If you load four troops onto four transports, the game will fill up two transports with two troops each (nice, this is what one would expect to happen). Let’s say you also have four artillery, you start loading them. After two artillery, your transports can’t hold any more because two transports are full up with troops and the remaining two transports can only hold one artillery each.

Solution is to simply load artillery/tanks first, then do the troops… but it would be really slick to add an error handler. If a user tries to put too many artillery/tanks onto a stack of transports, see if there is an open spots on any of the transports and check if any transport has two troops. If so, then just move that troop over for the user and add the tank/artillery to the transport.

@aardvarkpepper I play a lot of OTB and online chess… online chess never uses “touch” rules. Too much chance for miss clicks.

A&A online has two strikes against it. One there is often a day break between every single turn. Second, you can’t really see the whole board at once. There’s a lot of opportunity for errors.

Anyways, basically you just don’t want the back button active anytime it can “undo” a battle. In noncombat it should be off because going “back” would put you in the combat phase, etc.

I feel like the developers are likely to say that this would be impossible because I’m thinking they’re just updating the game state in the database rather than logging each move players make. The game would be much more robust if they did the latter, but I just threw out a rough data model for the former on the off chance a dev was reading this thread.

@aardvarkpepper I play a lot of OTB and online chess… online chess never uses “touch” rules. Too much chance for miss clicks.

A&A online has two strikes against it. One there is often a day break between every single turn. Second, you can’t really see the whole board at once. There’s a lot of opportunity for errors.

Anyways, basically you just don’t want the back button active anytime it can “undo” a battle. In noncombat it should be off because going “back” would put you in the combat phase, etc.

I feel like the developers are likely to say that this would be impossible because I’m thinking they’re just updating the game state in the database rather than logging each move players make. The game would be much more robust if they did the latter, but I just threw out a rough data model for the former on the off chance a dev was reading this thread.

If you load four troops onto four transports, the game will fill up two transports with two troops each (nice, this is what one would expect to happen). Let’s say you also have four artillery, you start loading them. After two artillery, your transports can’t hold any more because two transports are full up with troops and the remaining two transports can only hold one artillery each.

Solution is to simply load artillery/tanks first, then do the troops… but it would be really slick to add an error handler. If a user tries to put too many artillery/tanks onto a stack of transports, see if there is an open spots on any of the transports and check if any transport has two troops. If so, then just move that troop over for the user and add the tank/artillery to the transport.

The online game really needs back buttons for moving between phases… The game is currently very frustrating because you will make a mistake, click accept, then it cannot be undone. This can be totally solved by adding back buttons to navigate back to previous phases.

This is actually what tends to happen in OTB games… People tend to place units while they are making their noncombat moves. They also tend to make purchasing changes when they start making combat movements. Obviously, as soon as combat begins, there’s no going back.

—Rambling Begins Here—

On the software side, you just need to do two things. First, disable the back button in the combat phase as soon as the first attack is made. Second, disable the the back button during the entire noncombat phase.

Depending on how you have your database set up, things could get slightly more complicated. You’re all set to go if the actions of every phase are recorded and kept (which they really should be… eventually you’ll want to be able to query this data to know things like what percent of winning Allied games started with the British player buying just three tanks). However, if you’re just keeping the present game state (bad idea) and writing to it each turn, then you’ll need to treat phases 1+2 as a single phase, and 4+5 as a single phase and just keep a temp file after phases 1 and 4. Anyways. Great game, but the lack of a back button is really frustrating.