[Freeciv-Dev] Proposals

[Gerhard Killesreiter <killesreiter@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Hi!

This weekend I had several ideas, that maybe would make freeciv even
better. I apologize in advance for not being able to code them myself, 
but maybe somebody else is interested. Not all of the topics are new
or mine.

Cheers,
        Gerhard

A list of proposals for freeciv in no particular order:

Questions:
- How are the start techs determined? In partikular: Does every player 
   get the same?

- I twice got  less than 100 gold  for arresting a Berbarian leader. Is this
   to be expected?

New techs to be researched:
- the printing machine (Gutenberg): related to science

- telegraph (who?): can connect cities, more science, trade (?)

Client:
- graphical representation of money/science/whatever-increase
    vs. time  as graph on the empty left side of client.
  Or  number of cities with population n against n.

Buglets:
- when building spaceship the time for the journey is indicated even 
   if you have not built any aggregat

- when changing city production, the the city production line 
   below the cityname is not updated (Gtk).

- when you get a message like : your %s near %s ...
   the second %s might tell you about cities you have not yet 
   discovered due to FoW.

Translation:
- some leaders have names like <somebody> the <something>
   make the the-something part translatable

- sometimes the translation of non-ascii names to English leads
   to different results than to German and probably other languages.
   Examples: Yeltsin vs. Jelzin
                      Beijing vs. Peking
   make names (leaders, cities) translatable?

- the case of needing more cases in other languages than English
   is not yet resolved :-(

   I propose the inclusion of additional fields in the
   <nation>.rulesets files, i.e. making the nation's name an array to 
   be filled with the cases in singular und plural.
   Do the C-stringhandling functions accept arrays of strings?
   Apparently not. Is it possible to write some modified printf?
   The strings would then look like:
   "The %a[1,2] have discovered the %a[1,2]" and the translators could 
   change the numbers as they think fits best.

- the server is not yet fully i18ned:
   e.g. list gives:
    Jimmu Tenno (AI, difficulty level hard, nation Japaner)

- from barbarian.ruleset:
   [nation_barbarian]

   name="Barbarian"
   plural="Barbarians"

   Should be i18ned?

AI:
- the AI is too easy. It was harder to beat several months ago.
   sometimes it leaves cities without a single defender.
   typical situation: You put one musketeer in front of a city
    that is defendet only by phalanxes. The AI will waste many
    phalanxes to get rid of your musketeer. The following
    musketeers can easily take the city.

- it would be nice to have some basic diplomatic interaction.

- the AI should use fighters & bombers.

- the AI should try harder to liberate his cities rather then trying
   to conquer others.

other suggestions:
- when pillaging land improvements: decrease the quality of 
   railway, road gradually, indicated by less visibility of improvement.

- when selecting the leader name you can choose which one you want.
   do the same for citynames.

- I would be fun to see the name of cities in the language of the owning
   civ, say Chinese glyphs, with translated (see above) name below.

- a retreat-command would be usefull: when a unit is badly damaged
   the command would be issued and the unit would go to the nearest 
   friendly town/harbour to recuperate. Whether a town has a barrack 
   should taken into account.

- an option to save the position of foreign units on the map would be 
   usefull, especially with the new patrol-command. Maybe not in the 
   same size as real units. Some timeout for this option would be usefull.

- a zoom option for the map would be nice.

- the AI can stack units, human players might to want to do this too.
   (Settler & phalanx, musketeer & canon, mech. inf. & howitzer)
   OTOH the AI stacks say two musketeers. This is silly, if you lose a battle,
   you will lose both.

- one gets a message when the capitol of another civ has been captured
   and civil war resulted. Maybe include the name of the conqueror. This 
   would be logical.