[freeciv-data] Suggestions -- useful things for modpacks.

["Bobby D. Bryant" <bdbryant@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Hi.  I'm about to upload version 1.2 of the Ancients modpack, which now
uses most of the customization abilities available under Freeciv 1.10.
Thanks for implementing these features.


Here are a few more things that would be useful to me and presumably to
other modpack designers, if anyone is interested in implementing them:

1) A customizable calendar.  It would be nice to be able to specify
totally arbitrary starting and ending dates, and also to be able to
customize the size of the year increments over various arbitrary
periods.

 o The arbitrary start/end dates would be useful for things like the
Middle Earth modpack (in progress), which would presumably start during
the First or Second Age, and thus need dates completely different from
those used by the standard game.

 o The ability to scale the clock ticks would be useful for my Ancients
modpack.  Since it is strictly pre-gunpowder, it would be nice to end it
around 1500 or so.  However, since the clock ticks are large during the
older dates, ending around 1500 would reduce the number of possible
turns in a game by more than half.  It would be nice if I could have
(e.g.) flat n-year increments from 4000 BCE to 1500 CE, with n
calculated to give the same number of turns as the overall game.
(However, a more flexible system would be desirable, since hopefully
other modpacks will appear when the idea catches on, and they will have
yet different calendar needs.)


2) It would be nice to have an "overview" page available from the help
menu, which could be customized for use with a given modpack to tell
what the game is all about and what to watch out for.


3) It would be nice to have a field for governments that specifies a
technology that expires them.  For instance, the Ancients modpack has a
"Dark Age" technology that makes legions, triremes, etc., obsolete, but
unfortunately it still lets you keep the efficient government for
running a large empire.  It would be nice to be able to obsolete that as
well.


4) It would be nice to have non-researchable / non-transferable
technologies.

 o For instance, the most elegant way to do a Middle Earth modpack would
be to grant the Elven nations a technology called "Elven Lore" in their
entries in nations.ruleset, and have a flag on the technology that keeps
anyone else from researching it.  (Actually, the latter part would work
with the existing "never" flag, but we still need a way to grant the
tech to specific nations at the start of the game.)

 o Related to this, we would also need a new flag to mark specific
technologies as non-transferable (neither by trade, capture, theft, or
whatever).  That way the Elves could have a tech tree that is at least
partially independent from the Dwarves, Humans, and Monsters, and the
latter three classes would never be able to acquire the technologies
that let them build Elven Archers, Swan Boats, etc.  The Elves would be
able to research the necessary techs, because Elven Lore would be one of
the prereqs, and only Elvish nations would have that particular prereq.


Thanks,

Bobby Bryant
Austin, Texas