Rules...

[PlatyPrograms]

I got my hands on a copy of Grand Conquest, the fully fleshed-out 2-or-4-player game.

The 2-player game is the exact same as the one we've been working off of, with one notable exception:

What we have been calling "chariots" are actually "camels"; chariots are a piece in the 4-player that can be built, but does not come free.

We can either call chariots something else in the code, or go through and rename all chariots to camels.

There are also some funky rules regarding 4-person play, but until we have a working 2-person version we should hold off on 4-person anything. Nothing looks too hard to add on.

[pickten]

I actually have no builtin types, so there's no issue there (config is close to done; I'll write the standard config after). I guess I'll have to add building support soon. Regardless, I'd love to see the 4 player rules to try and figure out what should be more general.

[PlatyPrograms]

A couple of notes from actually playing Grand Conquest:

1. Camels cannot capture or recapture without a rider; however, they can move as normal.

2. There are fields, which only camels and knights (possibly chariots? will check rules) can go on. They have defined entrances and exits, and are pretty much nifty shortcuts. Easy to implement, just need to add a new link and node type.

3. There are 3 special pieces: chariots, trebuchets, and siege engines.

Chariots are exactly like camels except they can capture and recapture without a rider.

Trebuchets have 2 moves per turn and can fire once per turn. Firing costs the player a turn, but not the trebuchet; it can move twice and still fire. Firing destroys an enemy piece that is on an adjacent node or on some predefined other nodes (indicated with yellow notches in the circles of the nodes). Firing destroys a piece with no possibility of recapture. Trebuchets can also fire into fields, destroying pieces there.

Siege engines can carry three soldiers, have two moves, and can only be killed by elephants. Catapults firing on siege engines knock the soldiers off, but do not destroy the engine.

All three of these can be built at the cost of 10 turns by a disembarked soldier. Chariots and siege engines are deployed beneath the soldier who built them; trebuchets are deployed on an adjacent node. Neither the soldier nor the piece may act for the remainder of the turn.

4. Each castle space has a drawbridge, which can be raised at the cost of two moves. A raised drawbridge can only be crossed by a soldier disembarking from a siege engine. However, catapults can fire on the castle space to knock down the drawbridge; this deals no damage to the pieces inside the castle space. At the beginning of a players' turn, all of their drawbridges are lowered again.

[pickten]

It sounds like Grand Conquest is significantly different from Conquest. Several of these would involve significant changes to how stuff works (we'd need actions for kill-only-when-carrying, build, shoot, something for drawbridges, kill-carried, and some way to force chain actions for the trebuchet deployment).

Alternatively, I could try to rework the action system as it's kind of janky. But it does sound like we'd be forced into adding something approaching full scripting capabilities.

[PlatyPrograms]

My impression is that this is starting to become a total pain in the ass to do in C. We could always consider a different environment to work in...