[Freeciv-Dev] Comet Wars

["Wilner, Alden" <alden.wilner@xxxxxxxx>]

Anybody read "Heart of the Comet" by David Brin and Greg Benford?

OK. It's not water, it's space.

They're not fish, they're 'visual indicators of the photonic flux'

That's not the North Pole, it's the Sun.

They're not continents, they're Comets. And every turn, they move, carrying
settlements
and units along with them. Orbits are 'simulated' by the comets moving up
and down in a 
regular pattern. Yah, this is a major change to both the client and server. 

They're not settlers, they're colony ships.

They're not cities, they're -- Well, OK, maybe they are cities.

There's this one big continent that's all hills and plains, up near the Sun.
It's Earth, and it's where the AI lives. And every time one of your comets
gets too close, they start shooting stuff at you. Well, that's what Brin and
Benford did in their book.

Where the South Pole would be is this big glommy mess of (mostly) little
comets. It's the Oort Cloud. 

When your comets get close to the Sun, they melt (random pieces convert to
space, at a rate determined by proximity to the Sun. And they don't always
come back when you get further away). Technology can ameliorate this effect,
but in general the strategy is - get close to the Sun, grab as much energy
as you can, but don't let yourself get too close, cause your whole comet
will fall to pieces. Then orbit back out to the Oort cloud and pick up the
minerals & resources that are laying around out there and add them to your
comet.

Lessee. Comets are mostly just ice and tundra, with an occasional mountain
or hill thrown in. So when you're away from the Sun, there's never enough
food (again, technology will affect this, viz. Harbours), and, at least in
the early stages of the game, it should be touch-and-go whether you have
enough resources stored up to keep _anybody_ alive.

It would be fun to extend the map so that if goes way, way out south, and
gets wider as it goes. So you can go past the Oort cloud, and maybe find, I
dunno, new Physics or something. Anyhow, you could go all the way to another
star system without building the "spaceship" Just keep pumping your orbit
up. 

Woah, off topic. Sorry. 

And not very realistic, either. 

But it did feel like a cool thought. You ought to be able to start with a
Freeciv core, and modify it a little to add moving continents, and change
terminology, technology and bitmaps, and come up with a completely different
game. 

Brin & Benford's book has lots of interesting technologies that could be
used to start building the technology tree.

Well, I launch this email to the freeciv developers to see if anybody is
interested in such a project. I'm pretty sure I won't attempt it on my own,
but I might get started if I had help...

Sincerely,
Alden Wilner
alden.wilner@xxxxxxxx