April 20, 2006 - "Battle Plans"

As the ad-hot wireless network is much stronger, than we had earlier 
anticipated, it seems that we are going to need more in our game than
a simple steal the flag button.  The whole idea of creating a "battle
system" seems to be a bit daunting, and if not implemented carefully
could add a considerable amount of complexity to the system.  I think
that we should try to keep that in mind as we go on with our additions.

Andy had a really good idea this morning about using some of the location
information that is available to us through the framework, and as I 
have thought about it this evening, I think that his idea does have a
good deal of valor.

Considerations:
	Any sort of battle can't take too long, especially when dealing with
	to players, as what happens if a "battle" is engaged, but then the
	player runs out of range?  Because of this, I think that we should 
	consider two different situations.
		1. Stealing/Delivering the flag to the base
		2. Stealing/Transferring the flag from player to player
		
Changes:
	1. Upon receipt of a flag, it will have a number of "hit points"
		- In order for a flag to be stolen from a player successfully, 
		  its hit points will need to have been taken to 0.
	    - To encourage team work, upon receipt of a flag, hit points will
	      automatically decay.
	    - PDA's will still broadcast that they have the flag, but we will
	      need to alter the stealing protocol to have positive and negative 
	      responses.
	2. Players will be able to acquire "weapons" that will help to decay hit
	   points of opposing players more quickly than the standard decay time.
	3. Players will also be able to acquire "defenses" that will help to
	   restore hit points.
	4. There may be other "special abilities" that can be found that would
	   grant temporary modifications to a player such as invisibility
	5. Make it so that each player must hold the flag for at least x
	   seconds before being able to transfer it to another player on
	   their team.
	6. Alter the base so that to be able to steal/deliver to the base that
	   you must solve some sort of puzzle.  Bases do NOT have hit points.
	7. Use the framework so that you can only initiate transfers when
 	   signal strengths are within some preset signal strength tolerance.
 	8. Need to add the ability to transfer the flag to team-mates
 	   
Questions:
	1. How many hit points are appropriate?
	2. What decay rate is appropriate?
	3. What signal strength tolerance is appropriate?