[Freeciv-Dev] Re: City improvement

[Greg Wooledge <wooledge@xxxxxxxxxxx>]

Robinson (crusoe@xxxxxxxxxxxx) wrote:

> Another worker type should be available once industrialisation has been 
> discovered - the worker. Equivalent to a scientist, taxman or entertainer, 
> the worker adds two production squares to the city's total.

This will be required for CTP compatibility anyway.  But there need to
be more refined triggers -- e.g., in CTP you can only use the worker
specialist in a city that has a Factory.  The gold-generating worker
(taxman? I forget its name...) requires a Marketplace or Bank; and if
I recall correctly, the entertainer and scientist don't require any
improvements at all.

By the way, please try to wrap your lines at somewhere around 72
characters.

> A city with a factory should be able to build two things at once (eg a 
> dragoon and an ironclad), with production apportioned between the two as the 
> player wishes, by percentage.
> 
> A city with a mfg plant should be able to build four things at once.

Doing this does not give you any benefits in game terms.  Suppose you
build two things at once, each of which would require 5 turns by itself.
Under your proposal, both of them would finish simultaneously after
10 turns.  This means that you lose 5 turns of benefit from whichever
you would have finished first, if you had built them one at a time.

> Railroads should cease to become unlimited in movement, but have a movement 
> modifier of 10.

For CTP we'll need to have a granulation of 1/30 movement points.
Rivers use 1/2, roads 1/3, railroads 1/5 and maglevs 1/10.  Undersea
tunnels count as maglevs, as does every tile in outer space.

Also, just to be obnoxious, the CTP movement rules are slightly
different.  River/road/etc. movement cost reductions in Civ2/Freeciv
only kick in when you move between two tiles with the same type
of movement-enhancer.  But in CTP only the destination tile matters;
thus, it's possible to do this:

    ..X
    .~.
    .O.
    .~.

If X is a military unit stack on dry land, and ~ is a river, and O is
a city with a river running through it -- then the stack can attack the
city in one turn (at half strength??), even with only 1 movement point.
Moving from dry land onto a river tile only costs 1/2 movement point
(normal river movement rate).  However, moving from a river onto dry
land requires a full movement point.  It's not symmetric in CTP.

(Satan only knows what will happen in CTP2 and Civ3.... :-/ )

> There should be an 'elite' level of experience that goes beyond veteran. It 
> should have a chance of occurring every time the unit kills ten other units. 
> It gives another 50% offense/defense bonus (effectively doubling the base 
> stats).

For SMAC mode, we'll need multiple levels of unit morale -- from very
green (-25%) to green (-12.5%) to disciplined (0%) to hardened (+12.5%)
to veteran (+25%) to commando (+37.5%) to elite (+50% and +1 MP).

(For those who haven't guessed yet, combat in SMAC is usually a lot closer
and less random than in Civ2/Freeciv.  A final strength comparison of
7.5 to 6.0, instead of 6.0 to 6.0, is a big deal.  This is especially
true with "psi combat" which ignores the units' attack and defense
ratings, and only uses morale and some special bonuses.)

I think that a +100% bonus is too powerful.  (But then, the +1 movement
point for a SMAC elite unit is pretty potent.... :-) )

> To go with this, you should be able to upgrade units that are in cities.

You can already do this.  The Civ2/Freeciv unit tree includes an
obsolescence relationship -- e.g., the Phalanx is obsoleted by the
Pikeman, which is obsoleted by the Musketeer, etc.  You can upgrade
any unit to any of the unit types that make it obsolete, an arbitrary
number of hops forward -- but you pay more for bigger jumps, of course.
So for example, you can upgrade a Phalanx straight to a Musketeer,
as long as you have the techs (Feudalism and Gunpowder in this case).

The Leonardo's Workshop wonder also does this, 1 unit (randomly chosen)
per turn.  This is a toned down of the Civ2 Leonardo, which does *all*
units at once (but has some bugs -- it doesn't always trigger at the
earliest opportunity).

Wanna know what's sick?  In SMAC, you can upgrade units *anywhere*, even
in enemy turf IIRC.  The only thing you can't change is the chassis type
(e.g., an infantry chassis can't become a plane).  That 1/1/1 scout that
Miriam just sent into your territory could suddenly transform itself
into an 8+/<4>/1 Amphibious AAA Chaos Infantry....

Wanna know what's *really* sick?  There's a SMAC bug that lets you do
this without the normal movement point cost (the only down side is that
you have to upgrade all the units of a given type at once to get this
effect -- which can be an expensive operation).  So that 1/1/1 scout
could forego the armor, and just make itself into an 8+/1/1 Amphibious
Chaos Infantry and attack you immediately -- and if it lives, it can
transform again, to get some armor, to make your counter-attack more
difficult. :-/  (Naturally the SMAC AI does not know how to do this.
It hardly ever upgrades units in the first place.)

> A city should be allowed to have as many trading links as it has units of 
> population.

Interesting.  I think that has potential.  But you may find that most of
the experienced players on this list don't use trade routes very often,
if at all.... ;-)

(It's also worth mentioning that SMAC and CTP both have dramatically
different trade models.  In CTP you build Caravans, but they don't appear
on the map -- instead they go into a special pool.  You can use Caravans
from this pool to make a trade route between a city that has a trade good
(a map special) and another city, but I don't feel like explaining all
the nuances right now.  In SMAC trade is entirely automatic and happens
between your faction and any factions with whom you have a non-Vendetta
diplomatic relationship (the friendlier the relationship, the more trade
income you get).)

-- 
Greg Wooledge                    | "Truth belongs to everybody."
wooledge@xxxxxxxxxxx             |   Red Hot Chili Peppers
http://www.kellnet.com/wooledge/ |

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