In creating the S.A.D. spin-off board game called Calsiah, my goal is to create a game in which both large, epic battles and smaller battles (such as harrasment) occur. I don't want Calsiah to be a game where a player moves every unit in a clumped up ball around and around the board, and I also don't want it to be a game where units are weakly spread all over the place. So I'll tell you what I've cooked up, please let me know what you think!

* The object of Calsiah is to take control of the planet Eralo (located in the center of the gameboard). You must control 4 outer planets before attempting to control Eralo.

* Each player starts with one "Operation Center" in a quadrant of one planet. In other words, each player starts with their own planet, controlling one section of it. It should be the player's goal to control all four sections of their planet, thereby controlling the entire planet.

* Each player also starts out with a basic assortment of all their units. These units start on the planet.

* Resources are generated each turn. Each Operation Center generates 10 belthium crystals. In addition, if at least two units control one of 8 asteroids around the planet Eralo, 1 ton of titanium is generated each turn for every asteroid controlled. (Think of belthium crystals as Starcraft minerals, and titanium as Vespene Gas.) Crystals and titanium are used to buy more units.

* By keeping a Scouter in one quardrant of a planet for one turn, an Operation center will be built. Build 4 Operation Centers and you gain control of a planet.

* You have a certain number of spaces you can move per turn, equal to the number of pieces you have. Some pieces can only be moved one space per turn, others can be moved many spaces per turn. Movement is mostly based on a grid, like a chess board.

* Air units can go wherever they please. Ground units must stay on the planet unless carried by dropships.

* There are three main reasons to attack: To establish map control, to take away an enemy's hold on titanium, or to eliminate control of planet quadrants.

* Ground units are the primary forces used for ground assault/defense when it comes to planets. (Air is not as good for planetery attacks except for harassment opportunities or emergencies). Ground units can be moved from quadrant to quadrant in a planet, but if a quadrant is under attack, the quadrant can only be defended by units in that quadrant. Just like the game of RISK, where a territory under attack cannot be defended by adjacent territories.

* If you control all four quardrants of a planet, you control the planet, and the planet is considered "impenetrable." Such a planet cannot be attacked unless 3 capital ships "break the shield," so to speak.

Seems cool enough although I must say that it might be hard to control the units stats because you only have 2 resources so one unit might be like cheap fodder and used to spam.

But overall my main concern is about the size, and also the sheer amount of variables you must use.

And also screenshots? and what libraries are you using? Celtic3, Xlib, Axe DCSlibs?

That makes sense about Correlation, thanks for explaining. Perhaps there should be a thread about that as well here, because I'm not really familiar with it.

*Heh*, you and your Doors CS

Correlation is different from Omnicalc custom fonts because it doesn't use the font hook. So text displays faster (with a rewritten text-displaying routine), and you can still use Output( and Text( to display the standard Ti-83+ font. In addition, you can use graphics and sprites to replace the letters A-Z, something that would have made text impossible to read with a font hook.

Very nice, so it sounds similar to using the xLIB tilemap features, with letters instead of sprite indices, and on a 5x7 grid?

Correlation? Interesting I'd like to see it, so if there is a link...?

I don't suppose you'd consider a topic here at some point? Thanks for the clarifications on the variable character sizes, that sounds neat! It has to be standardized on a per-font basis though, right?