Given that combatants only exist for the duration of a skirmish blog post, couldn’t we just track this in comments? It seems like a lot of work to add, update and remove a bunch of combatants for every skirmish post.

That’s… rather ridiculous, and also potentially fun. Do the Enemy Combatants get passwords of their own? Is zero positive over in the Enemy’s country? (Maybe they’re French; IIRC, the French word ‘positif’ includes 0, even though the equivalent English word ‘positive’ doesn’t.)

There’s been times a second GNDT could be useful so I’m voting for. I’ll change my vote if it’s actually unfeasible to make one for whatever reason.

@Amnistar: How many Enemy Combatants are we potentially looking at in a Skirmish?

Enemy Combatants (generally speaking) should not have individual statistics. It’s awkward to track, awkward to make combat rules for, and has a greater chance of falling victim to confusion or exploitation. My proposal of a Skirmishes rewrite generalises all enemies, making their total effectiveness set by the General on skirmish creation - this is easier to write rules for, easier to track, and SAFER.

@Devenger: I don’t understand how you derive your claims.

I believe having specific enemies makes battle less awkward to track, because the GNDT logs all attributes and actions; more intuitive to make combat rules for, because you have specific targets you can take action against; more in line with Stunts; with less chance of confusion or exploitation, because an entire history of actions is right there in the GNDT; and SAFER, because no one’s taking actions that others have a hard time paying attention to.

Furthermore, it opens up the game to a lot more strategy. When you fight all the enemies at once, the only strategy is whether or not to join a Skirmish. When you have specific enemies, that’s merely where the strategy starts. Who you attack, when you attack, and who you coordinate your attack with are all significant.

Sparrow, see my combat rules draft here if you haven’t: http://blognomic.com/wiki/index.php?title=User_talk:Devenger

The system can still have tactics and choice (number of shots and choice of weapon in my plan) without specific targets, and it makes participating easier in terms of number of actions you must make.

An example of how weapon choice and number of shots interact to give tactical decisions: weapons with better Damage Rating will probably have higher Ammo Rating. So shooting with them will be more effective, but shooting many shots will deplete ammo rapidly (and shooting few shots limits your number of kills per day). Weapons with low DR, like the Revolver, will be useful because you can easily take many (5) shots each day; your potential for maximum kills is decreased, but still possible, and you’ll have more ammo to try more times a week.

CoV as per IRC. This should be interesting!

This can now be passed (13 FOR?), however someone with the ability/know-how to create a new GNDT is required.

/me calls Kevan.

There’s no way for anyone other than Kevan to set it up and he’s voted against, making it possible that it will never get implimented.

That doesn’t mean it shouldn’t pass…

Well, I guess it does, since things have to be enacted in order. But Bah, Humbug. Do you really think Kevan would do that?

Sure, I’ll enact when I have a moment, but I’m afraid I’ve got a lot of work on today. (There may be some cookie issues which will require a test and maybe a rewrite - the GNDT assumes that each user is just playing one Nomic; two GNDTs are effectively two Nomics.)

I still don’t really see why we need this, though; it seems much clearer to announce the stats in a blog post and declare both actions and stat updates in its comments (“I throw a flash grenade at Burke, reducing him to (3/0/2) for the next three actions.” “Now I shoot Burke with my rifle, taking him to 1 Health.” “And I finish him off with a pistol; zero Health!”), than to split the action and the numbers between the comments and the GNDT (which seems needlessly fiddly, if I have to open up the combatant GNDT and check the edit log, to see what a player actually meant when they said “Boom! Direct hit!” 7 hours ago).

Surely it is somewhat against the nature of the game to have someone not specially labelled by the Ruleset (Kevan) capable of vetoing a proposal just because of technical limitations?

If this fails, we really won’t have any combat system for a month. Amni, have some backbone and decide how you want enemies to work… you decide half the votes in these kinds of proposals anyway.

this is what happens when I write comments so slowly, someone else comments in between…

What Kevan says makes sense. I didn’t think this would be such trouble.

s/k

Okay, admining this now.