Tigris and Euphartes on Thousand Parsec

This week I focused on getting all my goals completed for the midterm evaluations. I added a restriction to the move order which I had forgotten before: leaders can only be moved to star systems which border a scientist colony.

I also added code which awards alien artifacts to players at the end of each turn. This ended up taking a bit longer than expected and I'm not able to fully test it out until I get combat implemented. It looks for regions which have more than one alien artifact in it. For each of these regions, one of the artifacts is awarded to the player who owns the merchant leader in that region. If no merchant leader exists in the region, then no artifact is awarded.

Finally, I implemented a new way of generating maps for TaE. Players can now make their own maps by creating a text file where '.' is a normal system 'A' is a system with an alien artifact and 'M' is a system which can only be colonized by mining robots. For example, if the player wanted to create a 4x4 map with Artifacts on the corners and a 2x2 mining area in the middle, it would look like this:

A..A
.MM.
.MM.
A..A

The player then specifies the path to the file in the .conf file as "board_path=/path/to/map.txt" If a file is not specified or cannot be found, then a default map based on the original TaE board is produced.

In addition to all this, I've also been working on the midterm evaluation and the midterm report for Mithro.

I definitely need to start showing off some all the stuff that I've been working on. Later today I'll be posting a screenshot tour of the ruleset so far. I'm also going to be revamping the TaE wiki page to provide some direction for people who want to play the game. I'll be working on that this weekend and next week. After I get a good bit of stuff posted, I'll begin work on coding the combat side of the game.