kevin@perle.UUCP (Kevin Pickard) (03/08/91)
To quote from the 'bt' documentation: >Swamp hexes (' S ') are the armpit of Broken Throne! Troops are very >unhappy here; the swamp will often gobble one army of the advancing >force. Swamps have no population, and unless in the player's way, aren't >worth slogging through. Troops in a swamp are at a 10% DISadvantage, >both attacking and defending! Therefore if you want to win just attack Cities, Towns, Forests and Mountains from adjoining Swamps. Confused? I sure was, but it worked, so I looked at the code. There is a bug in the code where it computes loses in com- bat. The probability test is backwards resulting in all terrain biases being reversed. The result is that if you attack using the worst scenario (ie. from a Swamp to a City) you end up with a 75% chance of *winning* each individual army combat. Not bad for a bunch of soldiers trudging around in the mud and muck. Anyway, the fix is easy. The following segment of code is from btserver.c (around line 265). It is shown here as it should be. The original code segment had the 'unitsa' and 'unitsb' variables within the if statement reversed. while ((unitsa>0) && (unitsb>0)) { if (weight>((rand()/32) % 100)) { /* In search of good random #s! */ unitsb--; } else { unitsa--; } } The above change allows the game to work the way it is documented. Have fun. -- ------------------------------ ~~~~~~~ --------------------------------------- | o o | Kevin Pickard | . | UUCP: ...!uunet!mnetor!perle!kevin --------------------------^^^-----------^^^-----------------------------------
lee@sq.sq.com (Liam R. E. Quin) (03/09/91)
In article <530@perle.UUCP> kevin@perle.UUCP (Kevin Pickard) describes
a problem with the Broken Throne terrain handling...
But a faster way to win against robots involves moving a negative number
of troops.... which will _create_ troops as neccesary, awarding you
action points in the process!
I have made a few changes to btclient, which I could send out if there
was interest.
* a "move one troop" command
* things that take a <to> and a <from> now use the current position as a
<from>, so to move troops you
* move to the right place
* press m
* move to the new place and press return or space
* type the number and press return
* things like "recruit" also use the current location, so you simply
type "r" instead of r-space.
The only major problem I've found is that sometimes either a client will
get disconnected for no obvious reason (you're told you're dead, but the
other players see you as still alive), and sometimes the server (or one
of the robots) will go into an infinite loop, which is a pain.
I don't have fixes for those. This is on a Sun 4/110 under SunOS 4.0.3.
Lee
--
Liam R. E. Quin, lee@sq.com, SoftQuad Inc., Toronto, +1 (416) 963-8337