I have another question..

[AMF]

douglas said:
Edit2: After further testing, I have established that which player can flee with impunity is determined not by player number, but by order of construction of the ships involved. The player whose earliest-built ship in the fleet was built last gets to move second. Actually, it depends on the internal ID number of the ship, but as long as no ships have been destroyed it makes no difference - not that that situation is likely to last in a real game.

Actually, that sort of makes sense from a programming point of view, but obviously not from a "realism" point of view. That doesn't mean I don't like it. I think it's, frankly, a perfect way to do it because one can't take advantage of it really...If you are really going to have simultaneous movement, you can't tie it to player order - you need something based on intrinsic unit abilities (like "speed" or "dexterity" of the ship, or experience rating or something), OR just plain old randomness. Build order sounds like a decent compromise to me, and I suspect that it's due to the game being written in C++ or some other object language, with each ship being a separate object. How else could one order them aside from build order? (I'm thinking while I'm typing here, so bear with me) The list is created and appended with new objects in the order they're built, no doubt...hmmm..I suppose you could have a ship-movement routine that did it differently, but I can't think of a good one off the top of my head that isn't essentially the same as the current, unless it was truly random...again, randomness isn't satisfying either...nevermind...I'm babbling...

[Fyron]

You need some sort of hash table that prioritizes the ships by their "iniative" rating, which depends on speed and other factors. Down with the list!

[dmm]

No, no, current way is realistic.

Age + guile always beats youth + skill.

[douglas]

dmm said:
No, no, current way is realistic.

Age + guile always beats youth + skill.

Actually, it's the newer ship that has the advantage here. Also, it's not quite by build order. Suppose you have ships 1, 2, 3, and 4. Ship 2 gets destroyed and another ship gets built. The new ship will not be ship 5; it will take 2's empty slot.

[Fyron]

But what if you have youth + skill + guile, huh? Beats old + guile any day.