Hey folks,
I'm looking for some general feedback/advice from experienced PHP coders.
I am planning on starting a project to develop a web-based strategy game for recreation/education. There's another coder who will be working with me.
The goal is to develop a simultaneous turn-based strategy game with the same sort of idea as the popular Avalon Hill board game "Diplomacy".
There will be a game map which will show the current ownership of the various territories and the names of the territories for issuing orders.
Each turn, all of the players will have a certain time window available to issue a fixed number of orders for their units (ex: 3 orders per turn). Once each player has issued their orders, the game engine will play the turn and resolve each of the orders given in a simultaneous fashion. Anyone who is familiar with the boardgame will know what I'm talking about.
What I am asking for is advice on how to handle two major components of this game.
The first problem I see is the processing of the game map. It doesn't have to be graphical, per se. I might think about doing a textual game map, even to make life easier. But it needs to be dynamically created to show the current ownership situation on the game map.
The second problem will be the actual game-engine processing of the turn orders. Because the game has so many variables (attack orders, defensive support, offensive support, fortification, etc) it gets extremely complicated as to how to resolve all of the combat scenarios.
I'm not expecting anyone to sit and tell me how to do all this, but I was hoping that some of you might have actually done something similar in the past and could point me to examples which I could borrow ideas from. Or, if you know of a similar sort of game for which the source is available, I could also use that as a guide. Anything based on the Risk sort of genre would be helpful for at least programming the map generation stuff.
The rest of it will be pretty straight forward, from what I can see.
Thanks for your time.
