Matrix Games Forums

ORIGINAL: Monadman

Yes, I stand corrected on my comment - we will change it back to the reinforcement phase (because the original rules – naval and land phases - will not work in EiANW). FYI, there use to be a Diplomacy Reaction Phase in EiANW that was combined into one phase (the Diplomacy Phase) when the standing orders format was implemented. Unfortunately, we overlooked the ramifications of leaving it in the diplomacy phase – sorry.

Richard

A "diplomacy reaction" kind of phase seems like a good idea. Was there a technical reason to remove it?

A "diplomacy reaction" kind of phase seems like a good idea. Was there a technical reason to remove it?

 
Let me make a guess...
 
To minimize the number of needed e-mail exchanges and not add another real time week to finnish a game month.

Regarding anti-cheating, I would suggest that at a very minimum, the game should verify that a setup file actually contains a legal number of factors if being played by a human being (exception to allow tougher AIs, since it's hard to write a smart AI, compared to one that gets numerical advantages).  I don't think such checking is presently being done.

ORIGINAL: Grognot

Regarding anti-cheating, I would suggest that at a very minimum, the game should verify that a setup file actually contains a legal number of factors if being played by a human being (exception to allow tougher AIs, since it's hard to write a smart AI, compared to one that gets numerical advantages).  I don't think such checking is presently being done.

Shouldnt 1.01 have fixed the factor bug ?

Regards
Bresh

In this case, I refer to out-of-game editing -- which seems to be trivial for the setup files.  Some playing around with debug.exe tells me that there's no checksumming or 'is this number of factors legal' sanity-checking happening.  Tweaked, completely illegitimate setup files (e.g. 200+ French regular infantry factors and a full 20G/3C Guards corps running around) are still happily accepted in hot-seat play.

On a related note, it seems that the AI uses the same basic setup file format as the player's, so it'd be possible to create a monster AI setup with many, many factors and perhaps a better deployment.  Perhaps useful if you can't or don't want to have a full seven-human game for speed reasons or whatever... like if you want something bizarre like 'Human GB and Prussia against Monster France'.  Even the AI might be a bit bothersome if it starts with far more power than would normally be allowed.

I could certainly add a checksum to a setup although, I wish I didn't have to
 
 
 
 

If you have players who are sufficiently paranoid about other PBEM'ers that they worry about re-rolling and so forth... probably a checksum, sanity check or similar measure would also be appropriate for human-controlled nations' setups.  Starting France with 200I (let alone more than 5G) wouldn't be very subtle, especially if the anti-French coalition shares information, but in other players' cases and less extreme edits...

I'd still exclude AIs from that check if possible, just for goof-off purposes like Monster France.