Tigris and Euphartes on Thousand Parsec

This was the final week of GSoC. I was out of town for most of the week with limited internet access, so I don't have a ton of updates. I spent the week cleaning up and commenting code. I also did some more testing as I went.

Even though GSoC is ending, I plan to continue to test the game and I may add some new features too. Overall, I had a great time coding this summer. Hopefully I made a worthwhile contribution to TP!

This week I worked on testing and documentation. I completely revamped the wiki page for Tigris and Euphrates into a much shorter and clearer walkthrough of the rules with screenshots. I removed a few of the sections in the wiki because I felt that they were excessive and didn't really help the reader understand the game.

I also continued to test the game, and fixed bugs as I found them. Most of the bugs were relatively minor. I fixed a bug where regions were not being correctly merged if they were joined but no combat occured. I also fixed a bug where leaders were not being removed when they no longer border a scientist colony. And I fixed a bug where colonist ships which were generated the previous turn were not being flagged for combat.

Next week I'll be doing final testing and bug fixes.

This week I completed the combat turn. This means that TaE is now fully playable from start to finish. All the features that were originally planned at the beginning of the summer are now implemented.

Here is an overview of my commits for this week: I completed the final cleanup for external combat which removes all the losing combatants and awards points to the winner. I added a function to look over the regions after all the losing combatants have been removed and make sure that it is still a region. If it is not still one region, the function rebuilds it into multiple regions. I added code to check for any more instances of combat after the current combat is resolved. Finally, I added the code executed when a game ending condition is reached. It tallies the points and announces the winner to all the players.

Later today (hopefully) (UPDATE: The combat overview is up! you can see it here) I will be adding a writeup explaining exactly how combat works in the game. It will be done in the same style as the "Tour of TaE" post.

Next week I plan to work on testing and documentation. My goal is to make sure there aren't any lingering bugs in the game and to make the documentation good enough so that anyone who can install TP can play TaE.

Now that combat is implemented into TaE, I'm going to run through the rules behind it and what it looks like both in TP and on the physical board.

First off, there are two different types of combat in TaE: Internal and External.

Internal combat is when there are two or more leaders of the same type in a single region, as shown below:



Physical Board


TP: Normal View


TP: Resource View


External combat is when there are two or more regions which have just been connected and contain leaders of the same type, as shown below:


Physical Board. The different regions are highlighted in red and green.


TP: Normal View


TP: Resource View


Once combat is initiated, each side's initial strength is calculated. For internal combat the initial strength is the number of scientist colonies bordering your leader. For external combat the initial strength is the number of colonies of the same type as your leader in your region. For the internal example above, the "pot" has an initial strength of 1 and the "bow" has an initial strength of 2 (the red tiles are represent the scientist colonies). In the external example above, the "pot" has an initial strength of 1 (one green tile) and the "bow" has an initial strength of 0.

During the next turn (the combat turn) each player involved in the combat my "reinforce" their leaders. To do this they select an appropriate colonist ship (scientist for internal, the same type as the leader for external) and select "Reinforce" as shown below:




For each reinforcement added, the strength of that side increases by one. After the turn is over, the side with the highest strength is declared the winner.

For internal combat, the losing leader is removed from the board and the winner is awarded one technology point. If in the example above, no reinforcements were added, then the "bow" would win and the board would look like this after combat:


Physical Board


TP: Normal View


TP:Resource View


For external combat, the losing leader is removed, and all of the colonies of the same type as the losing leader in the losing leader's region are removed. In the example above, let's say the "bow" adds two reinforcements and the "pot" adds no reinforcements. This makes the final strength 2 to 1 with the "bow" winning. The "pot" leader is removed as well as the green tile in his region. The "bow" player receives 2 points of the same type as the leader (green). The board looks like this after combat:


Physical Board. After removing the losers, the area is split into two regions, outlined in black.


TP: Normal View


TP: Resource View


That's all there is to combat in TaE. After the combat turn is complete, if there are still two or more leaders of the same type in one region, another combat turn will occur. Otherwise, the game resumes with normal turns.