[Freeciv-Dev] improvement?

[Sebastian Fischmeister <sfischme@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Hello.

After two days playing about 10h each day against each other, my
brother had a very good idea, which could improve the game a lot.

The magical word is: auto-attack

I do not know, if it has been discussed around here, because I did not
read all the archive, however, it works as follows:

objective: when you play a large land-mass it is impossible for you to
---------  control everything (see every attack). And as buying cities
           is not very expensive (thanks for the patch which looks for
           units in cities), you can loose many cities very fast.

           the second intention was, to encourage players to use new
           technologies (for example aircrafts). No-one will build an
           aircraft carrier as long as he has to control all and
           everything by hand. 

units concerned:      (first phase) aircrafts, (finally) aircrafts and ships
----------------

how it works:  for each city you can fill out a small form:
-------------
               - attack ground
               - attack water
               - attack air
               - choose players to attack (you may have allies) 
                 [you may put this in a more global one,
                    for example game->players]
               - auto-attack active (yes/no)

               Then when an aircraft is sentry in that town, it's in
               patrol-mode. Now there is an extra turn in the
               server-loop:

                 play_auto_attack(); play_ai(); 
                 play_players(); end_turn();

               So before the ai plays its turn, the auto-attack is
               started. There the computer looks in each city, which
               has the auto-attack enabled, if there is a target in
               the range for an aircraft (bomber or fighter) and if it
               is possible for the aircraft to return *home* [not
               another near city]. If yes -> attack !

conclusion: This can prevent your cities from being incited, but
----------- still gives the enemy a chance. Now you are possible to
            reign large land-masses, guard narrows etc... without
            having a timeout of 0 and wasting lots of time.


Well. With ships its a bit more complicate, because they can keep on
moving, so it would be nice if I get some comments on this. Generally
I am not very familiar with the code right now, but I am willing to
contribute...

Yours,
  -Sebastian