Proposal: Natural erosion of buildings and ships

[abian]

I propose that buildings and ships can very slowly deteriorate naturally due to lack of attention at a rate of 1 HP every s seconds, but only after about w seconds after being built or repaired. For example, s=4 and w=120. This erosion should not be relevant in short games.

Spoiler

Implementation tip: There would be no need to introduce any new attributes in the entities' data structures or apply any other modifications to them if a probabilistic strategy is adopted whereby, if the building/ship has all its HPs, the building/ship is only eroded at each given time or iteration with a low probability that decreases linearly with w. Once the building/ship no longer has all its HPs, erosion is forced with probability 1 at a rate of 1 HP every s seconds (or, again, erosion happens with a certain higher probability that decreases linearly with s). This will hopefully be an inexpensive implementation.

 

[wowgetoffyourcellphone]

18 minutes ago, abian said:

I propose that buildings and ships can very slowly deteriorate naturally due to lack of attention at a rate of 1 HP every s seconds, but only after about w seconds after being built or repaired. For example, s=4 and w=120. This erosion should not be relevant in short games.

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Implementation tip: There would be no need to introduce any new attributes in the entities' data structures or apply any other modifications to them if a probabilistic strategy is adopted whereby, if the building/ship has all its HPs, the building/ship is only eroded at each given time or iteration with a low probability that decreases linearly with w. Once the building/ship no longer has all its HPs, erosion is forced with probability 1 at a rate of 1 HP every s seconds (or, again, erosion happens with a certain higher probability that decreases linearly with s). This will hopefully be an inexpensive implementation.

 

It's already possible to introduce a negative health trickle, however the initial grace period concept is not something that is implemented. It would be interesting for ships, etc. to have realistic things like this if we were opting for a handful of ships, but more recent changes to Naval Combat have tried to push things toward larger numbers of ships with more dynamic combat, making upkeep probably a pain in the patookis. 

[abian]

16 minutes ago, wowgetoffyourcellphone said:

It's already possible to introduce a negative health trickle, however the initial grace period concept is not something that is implemented. It would be interesting for ships, etc. to have realistic things like this if we were opting for a handful of ships, but more recent changes to Naval Combat have tried to push things toward larger numbers of ships with more dynamic combat, making upkeep probably a pain in the patookis. 

Good to know! The grace period should be easy to implement if probabilistic (there's no need to keep track and wait exactly w seconds for every entity, it may be sufficient that the average wait is w seconds), which would also be a more realistic effect. I also agree that, with the changes you mention, and even though this erosion would be really slow, repairing many ships would be a pain. What about buildings?

[wowgetoffyourcellphone]

12 minutes ago, abian said:

I also agree that, with the changes you mention, and even though this erosion would be really slow, repairing many ships would be a pain. What about buildings?

I could see it being used with a structure like the Roman Army Camp and Siege Walls.