Tactical Information

This is for the more advanced players, novices shouldn't bother with this.

In the first year and half of play many alliances requested some way to share tactical information, to the extent that one clan wrote their own tactical viewer, which they may still develop. Anyway, after a six month wait the tactical import/export was added (version 3.1).

The tactical options only appear within the File menu when the game client is being run standalone (i.e. from the hard disk via runnit.bat).

Export

Tactical export will write to a file of your choice the details of all titans that you are aware of, this file is a text XML file which you can look at and edit directly if you want. Alternatively, you can export a compressed version of the file which will have an extension of tzp, when importing a file the filename ending in .tzp means its compressed. Compression is good for sending the entire file is you have no wish to edit it. You must also consider that other players may edit the xml resulting in misleading tactical information. So my advice is to only swap tactical information with those you trust with your breeders, hall and very existence.

Once you have exported the tactical file you can mail it to your allies. BUT, these tactical files will be too large to travel via message relay, so again, you must use an allies normal email address to exchange such information.

Another approach to tactical information is to always store the turns tactical info, and to read it in the next turn - in this way you get degrading information about the last place you saw a certain Titan.

Import

If you want to load tactical information from other players or from previous turns then you must select the XML file using the Import Tactical File menu option. If the file ends in .tzp then the game will first decompress the data before reading it in (see above).

Once loaded then all titans within the file will be added, and they will be displayed (you may switch them on and off using the view filter). A tactical titan is drawn as normal with a number on top of them. The number is the age of the information, for example, a 0 means that the information is from this turn, a 1 means that the information for this titan is 1 turn old, and so on. If you select a tactical Titan then the panel on the left of the screen will show the turn from which the data is derived - next to the Titans name.

Import is only available after you have loaded your turn report.

The Details

XML is the eXtensible Markup Language, which is a fancy way of saying you use tags to identify what text means. The files that are produced can be viewed by any text editor, and providing you edit the files correctly, Tartarus will read hand made XML, but I wouldn't recommend it.

There are certain rules that Export and Import use.

• Export and Import will ignore dead titans.
• Import will replace any out of date info on a Titan with more timely data about the Titan. For example, you could load one tactical file with information from 5 turns ago and another with information from last turn. If a Titan is in both files then the most recent will be used and the previous one will be discarded.
• As mentioned above, the files are too large to go through Tartarus Message Relay. Zipping them up will not work either. So your only option is to get the real email address of a player and send it through normal email. I'm guessing you are only swapping tactical info with close allies anyway.
• Import will ignore any tactical information about your own Titans. In other words, your turn report is always more up to date than any other clans tactical export.
• The advantage of using this format is that you can exchange data without giving away passwords and so on. You can also edit out details of any titans that you do not want to give away - admittedly this must be done using a text editor and will be a slow process.

And that's that. I'd suggest you do an export of a turn and then import it a few turns later and you will see how it works.

I'm a programmer, tell me more

Hey, some of you are, and I encourage you to play with XML and Java. I actually didn't use a validating parser as I have no Schema/DTD, and so my very own rubbish parser does the trick. So if you edit the XML by hand and corrupt it then you may find Tartarus simply fails to read the file and doesn't report why correctly.

Feel free to produce your own better tactical viewers, sadly I cannot allow you to write robot programs to drive your titans automatically. Tartarus is a war game for humans, and having a player run 100 robot armies each night from their AI's is not in the nature of the game. Sorry.

If you can't work out what the tags mean, or have another question then get in touch.

And finally, command line mode

The Tartarus game client has a command line mode that lets you read from tzp or xml tacticals and also from turn report files and from a directory full of such files produce html tac files, one per go. The details of command line mode are given elsewhere, but you can use this from your own programs by 'exec'ing the tartarus client and then reading in the resultant xml.