0026487: Teaching players defense in depth, calculating amount of existing protection, etc. - Arcen Idea Tracker (Bugs and Features)

ID	Project	Category		Date Submitted	Last Update

0026487	AI War 2	Gameplay Idea		Feb 22, 2022 11:34 am	Mar 15, 2022 2:27 pm

Reporter	Chris_McElligottPark	Assigned To	Chris_McElligottPark
Severity	minor
Status	closed	Resolution	won't fix

Summary	0026487: Teaching players defense in depth, calculating amount of existing protection, etc.
Description	The best teaching aid I can think of right now for players, is an exposure rating for each of your planets, and a general rating for your empire as a whole. I can think of several interesting ways to display this information if we had it, but I can't think of a good way to calculate the data itself, even on a background thread. Essentially, figuring out where the "enemy sea" is, which is the big blob of planets connected to enemy homeworlds via direct travel not through your lands. Then figuring out where "captive enemy planets" where they are cut off from the rest of the map behind your lines, and figuring out just how captive it is (aka, it's less captive if you have not destroyed the guard posts and there are lots of guards there, or if there's warp gate, and it's completely captive if it's just a command station and whatever garrison is inside). On each of the human planets, the direct exposure level would be however many planets are bordering it that head to the "enemy sea," and when that number is zero (an ideal for home command stations), then the indirect exposure level would be how many of your planets the enemy in the "enemy sea" has to go through in order to get to the evaluated planet. So for instance, if the enemy has to go through one planet of yours, then a captive enemy planet, then a neutral planet with nothing on it, then another planet of yours, then the evaluated planet, the evaluated planet would have an indirect protection of 2. If you have battlestations or citadels on the captive enemy planet and the neutral planet, then that would be an extremely high indirect protection of 4. If we figured out a way to calculate all this on the background thread, then I could draw a very cool galaxy map mode, as well as having some notifications and tips, and other helpful teaching aids based on this core data, along with additions to the tooltips in general. My main problem is that I can't think of a good way of solving for this data in an efficient way. I also don't have time to do that part right now, but I might later on. Part of the TLDR of that is that I think there is no visualization of your empire's surface area, what that means, or of defense in depth at all. You have to use external resources, to my knowledge, to figure out defense in depth in general. Badger response: Deducing the "enemy sea" is easy; you can basically reuse the mechanism I made for figuring out which planets are suitable launching points for wormhole invasions Me: That's helpful. Then figuring out how many planets are in the shortest path from the enemy sea to each planet owned by a player that have a friendly command station, citadel, or battlestation on them would give the indirect exposure level. Direct exposure level is very simple if we already know what the enemy sea is. I suppose it's possible that we may have multiple enemy seas, which is one challenge; I wouldn't want for a split galaxy to read as half enemy sea, half captured planets.
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Date Modified	Username	Field	Change
Feb 22, 2022 11:34 am	Chris_McElligottPark	New Issue
Feb 22, 2022 11:40 am	Chris_McElligottPark	Relationship added	related to 0026483
Feb 22, 2022 11:40 am	Chris_McElligottPark	Relationship added	child of 0025897
Mar 15, 2022 2:27 pm	Chris_McElligottPark	Assigned To	=> Chris_McElligottPark
Mar 15, 2022 2:27 pm	Chris_McElligottPark	Status	new => closed
Mar 15, 2022 2:27 pm	Chris_McElligottPark	Resolution	open => won't fix
Mar 15, 2022 2:27 pm	Chris_McElligottPark	Note Added: 0065445