Confusion with Stages

[holotrek]

I'm trying to wrap my head around Stages and it is very confusing in how it relates to turns and move limit. Here is the scenario I'm trying to accomplish:

1. Players have 1 "action" per turn
2. Generally performing an action ends the player's turn, so I set the maxMoves to 1 in turns for the game. One such action is "Explore".
3. However, some "actions" (let's say MoveShips) require additional "moves" that I don't want to cause the end turn, so in that case I set noLimit to true and provide an End Turn button that is the actual move that counts against the move limit.
4. If an action has 4 associated moves, then I have to set noLimit:true on each of those moves and each one is a complex object then. It starts getting a little cumbersome. What would be nice would be if I could do something like this, but I can't seem to get it to work the way I want it within the current API:

function MoveShips({ G, events }) {
  events.setStage('moving');
}

const game = {
  moves: { Explore, MoveShips: {
    move: MoveShips,
    noLimit: true,
  }
},
  turn: {
    minMoves: 1,
    maxMoves: 1,
    stages: {
      moving: {
        minMoves: 1,
        maxMoves: undefined, // or 0 or Number.MAX_SAFE_INTEGER
        moves: { SelectOrigin, SelectDestination, ChooseShips, EndMove },
      },
    },
  },
};

I am aware minMoves and maxMoves doesn't exist on a stage, but this would be the ideal way to keep the turn going until the player initiates the EndMove move which could have a manual events.endTurn call.

What I did try was calling:

events.setStage({ stage: 'moving', maxMoves: 3 });

2 weird things with this:

1. I'm using TypeScript and there's no definition for this method overload. It only has the one that sets the string. So I had to use (events as any) to get it to transpile. I don't understand why that overload apparently exists and sort of works, but EventsAPI doesn't have it.
2. It went to the "moving" stage, but as soon as the player chooses SelectOrigin move, it ends the turn, so it seems to be ignoring the maxMoves setting.

I also tried this, with similar failed results:

events.setActivePlayers({ currentPlayer: 'moving', minMoves: 1, maxMoves: 3 });

What is the point of passing maxMoves when it seems to just ignore the value?

[fladrif]

I think the minMoves and maxMoves are a simplistic tool to organize turns around, and by incorporating them into your game engine you're limiting and tying yourself up. You can organize your game around other concepts and entirely leave out counting the # of moves, and that would probably free up how you're viewing and using the framework.

Brief aside: stages are for organizing different parts of a turn and by setting allowable moves within each. For example you can have a stage that revolves around picking or drawing cards at the beginning of the turn with their own set of moves, followed by a play stage where you play cards from your hand with another set of moves after which the player's turn ends and shifts to the next.

So with your example, the start of a player's turn could be a ChooseAction stage with 4 different moves to choose from that then puts them into the relevant stage (MoveShip, GetResource, ..etc) each with their own set of moves. Like in MoveShips stage you could have a set of moves for different ways to moves ships and an end turn move that ends that player's turn. Whereas with another stage that only has one "move", that move would then pass the turn as well as its actual game play.

[holotrek]

I see, so move limit is really more for simplistic games that have a set number of moves per turn. For a more advanced war game, it is probably better to just call endTurn manually when applicable. I'll give that a try, thanks!