#253 Distribution can leak information on absolute origin
The server has a feature: Distribution at updates proceed from absolute 0 to the right and then down.
If you are unlucky, your home country gets cut in half or worse. This means e.g. your tech center could get starved.
It can screw up the early game if you are not very careful with micromanagement. A significant disadvantage to other players.
Perhaps this is too abusable if players can communicate absolute coordinates?
A less abusable alternative is to let countries with homeland intersected by the horizonal line know the 0 Y coordinate
and countries with homeland intersected by the vertical line know the 0 X coordinate. Command "origin homedivider" or similar?
If both lines intersect, that shall obviously be reported.
Then the significant abuse is limited to those that both have intersections. Minor info is knowing that one or both parties in a
communication has no intersection. This may become relevant when a fairly large % of the map is known.
As is, affected countries will know this eventually, but only after a lot of potential grief and moving of important sectors.
An intersection on discovered islands can be damaging too, but that is far from as critical as the homeland.
I overlooked this tracker item. My sincere apologies. I'll try to do better in the future.
Yes, distribution starts at the absolute origin. First, all sectors export to their dist center. Next, all sectors import from their dist center. As long as the dist centers accept all exports and satisfy all imports, the order doesn't matter.
Unfortunately, these conditions aren't always met in practice. For instance, a bank with a high dust threshold can import all dust, leaving nothing for a tech center that comes later in sector order. I figure that's what you meant when you wrote "your tech center could get starved".
You're observation that this allows some players to learn something about the absolute origin is correct. I consider that a bug. The absolute origin isn't for players to know. May not be the only place where the absolute origin leaks; a systematic search for such leaks seems advisable.
I'm not sure I understand your "origin homedivider" proposal. I guess what you're proposing is this: whatever information about the absolute origin they could ferret out from distribution (or delivery), tell them straight away. This saves crafty players the trouble of ferreting it out, and gives not-sufficiently-crafty players a chance to deal with it. Correct?
I'd rather fix distribution and delivery not to depend on (and thus leak information about) the absolute origin.
An obvious fix is to start distribution and delivery at the players origin. But that sucks. Perhaps start it on the sector opposite to the player's origin.
Reordering distribution could conceivably incur a performance hit; need to measure.
Moving to the bugs tracker.
Indeed I meant that lower prio sectors get resources due to unexpected dist order.
I think it gets extremely complex to keep absolute zero secret throughout a game.
It becomes less and less important as the game goes on though. If all home islands have predictable dist, that would be good enough, e.g. with start in the water sector to the NW of all land sectors. All other sectors use the regular absolute zero. Perhaps realms can help for impl? I think this dist method would have to be an option, so it does not mess up continental games or those where such dist realms could overlap.