[Freeciv-Dev] sugestions for long term playing

[thomas <thomas@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

    A friend of mine and I play freeciv quite different then most people I
think.  We create large maps with many ai players, then we spend the next
month to month and a half tring to beat them as a team.  We only make about
2-4 moves a day as we play at work (and we actualy try to get some work
done).  By playing in this way I have developed some simple stratigies to
help me manage my empirer for such a long game.  One of these ideas is to
use a naming convintion for all my cities.  This allows me to sort my cities
by island in the city report window.  On the end of the city name I append
flages that encode information about that city such as the existents of a
port or a factory.  My system also allows me to state if the town has a plan
(in the work list) to build an aquaduct or a sewer system so that I can
ignore the naging message box for that town.  While this system works well
for me, I do not like brodcasting this information to other human players
(we may not work together forever) who may be able to decipher my codes,
which are not that hard.
    I would like to propose that a string be added to the cities information
to allow people to save short comments about that city.  I would like this
string to be shown whereever the cities name is shown, but on the map only
the owner of the city should be able to see it (I thought it could appear
under the cities name).  With this you could do things like enter in
"assemble troops here" and on the map you have a visual maker to help you
remember what it was you were doing last week when you started doing what
ever. Or you could enter in codes like what I do with the city name.
    I would also like to know if there could be bigger maps, like 400x200 or
how about IntegerxInteger.  Well that my be a bit to big, but you get the
point.
    How about an auto sove based on time and not turns.  It would be great
if freeciv did an auto save say every two days or what ever you set it to.

Example city code if you care to see:
M 00 003 -AP -S

M   -> the country code incase any one else does something weird like I do.
00  -> the island number, this is the first island that I settled
003 -> this is the city number, in order of founding.  Can be a name like
Cannel, BayMouth, or Capital
-FA -> flags to signify what is in the city, this means Airport and see Port
-S  -> flags to signify what the city needs, this means Sewer