[Freeciv-Dev] Re: long-term FreeCiv play

[Tobias Brox <tobiasb@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

> Just wondering -- how well would freeciv support long-term play, e.g.
> maybe 1-4 turns a day?  (The idea being a kind of play-by-email style.)

I've been into it before ... I can't remember why it didn't work, but I
think it was more because of my bad organizing, bad time or the players
never beeing able to connect at the same times (one update every day would
eventually cause the game to last for years..) 

> Looking at http://www.freeciv.org/manual/server.html , it looks like
> setting timeout to e.g. 3600*4 would provide this. Would it then be
> possible for users to connect, do their turn, and disconnect?

It wasn't back then at least, but I think there has been done some hacks
to it?

> world, and now there's what looks like a massively improved version, and
> it's free software.  If I can only find the time to really start playing
> it though... ;)

It's never _really_ time ... though often it's a lot of dead time (or
time when you should have been doing some work but are too lazy to do it).
Anyway, I guess I discovered that if I really didn't have time, that also
included long term gaming.  Vacations and weekends are also always a
problem.

One of my "most wanted" game design ideas (maybe it could be done through
Freeciv?) is a large system (much larger than Freeciv of today) where
things are going quite slowly (...anyway a bit faster than 1:1), and where
all units are more or less hierarchically organized (one person might be
in charge of one city, one person might be in charge of all activities in
a territority, one person might be in charge of some group of units, etc). 
There should be some few empires, and there should be several players
controlling each empire.  Every player might control a branch, restructure
it, control individual units, give orders, and edit scripts that controls
default behaviour.  Everything can be overridden by the lower-rank
players, but the upper-rank player is also free to reorganize people.
People should automaticly rise somehow in the hierarchy if they perform
good.

There are _a lot_ of problems, complexity and concerns about this design
idea ... I don't think this is the right forum for discussing this.  I can
also say that I don't have any time to contribute to such a project
myself, except for some design thoughts.

-- 
Tobias Brox (alias TobiX) - +4722925871 - _urgent_ emails to
sms@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx.  Check our upcoming MMORPG at 
http://www.anarchy-online.com/ (Qt) and play multiplayer Spades, 
Backgammon, Poker etc for free at http://www.funcom.com/ (Java)