subota, 24. lipnja 2017.

Bombardment Mk II

Real life got me busy again, it has been a while since last update but the last feature for v0.6 is done. Bombardment can be performed after victorious space battle.

New bombardment kicks in when attacker is at undefended colonies. Be it after defeating defender's fleet in space battle or by simply there being no space defenses at all. Rules for in battle and out of battle bombardment are virtually the same: damage calculation, ammunition limits and turn limit are the same. This also means that ammunition and turns spent in space combat are not available in bombardment phase. In essence bombardment acts like simplified space combat without unit movement, any colony can be bombarded instantly with all ordinance without spending turns on travel.


On top of this feature I've improved starlane generator so the map looks more organic and less like a crystal lattice. It was in rather a simple change, I've increased minimum angle between incident (coming out of a same star) lanes and decreased the number of extra lanes beyond the minimum required to connect all stars. It turned out that those extra lanes were major contributor for turning organic look to crystalline. Now, if 0% means minimum number of lanes to connect all stars and 100% means maximum lanes possible then new starlane density settings are as follows:

  • Few - 20% (was 33%)
  • Decent - 33% (was 50%)
  • Many - 65% (was 100%)
  • Maximal - 100%
Why stop on simple things when I can do complicated stuff too? Occasionally in maximum lanes setting there would be a few extra long lanes at the edge of the map, practically running along the whole edge. I've made an algorithm to remove them. It's something along the lines if a long lane was not there, find out if previously connected stars can still be reached via other lanes which are individually shorter and form a path which is not much longer then removed lane. Sounds simple but is a bit of a calculation intensive.

And now the plan is to fix a major bugs, polish a few things and finally release v0.6.