AGEOD Forums

Hello.

I came upon NCP just a few months ago and I'm really having a lot of fun with it.
My congratulations to the developers. Wishing there'll be a sequel, someday.
However, in the long term, I'm feeling a bit the lack of one interactive battle simulator.
So this is my suggestion (am I too late?):

If a player-given condition was encountered,
and once the engagement conditions are met and the battle resolver is going to be started,
why not writing all the source data (contextual: ground, weather, tactics, etc.; OOB: commanders, units, etc.) to savegame
together with some game state flags (PRE-BATTLE in this case)?

Then we may close the app, extract/convert our data with a tool (a python script for example), simulate the battle (wargaming, 3D or whatever),
reloading the NCP's savegame (stuck on PRE-BATTLE) and finally feeding the outcomes back (moving to POST-BATTLE) through a text file format.

Does the game architecture allow implementing such a modification easily?
If so, is there any chance you'll invest some efforts on it, compatibly with your actual plans?
Leaving out state-of-art changes to GUI and just with command-line arguments and keyboard shortcuts would be a perfectly acceptable solution to me.

Thanks in advance for any reply.
r59

No real chance... This is a very big job, as it means proposing to players a clear interface so he can enter back all values once he does the battle, so basically an OOB editor... We have from time to time such a request, coming from table top miniatures players, but this is something like 1 people every month. I'm not a proponent of investing thousands of hours into a tactical module, but perhaps more control to how battle unfold can be done, in a future game. Who knows... perhaps in a year or so you can read again this very sentence and tell yourself: they did it!

perhaps not

Pocus wrote:No real chance... This is a very big job, as it means proposing to players a clear interface so he can enter back all values once he does the battle, so basically an OOB editor... We have from time to time such a request, coming from table top miniatures players, but this is something like 1 people every month. I'm not a proponent of investing thousands of hours into a tactical module, but perhaps more control to how battle unfold can be done, in a future game. Who knows... perhaps in a year or so you can read again this very sentence and tell yourself: they did it!

perhaps not

Well maybe not a tactical module but something akin to the more detailled posture and battle tactics available in games lik EiH... Imagine an NCP II were when the battle is joined, depending on force composition and commander you are given a rough choice of the main orders you would like to give (probe offense, staunch defense, extend flank and hammer centre with reserves for exemple) with some general tactics only availbale for certain types of forces or leaders (thin red line of the british with an approach emphasizing fire, Extend flank and rupture attack by reserves typical of Napoleon's tactical approach, etc...).