Re: [Freeciv-Dev] terrain server options

[David Pfitzner <dwp@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Jeff Mallatt <jjm@xxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

> >So is farmfood likely to be used in practice?
> 
> When I added farmfood, it seemed the same sort of parameter as railfood
> (and railprod and railtrade), so I put it in the same place.

Yeah.  I guess historically the railmod server options were 
handy/necessary to generalize Civ1 and Civ2 rail differences,
pre-rulesets.

>  In practice,
> I suspect all four of these could (should?) be moved into the terrain ruleset.

Yep, I think I would prefer that.

The real problem is that we don't really have a clear policy on
what should be in rulesets and what should be server options.
I guess server options should be things you're likely to want
to vary interactively from game to game, rulesets things you want
to modify carefully and rarely and then leave.  Or select from
some pre-made rulesets.

Hmm, looking through the current serve options:
- the map generation things are good as server options, for 
  above reason: want to try different maps from game to game;
- player limits, aifill obviously server options similarly;
- settlers and explorer could probably be rulesets, if there
were an appropriate one (maybe the game.ruleset which was 
proposed for [calendar] could be a catch-all)
- gold, techlevel are start-up things I guess best as server opts?
- researchspeed, techpenalty, <foo>cost, foodbox, aqueductloss,
  unhappysize, cityfactor, razechange, diplchance, civilwarsize:
Various rules, I guess ok as server options, though there have
been ideas to generalize cityfactor, which would be easier in 
ruleset form.  (Eg, progression tables, etc.)  Or could be
considered part of government ruleset, since has govt dependent
modifiers...
- spacerace: maybe useful to prohibit the space stuff without having
   to mess with rulesets to turn off space parts.
- others real "server" server options, ok.

> Also, I find "civstyle" to be a very misleading misnomer.  It's only used
> in one place: to determine the radius of initially visible squares at the
> very start of the game.  Should we rename it to something like "startrad",
> and re-code its use to be more general?

Well, originally civstyle seemed to be intended to operate some 
sort of internal ruleset stuff for units etc to support a Civ1 mode,
but that was never in working condition.  When real rulesets happened 
I left the civstyle option there in case it was useful for something 
in the future.  Its been considered possibly useful for "minor" 
differences not worth having an extra option/variable for, but 
in practice it hasn't really been utilised.  I probably wouldn't
mind seeing it disappear or be renamed.  Though "startrad" parses
too much like "star trad" rather than "start rad" to me... :-/

Regards,
-- David