It's not 100 flat, it's 20 per interdicted land unit. It's been that
way since Empire 2 at least.
Signed-off-by: Markus Armbruster <armbru@pond.sub.org>
SAIL has issues:
* Sail orders are executed at the update. Crafty players can use them
to get around the update window.
* The route is fixed at command time. You can't let the update find
the best route, like it does for distribution.
* The info pages documenting it amount to almost 100 non-blank lines
formatted. They claim you can follow friendly ships. This is
wrong. They also show incorrect follow syntax. Unlikely to be the
only errors.
* Few players use it. Makes it a nice hidey-hole for bugs. Here are
two nice ones:
- If follow's second argument is negative, the code attempts to
follow an uninitialized ship. Could well be a remote hole.
- If ship #1 follows #2 follows #3 follows #2, the update goes into
an infinite loop.
* It's more than 500 lines of rather crufty code nobody wants to
touch. Thanks to a big effort in Empire 2, it shares some code with
the navigation command. It still duplicates other navigation code.
The sharing complicates fixing the bugs demonstrated by
navi-march-test.
Reviewing, fixing and testing this mess isn't worth the opportunity
cost. Remove it instead. Drop commands follow, mquota, sail and
unsail. Drop ship selectors mquota, path, follow.
struct shpstr shrinks some more, on my system from 160 to 120 bytes.
Signed-off-by: Markus Armbruster <armbru@pond.sub.org>
The autonavigation feature has issues:
* Autonavigation orders are executed at the update. Crafty players
can use them to get around the update window.
* Usability is poor:
- The order command is overly complex, not least because it can do
five different things: clear, suspend, resume, declare route, set
cargo levels.
- Unlike every other command involving movement, order does not let
you specify routes, only destination sectors.
- Setting cargo levels can silently swap start and end point of a
circular route, because "this keeps the load_it() procedure
happy". Maybe it does, but it surely keeps players confused.
- Setting "start" cargo levels actually sets the "end" levels, and
vice versa. Has always been broken that way.
- Predicting what exactly autonavigation will do at the update isn't
easy.
* The info pages documenting it amount to almost 400 non-blank lines
formatted. They claim only merchant ships can be given orders.
This is wrong. Unlikely to be the only error.
* Few players use it, and its workings at the update a fairly opaque.
Makes it a nice hidey-hole for bugs. Here are two:
- Unlike the scuttle command, autonavigation happily scuttles trade
ships while they're on the trading block.
- Unlike the load command, autonavigation can load in friendly and
allied sectors.
* It's more than 700 lines of rather crufty code nobody wants to
touch. Thanks to a big effort in Empire 2, it shares code with the
navigation command. It still duplicates load code. The sharing
complicates fixing the bugs demonstrated by navi-march-test.
Reviewing, fixing and testing this mess isn't worth the opportunity
cost. Remove it instead. Drop commands order, qorder and sorder.
Drop ship selectors xstart, xend, ystart, yend, cargostart, cargoend,
amtstart, amtend, autonav.
xdump ship sheds almost half its columns. struct shpstr shrinks, on
my system from 200 to 160 bytes.
Signed-off-by: Markus Armbruster <armbru@pond.sub.org>
Before Empire 2, nukes could be delivered only with bomb (special
mission 'n', airburst only) and launch (targeting sectors or
satellites only).
Empire 2 made nukes available for any kind of bombing, and for any
missile strike on sectors or ships. This included interdiction and
support missions. Nuclear-tipped anti-sats and bomb mission n were
removed.
Unfortunately, this was done in a messy way, which led to
inconsistencies and bugs. The problem is that ordinary damage affects
just the target, while nuke damage affects an area. Code dealing with
plane damage was designed for the former. Instead of rewriting it to
cope with area damage cleanly, nuke damage got shoehorned into
pln_damage(), the function to compute conventional plane damage, as a
side effect: computing damage blasted sectors in the area.
If the plane carried a nuke, pln_damage() returned zero (conventional)
damage. Without further logic, this simply bypassed the code to apply
damage to the target. This worked out okay when the target already
got damaged correctly by the side effect.
However, some targets are immune to the side effect: when interdicting
a move or explore command, the commodities being moved are not in any
sector.
For other targets, damage has effects other than damaging the target:
offensive and defensive support don't apply the (conventional) damage
to the target sector. Instead, they turn it into a combat bonus.
Without further logic, nuclear damage doesn't contribute to that.
To make all that work, pln_damage() returned the nuclear damage for
ground zero as well. Because a plane does either conventional or
nuclear damage, one of them is always zero.
Most callers simply ignored the nuclear damage, and applied only the
conventional damage.
Bug: land units and ships failed to retreat when pin-bombed or
missiled with a nuke. That's because they received zero conventional
damage.
The mission code flies planes and missiles and tallies their damage.
This mission damage included nuclear damage at ground zero (except for
missiles sometimes, see below), to make support and commodity
interdiction work. Unfortunately, this broke other things.
Bug: when bombers interdicted ships or land units, nukes first damaged
the ships or land units by the side effect, then again through mission
damage. Interdicting missiles had a special case to avoid this.
Bug: when interdicting move, explore or transport, nukes first damaged
the sector by the side effect, then again through mission damage's
collateral damage.
There may well be more bugs hiding in this mess.
The mess is not worth fixing. While the idea of interdicting and
supporting with nukes sounds kind of cool, I believe it's pretty
irrelevant in actual play.
Instead, go back to a variation of the original rules: nukes can be
delivered only through bomb mission 's' and launch at sectors.
Make arm reject marine missiles in addition to satellites, ABMs and
SAMs, and clear the mission. Make mission reject planes armed with
nukes. Oops when they show up in mission_pln_equip() anyway.
Make pln_equip() allow planes with nukes only for missions 's' and
't'.
Clean up pln_damage() to just compute damage, without side effect.
Change strat_bomb() and launch_missile() to detonate nukes. Simplify
the other callers. Parameter mission of msl_launch_mindam() is now
unused, remove it.
Missiles exploding on launch no longer set off their nukes. That was
pretty ridiculous anyway.
The ancients designed interception dead simple: when you overfly a
sector, you get intercepted by the sector owner. Fine print
interception rules govern which planes intercept.
Then complexity got piled on top of it.
Chainsaw 2 added an extra interception by surface ship owners, in the
target sector only.
Chainsaw 3 added an extra interception by land unit owners, in the
target sector only (Empire 4 later merged this extra land unit
interception with the extra surface ship interception).
Chainsaw 3 added an entirely separate kind of interception: air
defense missions. When you enter a sector in some air defense op
area, you get intercepted. Fine print air defense rules govern which
planes intercept. These rules differ significantly from the
interception fine print.
Additional complexity comes from these facts:
* Air defense mission interception happens in addition to non-mission
interception. You can boost your total interception by setting up
air defense. Which means you must set it up, or forgo an advantage.
* Air defense planes are not available for non-mission interception
duty. You need to decide on a split.
* In contrast to non-mission interception, interceptors flying air
defense get intercepted.
Moreover, the air defense code breaks one of the plane code's design
assumptions, namely that just one plane sortie is active at a time.
The air defense sortie runs while the sortie it intercepts is in
progress. This leads to two interceptions being active at the same
time: the one intercepting the original sortie, and the one
intercepting the air defense sortie. The same plane can fly in both
interceptions, and damage received in the interception of the air
defense sortie is wiped out, triggering a seqno mismatch oops.
The previous commit already simplified non-mission interception: you
get intercepted by anyone who owns the sector, or a surface ship or a
land unit there, whether it's the target sector or not.
Now simplify mission interception, by merging air defense back into
ordinary interception: when you overfly a sector, you get intercepted
by anyone who owns the sector, or a surface ship or land unit there,
or has an air defense mission covering the sector. That's all. No
multiple interceptions, no separate air defense rules.
Remove air_defense(). Simplify ac_encounter() and sam_intercept()
accordingly; both lose their last parameter.
Change sam_intercept() and ac_intercept() to intercept in mission op
areas. New parameter only_mission to suppress non-mission
interception. Pass zero when the intercepting country owns the sector
or a surface ship or land unit in the sector.
ac_encounter() can't efficiently predict whether a country intercepts,
so it needs to call ac_intercept() unconditionally. This kills the
optimization to collect interceptors only when needed; simplify
accordingly, replacing getilist() by getilists().
Before, the escort mission didn't support an op-area, and planes on
escort mission escorted anywhere. Change mission() to define the
op-area for escort missions as well. Show it in mission() and
show_mission(). Check it in find_escorts().
Land unit reactions are overly complex because we have two different
concepts controlling them: reaction radius (set with lrange) and
reserve mission (set with mission). You need to deal with both to set
up or query reactions.
Commit 8d0e1af5 "fixed" this by making reserve missions meaningless.
The previous commit made reserve missions meaningful again: they
support an op-area now. This brought back the problem of having to
deal with two separate commands to accomplish one thing.
Fix this for good by removing non-mission land unit reaction
alltogether. The only feature we lose by that is the ability to order
land units to react until the order is explicitely cancelled. That's
because missions are implicitely cleared by many commands and events,
while non-mission reaction wasn't. Closes#858121 and #858122.
Remove the non-mission reaction case from att_reacting_units().
Don't limit reserve missions to the land unit's reaction radius: make
lnd_reaction_range() return the type's maximum radius instead of
lnd_rad_max.
The reaction radius is now useless. Remove the lrange command, and
struct lndstr member lnd_rad_max along with its selector react.
Remove land command's column rd. Make ldump show column react as
zero. Deprecate edit key 'P' in dounit(), and don't show it in
pr_land().
Before, they always reacted to their maximum range, and the op-area
was unused. Change mission() to define the op-area for reserve
missions as well. Remove the special-case for showing reserve
missions from mission() and show_mission(). New lnd_reaction_range()
factored out of att_reacting_units(). Use it in oprange() to cover
reserve missions. Pass the mission as separate parameter to oprange()
for now, because miss() doesn't set it in the object until later.
Land units on reserve missions used to pay only half the usual
mobility for combat. This bonus was commented out in the code in
4.0.0, but not in info. Remove it from both.
Remove confusing columns Op-sect and Radius from table of available
missions. Add their code letters.
Fix efficiency required for artillery units to fire.
(all): Depend on info.
Flatten info directory. This undoes the move to one subdirectory per
chapter, which was done during Empire 2. The structure doesn't buy us
much, as the info name space is flat, and it complicates makefiles.
Overhaul info.pl:
- It now wants to run in the root of the build tree.
- Information on source files and subjects is now stored in makefiles,
thus info.pl no longer picks up random junk from the file system.
- Clean up Perl anachronisms, in particular use subroutine arguments and
results rather than global variables where convenient.
- Change format of diagnostics to the common format used by GNU tools,
so that Emacs and the like can parse it.
- Catch missing .SA.
- When creating a new subject file, cowardly refuse to overwrite an
existing file.
- Subject files contain topics sorted by chapter, then by name. The
order of chapters used to depend on how Perl sorts hash keys. Fix
it.
