[Freeciv-Dev] A few ideas.

["Claus Leth Gregersen" <leth@xxxxxxxxxxx>]

Borders:

Alpha Centauri got one nice feature and that is borders around your empire.
It's like 6-7 squares radius away from your closest city.
The reason there is borders is that when you have a treaty with another
nation, you're not allowed
to cross the border with units, without cancelling the treaty (except when
you're in an alliance).
That makes the diplomacy effort more valuable, and the information could
also give a helping hand to the AI. The code for this is  just an extra
information on each tile, and is pretty trivial and very fast to maintain
(update the ownership on surrounding tiles whenever a city is created).
Will require some extra communication to the client as this information
needs to be transferred to the client for it to be able to draw the border.
Another bonus would be that the size of the empires could be measured.

Tech-handicap:

In civ 2 you are punished on your researchspeed if you have more techs than
the other players.
Earlier i thought this as a crappy excuse to help the AI against good
players.
Now i changed my mind and think it would be a nice feature for game balance,
But i would rather prefer to reverse the effect, and make it cheaper to
research tech that has already been invented by someone else.
I think this also reflects the real world better.
This would make it easier for newbie players to keep up with the AI, and the
hardcore gamers would get a harder time.


/Claus Leth Gregersen