[Freeciv-Dev] Re: suggestion / idea

[Daniel Burrows <Daniel_Burrows@xxxxxxxxx>]

On Fri, Jan 28, 2000 at 07:26:27PM -0500, Greg Wooledge was heard to say:
> Yeupou !! (yeupou@xxxxxxxxxx) wrote:
> 
> > ship can conquer a city !
> 
> A ship can destroy the units in a city, but it cannot decrease the city's
> population or actually occupy (capture/conquer) an enemy city.  For that
> you need a land unit (or Helicopter).

  I think the problem really is that ships ignore city walls.  I don't *think*
this was the case in CivII (if it was, I missed a major tactical consideration
when I was playing it :-\ )

> > this is so easy to kill someone who havent got warships with few ironclad..
> 
> ... until your opponent builds Coastal Defenses.  Or Alpine Troops.

  Coastal defenses can come significantly after Steam Engine, depending on your
research order.  I keep forgetting how powerful Freeciv Ironclads are, waiting
to research Metallurgy until as late as possible (because of the Great Wall),
and then getting blown away by armadas of ironclads..

> > the second one is i'm only a newbie programmer, so i cant fix that problem
> > myself ...
> 
> It's not a programmatic issue.  It's a question of the balance of the
> units, which is mostly just numbers in a text file (units.ruleset).
> 
> Has anyone tried playing a game with the Ironclad scaled down --
> say, with 20 hitpoints instead of 30?  I'm not necessarily advocating
> making this change in Freeciv (I think we need to work on greater Civ2
> compatibility, not divergence, right now) -- but I'd love to know how
> this change (or a similar one) affects game balance.

  I don't remember Ironclads being nearly so powerful in Civ2 (in fact, I
remember them being pretty useless except for ambushing transport units) --
unless I'm completely mistaken, *something* is out of whack here.  Can anyone
verify that ships ignored city walls in CivII?  I still think they didn't, and
this would even things up immediately.

  Daniel

  PS - I'm a little aggrivated right now because I just got trounced a few
minutes ago by a "normal" AI which got Steam Engine and immediately set all its
cities to building Ironclads..while I was trying to research Metallurgy and
get enough Coastal Defenses to avoid being overrun, it managed to get way ahead
in research and build Darwin's Voyage, Shakespeare's Theatre, and Women's
Suffrage in a few turns (yes, while simultaneously putting everything into
Ironclads)  So I might not be entirely objective on the subject of "what should
be done about ships" right now :)

-- 
THERE IS NO HOPE BUT US.  THERE IS NO JUSTICE BUT US.  ALL THAT IS, IS OURS.
BUT WE MUST CARE.  FOR IF WE DO NOT CARE, THEN WE DO NOT EXIST...
     -- Terry Pratchett, _Reaper Man_