Re: Olympia: Stacking and Visibility

From: cedman@714-725-3177.nts.uci.edu (Carl Edman)

Date: Thu, 11 Jun 1992 20:29:14 +0000

David Weinstein writes
> The discussion has concerned the degree to which people
> (mostly) would be  visible when either in a large stack, or
> a crowded location. Proposals have ranged from entirely
> invisible to everyone can be seen. I would propose the
> following:
>
> The base chance of being seen in any location is the unit's
> percentage of the location population multiplied be
> some number to make it reasonable (perhaps 5?).
>
> Example: A Unit of 20 men in a crowded bazzar (1000 people)
> has only a (2% x 5) 10% chance of being noticed.

Theoretically a good idea except that it wouldn't work.
All you would have are people LOOKing some ten times every
day to make sure they see erybody. Or why not a hundred
times ? Write a little script to strip out the redundant
information out of the LOOKs and you have circumvented
your proposal completely for free. (That is free to
everybody except Rich who has to use up huge numbers of
cycles).

But then you say, why not just have a flag which says if one
unit missed another ? First of all, because a simple
minded implementation of such a flag would cost many
megabytes of storage. Second of all, because it is not
clear when you should clear this flag again.

Having things fail or work based on random chance always
has the possibility of giving you trouble in such a game.
In the end I don't doubt that you could come up with
reasonable answers to these questions, but it is also
very likely that such reasonable answers would require
more effort than it is worth, particularily compared
with such relatively simple solutions as have been
proposed by others here.

Carl Edman, BtA

References

Olympia: Stacking and Visibility
dweinste@hal.gnu.ai.mit.edu (David Weinstein)
Thu, 11 Jun 1992 16:24:05 +0000

Referenced By

Olympia: Stacking and Visibility
dweinste@hal.gnu.ai.mit.edu (David Weinstein)
Thu, 11 Jun 1992 16:24:05 +0000