Glad people have still been using it despite this glitch. And yes, I received enough to buy my own copy - I received only two donations, but each was for $20. One was from nscswitch, thank you again! Alas, my game has been prepared for play, but sits unused…
I’ve been busy (I’m articling at a law office this year) so I haven’t been here in a while. I only noticed because someone (Lyle Wincentsen) e-mailed me a bug report - he said that having a super sub caused him to lose 100% of his battles - has anyone else seen that? Does anyone use super subs anyway? I think it was over at C-Sub that they basically trash all the scientific advances, including super subs.
While I have your attention, I could use some suggestions on a new feature request I’ve received. The request is to add a feature that would abort attacks when a certain criteria is met. This would simulate what happens in real games, when attackers decide to cut their losses. Right now AACalc fights to the death every time, which is not always realistic especially if the attacker has a few bad rounds. Having some abort-threshold I think would make the odds calculator more realistic because the attacker would have fewer occurrences of being totally annihilated.
At present there is one simple abort condition, which is that an attack can be called off once the attacker has only air units. But there are a lot of situations in which you might want to call off an attack.
Here are my thoughts on implementing this:
Add a row to the form called “Abort threshold” or “Attack ends if…”
This would contain four inputs:
Attacker punch is less than ____ % of defender punch
Attacher count is less than ____ % of defender count
Attacker has less than ____ surviving units
Defender has less than ____ surviving units
An attack would end when any of these conditions are met. The default value for each field would be 0, which would make the sim run as now - until one side is dead.
The first two fields would allow you to decide based on when it becomes unlikely for the attack to succeed. Eg. once you have 50% of the punch of your opponent, odds are pretty stacked against you.
The third option would allow the attacker to preserve certain units, in combination with the order of loss (OOL). Eg. attacking with 3 Arm 5 Inf, you might call off the attack when you only have 3 units left, in order to preserve your armor. Actually, this one might have to work together with the above two, because if you have 3 Arm left against one enemy Inf, any sane person would continue the attack to take the territory. You might also use this to ensure that you only take a territory if you will have enough left to defend it, if that is your objective.
The fourth option would let you set certain objectives such as only fighting until you have destroyed all their subs, or their bombers, for example.
Thoughts?