Bridge Over Troubled Water

Here's version 0.8! I'd have to write much more than a few lines to describe the various features, but I prefer to leave that to the future official manual.

Here's the link

http://rapidshare.com/files/112306225/cmeps_0.8.zip

As always let me know of any issues.


A couple of important things: the main map has now feedback elements. The colour of the countries reflect the diplomatic relations between the country the mouse is upon (in white) and the rest of the middle east. The default country for which relations are shown is Israel for obvious reasons.

Then you can see columns of various shapes, altitude and colour, with starts upon them. A little explanation: I needed a fast way to represent a complex set of relations on a limited space, so I envisioned a unique indicator with four different "faces". Shape represents the quality of a given country's leadership: the shapes used are a pentagon, a reversed pentagon, a circle, a square and a rhombus to represent a leadership from the strongest to the weakest.

The second face is columns' altitude, it represents the stability of a regime: the highest the altitude, the strongest the regime.

The third face is columns' colour: it represents the public opinion towards Israel, with colours ranging from full green, pale green, gray, orange and red, to represent public opinions from the friendliest to the most aggressive towards Israel.

The last face of the indicator is the number of stars upon it, to represent the overall quality of the armed forces. One star: that country's army sucks; five stars: that country's army simply cannot be stopped.

Also there's feedback elements for nuclear research and possession of nuclear weapons, and for alliances and wars.



Now let's look at Israel's screen: I needed to represent a lot of important informations and options, all of which were a bit distinct from each other: a review of the strategic situation, the purchase new units, nuclear research, the Palestinian situation and an optional section where to review the internal politics situation.
Two solutions: put every sub-section in a separate screen, thus requiring the player to click one thousand times to go back and forth the screens; or put everything in a single screen, trying to have the player understand that the various sections were distinct despite they were in a single screen.
That was the idea before implementing a sliding windows method: the player can jump from one section to another just rolling up and down with the mouse. Thus the idea of a separation still exists while having the player remain in the same screen.
I spent some time thinking about the Israel's screen as it is quite important, and I thought a confused screen would have prevented many players from learning the game. Also, I left the graphics quite simple and functional.

You can see Dayan has been added in the purchase sub-section of Israel's screen: in fact he can give the player suggestions on how to spend the current remaining funds and with the chosen attitude, defensive (the shield) or offensive (the sword); note that Dayan's suggestion are limited to ground forces due to the way air forces are treated in the underground game mechanics.

In response to Draco's questions about Palestine: unrest level is random at the start of each game, there's a quantity of funds you have to spend each turn to at least maintain the situation as it is, although you are free to spend more or less funds in garrison and police duties. Doing so, unrest will be modified accordingly, so if you spend 50% less than required you can expect that unrest will increase in proportion, and vice-versa. A higher unrest results in higher percentages of suffering a kamikaze attack, which will negatively affect Israel's public opinion towards the Prime Minister (the player).