[Freeciv-Dev] Re: Project goals

[Per Inge Mathisen <per@xxxxxxxxxxx>]

What features define Freeciv?
 A) It is a turn-based game (TBS)
 B) It is inspired by the history of mankind (since we made cities)
 C) It emphasises the role of technology, cities and warfare
 D) The goal of the game is to become the greatest civilization
 E) The game is played on a tiled map
 F) The most important game unit is the city, lose them and lose the game
 G) Players start out on an empty world (except huts)
 H) Gameplay is simultaneous
 I) Up to 30 players can play in multiplayer

I think the most important features are A to E while G is a bit silly and 
rather boring, and H is inherently broken. I do not think H can be fixed 
without losing I.
Concerns from multiplayer often stand in opposition to making a better 
single player game. I think this opposition is our biggest problem. We can 
make a very good single player game, with the option of playing 
(turn-based) with 1-2 close friends. Or we can create a game that is fun 
in multiplayer. Because once we need to take into account the needs of 
higher amounts of players and a competitive and possibly hostile 
environment, the needs of single player must suffer.
So if we are to make project goals, we must decide which is more 
important, single player or multiplayer.
I have no problem saying single player is more important. This for the 
reason that multiplayer is inherently broken and unfixable without a 
redesign making multiplayer the priority.
A multiplayer civilization game needs to be real-time (RTS) instead of 
turn-based (TBS), and it needs to be redesigned to fit. We see continually 
patches and fixes to make Freeciv faster for multiplayer usage, like 
warclient features, and these make the user interface more adapted to 
multiplayer concerns but more cumbersome for single player, so they have a 
problem getting adopted. Statistically, in multiplayer most game time 
takes place in the early game, since game are restarted often and many end 
rather quickly. Freeciv is IMHO quite boring in the early game, with few 
important decisions, few ways to surprise your opponents, and many 
repetitive actions.
Fixing multiplayer Freeciv would either involve a change to "turn-less" 
playing, similar to what Civ4 offers 
(http://www.civ3.com/devupdate_multi.cfm), which would not work very well 
for long-turn games, giving priority to shorter games, or a more radical 
redesign towards a Moo2 model where players queue up actions that are 
executed in the turn end, which is what will work best for long-turn 
games. (If at this point you ask "why not offer both as options?", you 
have simply not understood the depth of the problem and the amount of 
redesign required for either to work well.)
The single player game suffers heavily under the restrictions imposed by 
multiplayer. The ban on modal dialogs has improved multiplayer 
significantly, but along with timeout and the undeclared ban on pausing 
the game to display information, it rules out many ways of displaying 
information to the player that can be highly beneficial for single player. 
Opening up a tab for tech selection and throwing it beneath the map tab is 
very nice for multiplayer, where it is imperative that you do not hide 
what happens in the early seconds of the new turn, and do not pause other 
players, but not optimal for single player, where it would not matter if 
the game waited for player confirmation of tech selection. Extending the 
rules of diplomacy for more interactivity with AI turned out to be 
extremely painful, and made me give up (see past threads).
To sum up this long post, I think our unstated goals of making Freeciv fun 
both for single player and multiplayer are incompatible, and that we have 
to make a difficult choice which is more important. I also think we have 
largely failed to make Freeciv a really fun single player game, and that 
some of the moves that we (in particular me, I suspect) have done towards 
this end may have negatively impacted multiplayer.
So perhaps what we need is a split of Freeciv into two projects, one for 
a multiplayer game and one as a single player game?
  - Per