Re: [Freeciv-Dev] Nationalities

[David Pfitzner <dwp@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Bobby D. Bryant wrote:

> Patrick Schmid wrote:
> 
> > Is it really a good idea to implement differences between nationalities?
> > This just produces stereotypes and prejudices.

> Yes and no.
> 
> "Yes" because no good is likely to come from trying to spread our parochial
> misconceptions about other civilizations around the world by means of a game
> implementation.
> 
> But "no", because it would be nice to have this feature for (e.g.) a Fantasy
> modpack, where you would *want* the Orcs to be aggressive and the Melniboneans
> to be perfectionist, and the AI would need some kind of flag if it were to
> make distinctions in their behavior.

Good points.  I think there are really two separate issues here.

One is actual game-effect race differences.  These would be things
which have an effect even for human players.  They don't happen
much in standard Civ, except perhaps if you count the different
initial techs which some races tend to have. (?)  But they could
be useful for some modpacks.  A concern here would be to balance 
things out so that no one race gets a big advantage, but that would
be something for the modpack designer to address; presumably the
default set would not have significant differences.

The second point is AI characteristics, such as aggressiveness.
These have no effect when the race is played by a human.  Such 
differences occur in standard Civ and would be useful for modpacks.
I think a way to handle this so as to avoid the stereotype problem
would be to associate AI characteristics with _leaders_, and to 
allow multiple possible leaders (chosen randomly) for each race.  
So for each race you would have a variety of leaders with different 
characteristics, so we wouldn't be associating specific 
characteristics with certain nationalities. 

Regards,
-- David