This has been mentioned before, but I want to bring it up again. It would be super handy to have a hordify tool in the board designer. What I envision is this:

1. Select all the territories that you want the hordes bonus to apply to
2. Set the value of the bonus (e.g. +1, +2) for each continent
3. Click a button labeled "hordify" that creates hordes continents for the selected area, each labeled with the name of their central territory and composed of just the selected territories that share a default two-way border with the central territory.
4. You're done!

Wouldn't that be nice?

ps- if that isn't too hard to do, it would be cool to have a collector's bonus tool, that creates a +1 continent for each pair of territories in the selection.

I still think this would be a good idea.

I think tom mentioned somewhere that it would be harder to do with the Board Designer or that somehow the script that 11s wouldn't work or something.

Forum search doesn't work to find the post :/

I still have my thoughts on it, but, eh.

I'm pretty sure that the javascript version won't work so it will need to go into the Designer. So what are your thoughts Yertle :)

90% of my hordify script code from WF dealt with the UI elements including the menu item, the input for an autonaming prefix, and the canvas element visual updating once it was run.

It's not really a question of it not working here, it's simply not relevant.

I assume that 90% of adding a hordify option here would also be dealing with the Designer UI elements, the actual actionscript code to loop through each territory and add a continent for everything that has a border to it is fairly trivial.

If I wrote the JS to do it tom would still have to convert to actionscript, so he might as well do the whole thing himself. =]

tom wrote:  So what are your thoughts Yertle :)

When things are too easy you wind up with boards that play the easy to develop way.  Meaning...I dunno what kind of continents to make, oooh here's a button that will do it for me, *click*. 

I'm not against Hordes, I like it and have used it on my boards, I just wonder if making things too easy actually decreases board innovativeness.  I'm not necessarily even against a Hordify button, just I think there are potential drawbacks.

Yertle wrote:

tom wrote:  So what are your thoughts Yertle :)

When things are too easy you wind up with boards that play the easy to develop way.  Meaning...I dunno what kind of continents to make, oooh here's a button that will do it for me, *click*. 

I'm not against Hordes, I like it and have used it on my boards, I just wonder if making things too easy actually decreases board innovativeness.  I'm not necessarily even against a Hordify button, just I think there are potential drawbacks.

Yeah, except when you're faced with a map to which you want to add 200 hordes continents, that quick button starts looking a lot more attractive. Also, it would eliminate accidentally missing a few as your eyes glaze over from staring at row after row of little target circles for several hours.

You could always add the option but then bury it in the back of a file cabinet with a sign in front saying "Beware the Leopard".

Yea, it'd be pretty easy to hide it I think, and then only those who know about it would utilize it... and anyone looking to make a hordes map that isn't familiar with it would likely come here asking questions anyway. ;)

Similar to saying max map size is 100k but secretly it is 500k :P
That's not good!

Yertle wrote: Similar to saying max map size is 100k but secretly it is 500k :P
That's not good!

FTW!!

ALN, well put sir.

I know this is a ridiculous amount of effort and will NEVER happen, but what if there was some way to implement a cheesy "scripting" language that you could use on the Designer? Maybe just give it access to some of the basic data underlying the board and you could then write something like...

If Touching(Territory[X],Territory[Y]) Then CreateRegularBorder(Territory[X],Territory[Y])

Or something similar. Could be totally cheesy and could start with just a basic command or two, but might grow in power with time. Then, the only way you're going to "Hordify" the board is if you either spend the time to write a basic script that does that or if you follow someone else's recipe. Plus, as an added bonus, someone like 11's could come in and use his script-fu to do all sorts of weird and wonderful things.

Like I said, I know it's a complete pipe dream, but that doesn't mean I can't imagine it while sniffing paint fumes.

Oatworm wrote:

If Touching(Territory[X],Territory[Y]) Then CreateRegularBorder(Territory[X],Territory[Y])

Now, Oaty, show us where, on this continent, the bad man touched you.

I have nothing to add, I just want people to click on my signature.

You are f###ing weird.

I was going to say - I thought Rollie was dreaming up something along these lines a while back? What happened to that project?

Touched(Oatworm) returned a core dump due to an abused memory pointer, so I'm going to have to get back to you on that one...

IRoll11s wrote: You could always add the option but then bury it in the back of a file cabinet with a sign in front saying "Beware the Leopard".

Don't forget to first put it in a disused lavatory first.

But seriously I am very very very much in favor of some kind of hordify option.   I have a map that plays pretty well (never been shared, so none of you saw it) on warfish, but haven't wanted to bring it over because it was 200+ continents and it was hordes, so would be a pain to port.  I never would have made it in the first place without IRoll11s script.

If a map sucks it doesn't get passed by the review committee right? So I think it's a bad idea to start rejecting improvements to the UI because it might make things too easy.

I also like the collector bonus option.

Oatworm wrote: I know this is a ridiculous amount of effort and will NEVER happen, but what if there was some way to implement a cheesy "scripting" language that you could use on the Designer? Maybe just give it access to some of the basic data underlying the board and you could then write something like...

If Touching(Territory[X],Territory[Y]) Then CreateRegularBorder(Territory[X],Territory[Y])

Or something similar. Could be totally cheesy and could start with just a basic command or two, but might grow in power with time. Then, the only way you're going to "Hordify" the board is if you either spend the time to write a basic script that does that or if you follow someone else's recipe. Plus, as an added bonus, someone like 11's could come in and use his script-fu to do all sorts of weird and wonderful things.

Like I said, I know it's a complete pipe dream, but that doesn't mean I can't imagine it while sniffing paint fumes.

I think this would be super cool.  One equivalent solution - if there was a dead easy way to export to XML and re-import from XML.  You could use any scripting language you like that has a decent XML library.  A built in scripting language might be cooler, but import/export might be easier.

I've had dreams (ok fine, fantasies) along these lines for some time now.  Besides your basic hordify script, I've thought of others:

* For some maps, you could programatically  define continents.   For example, with a maze map that had a consistent territory naming scheme, you could use that information along with border info to figure out what all the continents are and their values.   If you move some borders around, you'd just rerun the script to get all new continents determined.

* You could also use a script to calculate some map statistics.  # of Territories, # of Continents, # of Borders are the obvious ones, but also things like # of continents with N borders.  Avg Continent Size.  # of Continents of size N.  etc.

* Another example.  I have a map of hexes where the continents are placed regularly.  It would pretty easy to write a couple loops to drop down the initial continents in the correct place & with their correct names.

That's mostly what I've come up with, but I believe others might have additional ideas.

Collector Bonus style is really hard to pull off. I really only got it to work well with Risky Kong, on my Buffy map it was a total train wreck.
I've got to say that creating Hordes! bonuses with this tool is not really that difficult or time consuming. Noting like on the other site. I just did a 100 territory Hordes! map and it wasn't that big of a deal. There are 2 keys to doing it:
1) Make a hard copy and X off as you create the bonuses
2) Do it all at one time
3) Try to have an order when naming them

That's 3 and I said 2 but I don't really care. Do not let the computer do all for you, do somethings for yourself and your treasures will be just the same as if the computer did it all for you.