Re: [Freeciv-Dev] Fantasy Modpack

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

Jules Bean wrote:

> Sounds great fun.  One of the 'things' about Civ is then in my
> experience, everyone gets basically the same technologies (i.e. all of
> them!).  It would be nice to see a game where it made sense to
> specialise on one branch of the tech tree.

I ran into this problem while trying to make a fantasy modpack for CivII, and
there doesn't seem to be a general solution for it there.  (However, some of
the scenarios are doing something along this line, though I never quite figured
out how.)

It would be nice to have a way to specify some of the technologies as neither
researchable nor transferable, and to provide a mechanism for
modpacks/scenarios to assign them to the various nations at the start of a
game.  Then you could assign 'woodlore' to the Elves, 'stonelore' to the
Dwarves, etc., and let those serve as the basic prerequisites for units
specific to the indicated species.

As to the mechanism, we could provide another keyword such as 'special' or
'innate' to go along with 'none' and 'never' in techs.ruleset, and then have
the forthcoming tribes.ruleset allow specifying any initial techs posessed by
the various nations.

Bobby Bryant
Austin, Texas

p.s. -- I haven't had time to follow all the the recent discussions, but I do
like the idea someone mooted re having the server tell the clients which
rulesets and images to load.  That way whenever someone joined the game, there
would never be any confusion arising from people using different rulesets.
("Get your musketeer out of my oasis!"  "What musketeer?  This is a fantasy
game!")  And if you didn't have the scenario/modpack loaded on your system, you
would have to load it before you could join the game.