Its a good game, and I really really want it to be good, but stalemate or impossible maps/games come around the 2nd or 3rd board. PLEASE give a function for the enemy to give up if you cant hit them but you've taken all their pieces and they cant hit you
Well yeah, I gotta improve the early game quite a bit. But I don't really agree that the enemy should give up on a stale. It's a draw, not a win for the player. Maybe the enemy should run away in those scenarios not offering you a reward for the "win". But in an ideal world these stale situations wouldn't even be all that common. I think a lot of them are caused by bishops. I have improved the level generation to do less of those one tile bishop trap bridges and plan on doing quite a bit more of level generation finessing to make the experience all in all smoother.
The enemy should definitely give up on a stalemate, with rewards, aside from maybe not getting the pieces that "ran away".
There is no way to 100% eliminate stalemates if you're doing random generation with these fairy chess modifiers; if it isn't a P=NP problem it's darn close.
If you feel like you really, really need to have the player "prove control" or punish draws in some way, give us the ability to manually leave an island with whatever pieces are currently in the next raft, and a reward of the pieces we've captured.
Yup, you are correct. It will be impossible to eliminate stalemates completely. But I would like to at least make they way less prone to happening in the early levels. Maybe the opponent should give up and still give out the rewards. I was initially thinking of it not being the opposite but maybe it'll feel better to the player that way. I gotta play around with it and see how it feels.
But as you stated, even detecting those stale situations isn't all that simple task to tackle with all the card modifiers. I guess with no "punishment" for stalemating and having the enemy give up would make it more lenient for the detection so it doesn't matter that much even if they sometimes give up even if they still had a fighting chance.