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Unit Combat

Not all games require fighting. Races and exploration can be lots of fun, and don't require players to be bashing each other. However, the excitement of most Xconq games derives from the chances of going up against an opponent directly.

Combat includes five distinct action types that a player may choose from, not counting detonation, and you specify the characteristics of each. "Attack" is hand-to-hand with another unit, "capture" attempts to change the side without damaging, "fire-at" hits a unit without getting entangled, while "fire-into" hits everything in a targeted cell. Finally, "overrun" is an attempt to occupy a cell, doing whatever combination of attack, capture, and movement is necessary.

To specify what kinds of battles are possible, you begin by setting the hit-chance of some unit vs another unit to any value greater than zero. A hit probability of zero completely disallows attack. A hit probability of 100 is a guaranteed hit. In practice, you will probably need to specify most hit probabilities individually.

[describe mods to hit prob?]

Next you need to set the damage done by a hit. The default value is 1 hp, which is a good starting place but not always particularly realistic.

[describe variation parms]

As usual, you can define the action point cost of combat, via acp-to-attack and acp-to-defend. The use of separate tables for attacker and defender allows for some extra flexibility. This is important, because sometimes you want to allow combat to keep a defender busy and soak up its acp, while at other times attempts to engage in combat should be shrugged off. Consider battleships vs infantry; although combat between the two rarely causes much damage, an attack by a battleship will cause the infantry to keep their heads down, and preventing them from doing much else, while the return rifle fire is unlikely to disturb the battleship much!

Describing simple hit probabilities and damage is oftentimes sufficient for a game. It's simple; players can learn the numbers by heart. It's more efficient, because there's no need to manage lots of ongoing battles. However, there are endless numbers of situations where this basic model is unsatisfactory, so let's move on to the available enhancements.

The basic parameter for the firing actions is range of the unit, which is the greatest reach possible. You can also set a range-min, which is useful for ballistic missiles, certain kinds of artillery, and magic spells that can't be used for close-in fighting; you can't fire at a unit that is less than range-min cells away.

Also, you can define how transports and occupants affect each other in combat. The effects can be both positive and negative, and extend both from occupants to their transport and from the transport to its occupants. The table transport-protection defines the percentage of hit damage (by any unit type) that gets passed through to each occupant. If 0, then the transport is perfect protection. If 100, then each occupant gets the same hit as the transport did. [Ideally, protection is a prorating on a table value from occupant vs attacking unit.] Note that an occupant cannot be attacked directly from outside its transport.

If you want to make combat dependent on having a supply of ammo, use the tables hits-with and hit-by. The material type need not be explicitly designated as ammo, but both the hitting and hit units must agree that the same type is effectual (we assume that the attacking unit is smart enough not to use material types that have no effect on the target unit).

[need a combat-supply usage in addition]


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