, except perhaps a capital, which could be changed at will.

At the map square level, I would have a command object which includes such factors as loyalty to a civilization, probability of a particular civilization being able to levy taxes or raise troops. There would be no no specific "ownership", primarily because I have difficulty in understanding exactly what ownership, in this context, means.

Occupation of a square by units of a civilization will obviously have a considerable effect on the command object for that square.

Turning to the military side.

The way the code is structured at present is designed to use extension (a Java mechanism) to provide similar services for essentially different entities. This mainly involves the combat related vales (attack strength, etc) and aggregation issues (addArmy, etc). A unit (a physical object) needs to be able to produce an attack strength when required. But so does a command (brigade, division, army, etc), which is merely a paper aggregation of physical units - something which can be radically altered by a written order which changes nothing at all on the ground.

A consequence of this approach is that a lot of effort is spent making sure that things match up - that a task force is in the same square as its components. Also, units and task forces are treated in the same way (as I said before, units are task forces). Unfortunately, units are NOT task forces, as you find out if you try and add another unit to one. So the code is full of things like "if (army instanceof Unit)" which is a Java idiom to find out what we are dealing with. Such things are completely unnecessary.

I would restructure this system in a number of ways. First, I would use interfaces. I would have a CombatData interface to provide things like attackStrength. The CombatData interface would have two implementations (not using extension). One of the implementations (ElementCombatData) would actually list the values of the attackStrength. The other implementation (ForceCombatData) would have a Collection (excuse the Java jargon) as a parameter in its constructor, and would add up, average, or take a maximum or minimum over the collection as appropriate.

I didn't mention that Units are actually aggregations of Elements (which is why they are task forces...). They use the same list for their elements which the task forces use for their units. This causes untold grief when trying to work with military units.

The structure I would have is to do away with task forces entirely, and have Units as the only visible physical representation of a military. Elements are not visible to the player, but are there, and would include a field ElementCombatData. The units would have a field ForceCombatData. Only units would ever have a location, thus removing the burden of making sure locations match up.

I would completely separate the command structure from the physical units. However, each command structure would also have a ForceCombatData field which does the accumulations over whatever level is the next lower.

At the bottom level I would have a special type of command object which has command of a single unit. This would include the unit's orders, if any. Each unit would traverse up the command tree and carry the first set of orders it found. Thus a command could tell all the controlled units to move together (and not get scattered).

It may be that these command objects implement other interfaces. Refactoring will reveal what is required here. In any case, extension should be avoided.

There may be, for the sake of easier player understanding, an argument for giving each command level a name (Brigade for the lowest level, then Division, Army, Army Group, Front, General Staff, whatever).

	18-10-2001 04:38									#3
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Hi Gary:

I agree with a lot of what you say above, and have some disagreements that I'll note when I get the chance. The reason I'm writing now is that it looks like you're putting two pretty much distinct topics together, and each of them is going to involve a fair amount of discussion. While things are still relatively simple I propose that you start two new distinct threads on "Military Forces Command and Control" and "Governmental Command and control" or whatever you want to name 'em. If like the idea enough to do that, then we can have more focused discussions in each, and I can just delete this one.

-Mark

	18-10-2001 06:44									#4
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What they have in common is the notion of separating the command structure from the physical object.

Another characteristic that they have in common is the notion of orders. We already have an orders interface which could be used for governmental orders as well as for military orders (it might need a slight amount of tidy up, but it would be minor).

However, I have no objection to splitting the thread.

Cheers.

	18-10-2001 13:05									#5
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I'll precise a little how I envision(ned) the mil model when starting coding it:
There is a General interface (name may not be good) which is a Command interface, all the rest being Physical stuff.
What you say is basically TaskForce mustn't be physical but Command. That would reduce the number of tests in the mil model.
I also envisionned Army as an interface at the beginning but decided to make it an abstract class later on, probably out of laziness.
I can refactor things a bit, (though when is another question).
The General interface could be renamed into Command. Its sole method currently was to give orders to the armies. It is quite unused by now.
Mostly, all abstract methods of Army could go into one or more interfaces. Additionnally, some methods there are pointless. I will look at the code sometime soon and make a proposal as to how to refactor things.

	19-10-2001 05:58									#6
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OK, first my comments on the geographic command and control issues. I will post on the military stuff later.

I guess we can separate physical and control features in the model. I agree with Gary's statement that the Province and Civilization really are mostly control items at the moment anyway. So the only place where the physical and control elements seriously collide is in a MapSquare. I would like to see an architecture plan for what you (Gary) plan to do before I give a final agreement, but I don't have any real problem with the current MapSquare being split into two objects, one representing terrain, and the other control. I'm not sure which one would handle the economy though... The means of production are a physical thing, and so are the people, but there are certainly economic orders associated with it.

However, I disagree strongly with the contention that there should be no civ the ownership of a square. Here is the relevant quote from Gary:

quote: At the map square level, I would have a command object which includes such factors as loyalty to a civilization, probability of a particular civilization being able to levy taxes or raise troops. There would be no no specific "ownership", primarily because I have difficulty in understanding exactly what ownership, in this context, means. Occupation of a square by units of a civilization will obviously have a considerable effect on the command object for that square.

IMO ownership simply means that a given civilization has de facto physical control of the MapSquare, whether the people approve of it or not. The physical control can come from troops directly on the square, nearby enough that the people, if inclined to do so, would not revolt, or other factors. Ownership does not mean that the square won't erupt into revolt the very next turn, only that the civilization holds the balance of control their on this very turn. Ownership also implies that there is some authority that has at least nominal local control and derives in some way from the central (civ) government. (Although this might not be rigorously true for a feudal civilization.)

Without an ownership designation, complicated calculations would have to take place every single time we want to know "what civ does that square belong to?" The calculations would have to involve troops immediately present, troops nearby, capability of the central government to project power (and the will to use it to crush opposition), adjacency of nearby similar ethnic groups, and the list goes on and on. So I simply cannot accept the lack of an ownership identification for each square without very good reasons that have addressed the problems I bring up. (And any I can come up with in the future )

Gary and I also had some e-mail correspondence on these issues, which I will reproduce here so others can see what we said.

[Mark] I don't much see the advantage in your "Districts"
[Gary] I have reconsidered this and agree with you.


[Mark] Two civs being able to 'own' bits of one province -- interesting, need to discuss pros and cons.

[Gary] I think it will actually tidy up a lot of things. It is also in line with my "separate the command and physical" crusade.

[Mark] Well, I don't much care about that but what sways me is that provinces can be more permanent on the map. So Germany and France can keep fighting over Alsace-Lorraine and the Rhineland and the names and shapes are constant. The way I did it, you would naturally want to absorb a few squares into and existing prov and the shapes in wartime would be forever morphing. More constancy -> more player feel of connection to the world -> more immersion -> more Fun! (IMO) That's why I"m coming around to your idea.

And I like this last idea more the more I think about it! There are some complications, but I think they are well worth it IMO for the reasons I cited above.

	20-10-2001 01:28									#7
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The first point I would like to make is that it wouldn't be a bad idea to restrict this thread to Government command and control (rather than military). Apart from the "separate physical and control" they don't have much in common. So I will continue my comments on military command and control in the military thread.

My comments on Mark's post:

quote: I guess we can separate physical and control features in the model. I agree with Gary's statement that the Province and Civilization really are mostly control items at the moment anyway. So the only place where the physical and control elements seriously collide is in a MapSquare. I would like to see an architecture plan for what you (Gary) plan to do before I give a final agreement, but I don't have any real problem with the current MapSquare being split into two objects, one representing terrain, and the other control. I'm not sure which one would handle the economy though... The means of production are a physical thing, and so are the people, but there are certainly economic orders associated with it.

The control object is the de facto ownership object. The only divergence I have with the present system is that two civilization can have a control object for the same square, depending on the influence involved. I have no difficulty with the concept that one civilization has economic control of a square, another has military control, and a third has religious control. That level of complexity is unlikely to occur, but it could.

quote: However, I disagree strongly with the contention that there should be no civ the ownership of a square. ... edited out ... IMO ownership simply means that a given civilization has de facto physical control of the MapSquare, whether the people approve of it or not. The physical control can come from troops directly on the square, nearby enough that the people, if inclined to do so, would not revolt, or other factors. Ownership does not mean that the square won't erupt into revolt the very next turn, only that the civilization holds the balance of control their on this very turn. Ownership also implies that there is some authority that has at least nominal local control and derives in some way from the central (civ) government. (Although this might not be rigorously true for a feudal civilization.)

If this is the case, the ownership object merely has a boolean which is true if the civilization "owns" the square. false otherwise. It should still be an object, not a field.

quote: Without an ownership designation, complicated calculations would have to take place every single time we want to know "what civ does that square belong to?" The calculations would have to involve troops immediately present, troops nearby, capability of the central government to project power (and the will to use it to crush opposition), adjacency of nearby similar ethnic groups, and the list goes on and on.

How does having a field recording the result of these calculations make the calculations unnecessary? It is very much my experience that this field will have to be updated every time something changes. It is far, far better to do the calculation when it is needed, rather than every time something changes.

On the other hand, if there is simple a yes/no ownership, then its mechanics will need to be very carefully specified. What makes it change?

quote: So I simply cannot accept the lack of an ownership identification for each square without very good reasons that have addressed the problems I bring up. (And any I can come up with in the future )

I have not suggested that there should be no concept of ownership, simply that it is a much more comlex matter than a simple "this civilization owns this square - maybe - if the wind is in the west and Mars is in aquarius, and the coder remembered to change things".

Cheers

	20-10-2001 07:43									#8
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quote: Originally posted by Gary Thomas The control object is the de facto ownership object. The only divergence I have with the present system is that two civilization can have a control object for the same square, depending on the influence involved. I have no difficulty with the concept that one civilization has economic control of a square, another has military control, and a third has religious control. That level of complexity is unlikely to occur, but it could.

This just seems going too far to me. If as you say ownership needs to be an object then I guess I can live with that. But when exactly is there going to be the case that one civ has military control of a square but lets another civ build its military there? A case of allied troops doesnt' count, because control would be retained by the original civ.

quote: How does having a field recording the result of these calculations make the calculations unnecessary? It is very much my experience that this field will have to be updated every time something changes. It is far, far better to do the calculation when it is needed, rather than every time something changes.

Obviously if there is calculation involved the calculations must be done sometime. I don't understand how you thought I was implying that my way would eliminate the need to ever calculate anything . What I want to avoid is those calculations having to be done potentially 10 times or more in a single turn for the same square. Control would change from two possible sources: 1. Military Conquest, and, 2. Revolt. (The calculations for change of ownership for #1 are fairly trivial) Calculations would be done at most once per turn (for #2) under specified circumstances -- like the populace revolts or is near it. It would be done during the Govt/Riots phase. Your way, every single tick of the movement system the military potential influencing the square could drive a recalculation. Your way will better reflect reality in some circumstances, but I think you are wasting a lot of clocks to do it that way.

I just can't see the advantage of calculating ownership for every square in view every time the map is updated! Which is what your way seems to require if I understand it.

quote: I have not suggested that there should be no concept of ownership, simply that it is a much more comlex matter than a simple "this civilization owns this square - maybe - if the wind is in the west and Mars is in aquarius, and the coder remembered to change things".

A square just isn't much territory, and I'd prefer having my complexity elsewhere. Clash is already 5x more complicated than anything out there . I think between military conquest and the Riots model, square ownership is already complicated enough.

Cya, Mark

	20-10-2001 16:34									#9
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I've reconsidered on the square ownership thing. I believe in triage, and I don't think this is a vital issue we must get right the first time, and of course yours could be the right way anyway . Just go ahead and handle the square ownership in the manner you like. We will work out the specs you need for how to do it when we need to. I'd say we should just start with a crude version and then work up from that is something more nuanced becomes needed.

	20-10-2001 22:52									#10
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Actually, the discussion drifted a bit from what I originally had in mind. All I was really pushing for was a "degree of influence value" ranging from 0 (no connection) to 1 (absolute control) for each civilization for each square. In fact it is unlikely that more than two, or at most three, civilizations will be competing for a square.

The value of the index will depend on history, culture, and military presence, and maybe other factors. However, merely plonking a phalanx in a square would not give ownership. On the other hand, doing that will play havoc with the previous owner's control.

Cheers

	21-10-2001 01:06									#11
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quote: Originally posted by Gary Thomas However, merely plonking a phalanx in a square would not give ownership.

why not? it is a long and honored tradition. While it is the sole military there (a big proviso) it can force the people to do whatever it wants, at least whatever they are willing to do to avoid being slaughtered or taking to the hills if those are available. The economy will be adversely affected if the people are working under duress. Is that what what your 'influence' value does? But the civ that owns the phalanx can IMO make demands of the economy, and is likely to get something like what they demand.

	21-10-2001 01:41									#12
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My real point is that the influence of the previous owner does not go to zero. A single unit, for example, trying to exert control over 100 km x 100 km is going to have their work cut out.

More to the point, can the phalanx immediately start building units there?

Cheers

	21-10-2001 01:48									#13
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quote: Originally posted by Gary Thomas More to the point, can the phalanx immediately start building units there?

Yes! But of course taking people who may well not agree with you, and outfitting them with armor and long very-pointy sticks can have its disadvantages...

Anyway, I think we're enough in agreement to table this for now. I will, as I said above, let you try it your way, and we'll just see how it works. Hopefully I'll have to eat my words .

	21-10-2001 01:49									#14
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That is a sneaky way of saying: "if you care about it so much, do the work, then we will see".

Cheers

	28-10-2001 06:54									#15
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I am now really happy about the command and control system in the military model. Time to have a crack at the governmental side!

I tend to start from the basic rule that there should be no duplication of information, and that entities should not have to know anything about things that they don't need to know about.

At least the military stuff is now completely removed from the geography - map squares no longer know what military units are there.

The present system for government and economics is something like this:

Map square knows about

• a map square economy
  
• a controlling civ
  
• a controlling province
  

	28-10-2001 07:21									#16
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Hey Gary:

First, a big request! Please don't Do any of this unless you let me know you are going to, and I have sent you my latest econ code. Otherwise we will have one of those code change collisions I will be working most of my day Sunday I hope, and will send you whatever I have Sunday evening, and then you can have several days to rearrange things if you want since I'll be unable to do serious coding for several days at that point.

I don't have any problems with the basic plan. We've discussed much of this before...

I'd say definitely put Regions in at this point. I don'k know for sure if we'll need them or not, but I expect they will be a big help.

I can't think of any obvious objections to the MapSquare being isolated idea. But please think about the yet-to-come ecology model before making this final. Then again if its a problem we can just connect them more directly agian if necessary.

	28-10-2001 23:28									#17
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quote: First, a big request! Please don't Do any of this unless you let me know you are going to, and I have sent you my latest econ code. Otherwise we will have one of those code change collisions I will be working most of my day Sunday I hope, and will send you whatever I have Sunday evening, and then you can have several days to rearrange things if you want since I'll be unable to do serious coding for several days at that point.

I will not be making any changes at all to the D5 code. However, I have been changing D6 code (you understand that both of these are in the ClashD5 game directory, in line with one of my earlier suggestions). At present my code doesn't compile because of the very matter we are discussing here. I hope to have it all tidied up in the next day or so.

quote: I'd say definitely put Regions in at this point. I don'k know for sure if we'll need them or not, but I expect they will be a big help.

See my next post on this thread.

quote: I can't think of any obvious objections to the MapSquare being isolated idea. But please think about the yet-to-come ecology model before making this final. Then again if its a problem we can just connect them more directly agian if necessary.

The ecology model has no direct effect on a map square. A map square is exactly that - a notional area on a map. It has a reference to a TerrainData object which is rather carefully designed to be in line with the ecology model. When the ecology model has components other than purely descriptive, that can be readily incorporated.

I will describe my final suggestions for implementation government control in another post.

Cheers

	28-10-2001 23:34									#18
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Deep cogitation has led me to the conclusion the the Civilization class should not be part of the government chain, but should stand above it, and include a highest level government object in the same way that it includes a highest level military command.

I also think that the number of levels of government (and their names) should be set by the scenarion, in exactly the same way that they will be done in the military. They should also be modifiable as technology and empire size changes. There is not a huge justification for Province and Regional governments when the civilization consists of a single village.

Cheers

	29-10-2001 00:32									#19
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I hope you'll forgive me if I don't accept 'deep cogitation' as a sufficient reason to change around a major class like Civilization... Can you give me some better reasons?

I will hope the change you're going to in the govt area can be done without massive bugs. I guess the econ model will be one test case of how the new sytsem works!

BTW I will send you the current econ code in about seven hours, and then you can go ahead and integrate and shuffle to your heart's content. Do you want to do the game.econ type changes too while you have pretty much the whole code? (Need to hear from Laurent on this).

I will copy the previous para to the D6 planning thread where I guess it really belongs.

I actually have moved all my code to a ClashD6 dir already, but that's a trivial change. I'll just replace it with the new stuff when available.

Let me know what else you need to discuss before the drums crash and the cymbals clang.

	29-10-2001 03:19									#20
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My reasons are that Government is only part of a civilization. All the other aspects of the civilization (culture, religion, military and so forth) are not part of government. Government is just one part of the whole thing, and should, therefore, have its own class. I do not like the way in which the Civilization class, which has a very real and important function, is being contorted. If the Civilization is synonymous with the Government, it is equally synonymous with High Command and should implement the Command interface also.

I am not actually planning to change the Civilization much at all, just add another field referring to an object that implements the GovernmentEntity interface.

The reason for this is that I would prefer that all the government objects have the same structure, since their behaviour is similar. This, incidentally, is what the economics classes do already.

Without a detailed examination, I would think that the only change to Civilization is to make a Government object implement GovernmentEntity, and have lower levels of government link to that object.

The real change will be to Province. It becomes just another Government object with a name determined by the scenario ("Duchy" or "Khanate" or "Colony" for example, or all three). It contains a list, not of squares, but of the lower level of government objects.

There will also be a government object attached to a single MapSquare, which will be the part that implements GovernmentEntity.

Again, following the principle of separating control from physical objects.

It also gives much more flexibility in reassigning the geographic component of provinces.

Cheers

	29-10-2001 03:37									#21
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Ok, thanks for the explanation, I'm fine with all the positions in your post. I was picturing a masive wrending of the current Civ class into multiple smaller Classes, which is why I wanted more details!

	17-02-2002 04:51									#22
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All the administration material is now coded into the D7 code. So I thought I would hijack this thread (I suppose I am entitled, since I started it) on a closely related topic.

In the D7 code, every square is in one of two states: unowned (independent if you like) or part of a province.

The handling of squares, in both categories, is pretty much in hand.

The problem arises when some obnoxious general invades and occupies a square in your province (or maybe you do the same to him).

What exactly happens? The square is still in the province, which you own. But it is a bit unreasonable to claim that you control it, if Hannibal has his entire army there, and you have no troops at all. On the other hand, if he controls it, what province does it belong to?

Are there any opinions on this subject? There better be, because until it is resolved, D7 will stall.

Cheers

	17-02-2002 05:26									#23
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Hi Gary,

As far as I can recall we adopted your preferred method. Specifically, of keeping provinces static for long periods of time, and when squares change hands they remain in the same province but get their orders for from a different "chain of command". In this case a different set of provincial orders put in by side A who now controls the square, rather than side B that used to control the square. Control is determined at the square level by some TBD procedure.

Pending further discussion I think it is sufficient to have the last civ that had an uncontested military presence in the square being the one that "controls" it. That is essentially the definition that has been used up until now. This may not be the ultimate solution, but I believe it can take us quite far. The riots model will have the people eventually rebel if there is no military presence, and they don't like who they are under. We need to figure out what geographic scope a garrison can have for suppressing rioting and other important factors. But that's a discussion for the social model...

I have just noticed that in a post above I stated that although simple military control as described immediately above is my preference, you can go ahead and do something more nuanced if you'd like. So if you want, go ahead and use whatever your preferred approach is, just let us know what the details are. And I'm assuming it won't ignore obvious military reality too much

Is this sufficiently detailed, or do you need more?

OK with everyone? Nobody objected to my previous statement that Gary could try what he wanted to...

	17-02-2002 06:34									#24
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quote: As far as I can recall we adopted your preferred method. Specifically, of keeping provinces static for long periods of time, and when squares change hands they remain in the same province but get their orders for from a different "chain of command"

Nope, my preferred method was for provinces to be completely arbitrary and at the control of the player or AI. On the other hand, my map square level administration was more in terms of influence, ranging from zero to a hundred percent, so a map square could have more than one administration. To do that, we had to divide map square economy up, so that there were only government related things in it, since each square could now have more than one economy, or, alternatively, ensure that the map square economy was independent of the administration in question, in which case numerous adminstrations could interact with the same economy.

Making the modifications to MapSquareEconomy turned out to be beyond me, so we now have a situation where MapSquareEconomy controls the square, and a MapSquareAdministration is the contact between governement and MapSquare economy, but each MapSquareEconomy has a single administration link, and hence a single owner.

So it isn't my model! The model I had in mind would have coped with the present situation very easily, but my control model doesn't fit in with the economic model.

One solution we could adopt, now that the administration system is very flexible is to call Hannibal a province, give him an administration, and attach any squares he captures to it, reverting when the Romans re-occupy the square.

But definitely, long lasting provinces was never my idea or preference.

Cheers

	17-02-2002 08:18									#25
	Enter the AD-FREE zone

Occupied squares or squares with riots going on should be "problem areas" and those who share a common owner (civs, tribes)and occupier (civs, rebels, pirates, nomads) should be united under a provisionary "military administration", meaning no public spending except mlitary infrastructure (but no unit creation) and no taxes. All policies should be set by "martial law" by the ruler with the appropriate PAFs however (and a factor for suppression of them via the presence of occupation forces - even in internal problem areas like rebel provinces). Tolerance against the "martial law" should deteriorate as turns pass, leading to the need of attaching the occupied lands into the civ, by negotiating a peace treaty with the owner or by occupying a whole province, in which case you "negotiate with the local authorities" which means that they get attached to your civ, while still remaining a problem area for a few turns. In the later case, if the original civ reoccupies part of the territory, it becomes or remains a problem area, while in the first case it will be normal.

	17-02-2002 10:19									#26
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Gary:

Sorry I misrepresented your point of view on province fluidity. I either misunderstood it long ago, or achieved misunderstanding through the passage of time.

It appears to me that if for the moment we assume influence is either 0 or 100% in a square then the economy will work fine as is. I am hoping this will work ok with your administration code. If not I would be surprised if it can't be made so fairly easily. Essentially any map square's economy can be pointed to by a Roman and a Carthaginian administrative object, so long as only one of them can give orders, and the other one understands it has no power of taxation etc. there. I'm certainly not going to have the opportunity to redo the map square econ in the next week, and frankly think dividing influence on a square level is just too much realism to be worth the effort. Even Having the map square have an economy is probably too computationally expensive in the long run, and as we have discussed it may need to be bumped up to the provincial level. But we can figure that one out later.

For purposes of the scenario, and given my limited understanding of your admin system, and assuming you can set things up as I just outlined (0 or 100% influence) you could:

1. Do as I did in D4 and just make provinces on the fly. Something like 10-20 contiguous squares max for a province and after that you start a new one. Starting provinces are put in by the scenario, and everything else in terms of province structure is made up as it goes...
or
2. Start with the whole map already divided into Carthaginian and Roman provinces. When Hannibal conquers a Roman square it automatically goes into the pre-configured Carthaginian province, and gets orders that way. This has the advantage of getting names historically correct, but is more work.
or alternatively
3. We could start with limited geographical provincial structure for both sides, but that cover the world between them, and assume for the moment that each side will keep the same provincial structure the other had upon conquest. So the first Gallic square that H conquers you can create a C province of Gaul, and put that square in it. Or a mixture of 1. and 3. is possible. The rules would of course would be further refined in the future.

It seems to me any of the approaches above can work for the interim, and in the meantime we can think on how we want to handle it in general.

Cya,

Mark

	17-02-2002 18:21									#27
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quote: Originally posted by Gary Thomas ...in which case numerous adminstrations could interact with the same economy. [currently] each MapSquareEconomy has a single administration link, and hence a single owner.

To try and clarify a bit what I said directly above. I believe that it can be worked such that the top of you quote is true by having a many-administrations to one econonomy relationship. However, at least for the forseeable future, one and only one of the administrations is active. The active one's orders are pursued fully by the local economy, the other admin orders are ignored. That would change the "currently" part of the quote, and allow for the provincial system I think you wanted, albeit without the subtle influence effects.

	17-02-2002 23:49									#28
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I think I am following what you propose. Do you mean that we have, in effect, duplicate provincial administrations for provinces that are partly occupied, and swap the squares back and forth?

The problem with that is that so much government stuff is in the MapSquareEconomy class. There will be quite a lot of coding to achieve this. Certainly, if the economy stuff is moved to the provincial level, life will be hugely easier.

Cheers

	18-02-2002 00:20									#29
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quote: Originally posted by Gary Thomas I think I am following what you propose. Do you mean that we have, in effect, duplicate provincial administrations for provinces that are partly occupied, and swap the squares back and forth?

That's one solution. I thought it was what you wanted until recently. Arbitrarily arranged provinces are really fine by me. I do think it is a good feature to have fought-over provinces retain nominal pre-fight borders. Whether this will be great or confusing for the player I really don't know. At this early stage perhaps its simplest just to have provinces other than the starting ones arranged on-the-fly by whomever takes them as in 1 above.

quote: The problem with that is that so much government stuff is in the MapSquareEconomy class. There will be quite a lot of coding to achieve this. Certainly, if the economy stuff is moved to the provincial level, life will be hugely easier.

All I think the Economy needs is a way to find where the chain-of-command that owns it is, and be able to look up territory using it. That should be done Directly thru administration. I do not understand what other than the administration look-up needs to be changed to get this working. Please tell me.

	19-02-2002 11:47									#30
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If the square changes ownership, at the very least the GovtEconOrders in that square will change, as, I expect will PublicSector, which is tied to a square, and possibly other similar things.

Cheers