Help with Strategy game

I'm trying to make a strategy game where you build up an empire and army and all that and try to win the whole map. So I have the map and the players set up and everything, but what I need to do is have an initial city placed on each of the player's first territories.

There are 100 territories set up in a grid. I then use this code to pick and place the 5 players on random starting spots.

Code:

---

function starts () {
        c = 2;
        while (c<=6) {
                num = Math.round(random(99))+1;
                tellTarget (_root.num) {
                        gotoAndStop (_root.c);
}
                c = c+1;
        }
}
starts();

---

c is the frame number of the territory MC. The MC has 6 total, 1 is blank for nuetral territory, and the other 5 are different colors to represent different players. So c starts at 2 because it's the first player color.

num picks the random territory to place the player on. So now I want to place the player's capital city on their first territory so that the game can start. And I tried this:

Code:

---

function starts () {
        c = 2;
        while (c<=6) {
                num = Math.round(random(99))+1;
                tellTarget (_root.num) {
                        gotoAndStop (_root.c);
                        duplicateMovieClip (_root.basecity, _root.city[c][num], c);
                        _root.city[c][num]._x = _root[num]._x + 20;
                        _root.city[c][num]._y = _root[num]._y + 20;

                }
                c = c+1;
        }
}
starts();

---

But this doesn't work. I use +20 on both of them because each territory is 40 pixels wide, and this would place the city in the middle of territory. _root.basecity is the MC of the city that I placed off the side of the stage in order to duplicate it. I guess I could have linked it in library instead, but oh well.

Any ideas?

First, I dunno if you call your functions only from 1 place, but to keep things correct, I would use _root. with c and num variables:

_root.c = 2;
while (_root.c<=6) {
_root.num = Math.round(random(99))+1;
and so on...


When you place cities, you duplicate them into depth=c.
But your territories are also in the depth _root.c I guess.
So what might happen, is that city mc replaces territory mc and so when you try to place it with
_root.city[c][num]._y = _root[num]._y + 20;
then _root[num] mc doesnt exists anymore since its been replaced by _root.city[c][num]. Its just a guess, but try placing cities above everything else, like
duplicateMovieClip (_root.basecity, _root.city[c][num], c+10000);

I also dont see much point using names
_root.city[c][num]
while you can safely use just
_root.city[c]


Hope it helped a little :cool:

Ehhh...

It won't duplicate the city MC and place it. That's all I need help with. _root.city[c][num] is used 'cause I need to know which player it belongs to and which territory it's on. In the future players can build more cities, but only one per territory.

Yes but did you change variables to _root.num and _root.c?

Code:

---

tellTarget (_root.num) {
        gotoAndStop (_root.c);
        duplicateMovieClip (_root.basecity, _root.city[c][num], c);
        _root.city[c][num]._x = _root[num]._x + 20;
        _root.city[c][num]._y = _root[num]._y + 20;
}

---

after you use tell target(_root.num), you cant just write
duplicateMovieClip (_root.basecity, _root.city[c][num], c);
because Flash expects to find those num and c variables now inside _root.num mc. I wont write whole code again for you, only this line:
duplicateMovieClip (_root.basecity, _root.city[_root.c][_root.num], _root.c);
but its affecting almost many lines.