Block game design question

Module Design
1

Hello,

I am brand-spankin’ new to this. I’m making a module for Worthington’s “Caesar’s Gallic War”. I used Columbia’s “Julius Caesar” as a template and have had an easy time of it.

There is one unique feature to this game that I am having difficulty with.

This is a two player game. One player (Rome) has black blocks. The other (Germania) has blue blocks. In between the two are a bunch of gray blocks that could go either way or no way. In the board game, if they are neutral, they are face-down. If a player recruits them, he stands them up, puts them at full strength, and faces his direction.

I am having a difficult time with this. I have the players declared as “Rome” and “German”. I had the blocks set up as both, with a right-click feature to say it belongs to one or the other (a property on Julius Caesar’s blocks, since there is a defection card). However, those blocks are one or the other, but never neither. If a block can be either, it looks like all neutral blocks are yours, because you can see them all.

Any ideas on how to solve this conundrum? Please speak slowly as I have no programming knowledge. I just went in and changed the properties on the J.C. module to recreate another one.

2

I poked around in the Julius Caesar module a bit. You’re going to need to create a new prototype for these neutral blocks. I would use either the “cblock” or “pblock” prototypes as a starting point. The Mask trait will have to be modified so that the facedown appearance of the block is gray (maybe you’ve already created a graphic for this using image editing software). Each of the two prototypes has a Dynamic Property with two possible values (Caesar or Pompey). Your neutral blocks will need a similar Dynamic Property, but with three possible values (Rome, Germania, Neutral). Then you might use a Restrict Commands trait to prevent an opponent from hiding/revealing the blocks when they are controlled by the other player.

Similarly, another Restrict Commands trait could lock out the commands that change the ownership of the gray blocks when they are under someone’s control (i.e., if the currently belong to Germania, all ownership changes are hidden/disabled for the Rome player, and only the Germania player can restore them to Neutral). There are lots of possibilities here, but I don’t know your game’s rules.