Whats is the benefit if we use enemy pointer to the type of it's inherited class ?

Question

If we use a class like Enemy and then Ninja , Monster which inherits the property of Enemy class then in the main function we declare two pointer to the Enemy class having the address of It's derived class object like this ..
👇👇

int main()
{
Ninja n;
Monster m;
Enemy *e1 = &n;
Enemy *e2 = &m;

}

We could also separately declare that without pointing to enemy object like

Ninja n;
then pointer to it's own type
Ninja *p = &n ;

https://www.sololearn.com/learn/CPlusPlus/1911/

But what's the benefit of the way we used above .... please help me 🙏🙏

Answer 1

AFAIK, you may want to override a virtual function defined in the base class (Enemy class) like this

class Enemy {
public:
virtual void kill() {
cout << "Enemy gets killed\n";
}
};

by an object from the derived class

class Ninja : public Enemy {
public:
void kill() {
cout << "Ninja gets killed\n";
}
};

in order to avoid, for example, overloading a global function to perform the correct action like so

// global function prototype
void f(Enemy *x); // notice that the formal parameter is of type `Enemy *`

int main() {

// objects creation
Ninja *n = new Ninja;
Enemy *e = new Enemy;

// invoking the global function
f(e);
f(n);
}

// Function definition
void f(Enemy *x) {
x->kill();
}

Output:
Enemy gets killed
Ninja gets killed

Without being virtual:
Enemy gets killed
Enemy gets killed

Answer 2

If you have plenty of Monsters, Ninjas, and several kind of other "objects" in a game on the same spot, and you might attack them with a bomb or something, the explosion would damage all of them.

So if you point to them with enemy pointers, you could just loop through an array of enemies and don't mind about the different types instead of calling each object separately and add damage.
This makes coding easier and closer to the real applications.
So it's a nice feature ;)

There are also other examples depending on the context.

Tip: read the comments below these lessons. They often provide useful explanations and your question is actually already answered there 😉