I’ve chewed the old ones off.
This last patch cycle has been a real dog. What you see is the result of virtually no effort.
At least on actually writing code.
Every single line of code in this cycle has had broad reaching implications. The rules that we released are very close to those in the spec we started with 6 weeks ago, which is again very close to the original spec for 5 years ago.
But we questioned everything again and again and again, because as we worked through it we tried out different contexts and goals. There is going to be a lot of canned-sounding “we already thought of that” for the next few weeks.
If you read those patch notes or Gophur’s Brigades Primer, it sounds scarily complex. But actually you can boil the rules down very simply (or it would have taken me much longer to code, since code is all about rules).
Because these rules are far-reaching, its often neccessary to explain both sides of the rules, which makes it sound like there are two rules.
Some of the rules weren’t entirely clearly expressed, perhaps. Its taken a few people a while to understand that you can *create* an isolated brigade by moving one of its neighbors, you just cant move a brigade into a location that isolates it from all of its divisional group members.
Consider the following towns. If you find your brigade deployed here, you’ve really done something wrong. For those unfamiliar with the game, these are not in-game screenshots, and I am so clearly not an artist :)
An HC officer moves Brigades B1 and B2 up to Swinhope and Louth.
He moves the Division HQ up to Swinhope. Doing so appears to be invalid because now Brigade 2 is no-longer within 1 link of the division? True. But Brigade 2 wasn’t moving, so it is left alone. You’ll see why shortly.
He moves Brigade 1 to Binbrook. Brigade 2 is still isolated off in Louth. They must really have annoyed someone.
Brigade2 keeps loosing Vickies in Hubbard’s Hills (what part of “Hills” do the drivers not understand?). They need DivHQ to do that. So DivHQ moves to Tetney. This is a valid move because Tetney is one-link from a divisional member – even though the member was previously isolated.
The confusing part that I hope to clarify is that the movement rule is a limitation to on where you can move *to*. The destination must be within a link of another divisional member. So: Brigade1 couldn’t move further away from DivHQ, say to Tealby. But it *could* move back to Swinhope, since this would put it one link from a divisional member.
However: If the DivHQ were to move up one more place then Brigade 1 would become stuck, because none of the linked towns are 1-link from a divisional member anymore.
In order to recover, DivHQ or B2 has to move back to Tetney or Grimsby to provide B1 a valid move destination once more.
There are a few other misunderstandings that people aren’t sure about yet… If you cut off supply to a pocket in which the enemy has no brigades, we don’t automatically hand them back to you. This could perceivably be a pain to undo if the enemy manages a deep penetration somehow. But we think you’re all smart enough to figure that out :)
Some folks thought you could only attack a town within range of a brigade. That’s part of the plan for TOEs. We didn’t do it right now because it killed paratroopers off as capturing infantry, but also because we’re not yet ready for the removal of AOs.
Other folks are worried it will create an “avoid the fight chess” system. Why we don’t think it will is just too long to go into. Its one of the reasons that showing you the enemy brigades is the right thing to do for now. But we do expect and hope for some degree of free-cap chasing. I think players will start to see why as it plays out :)
kfsone's pittance 
Recent Comments