[Freeciv-Dev] Idea: Nation Provinces.

[Martin Olveyra <molv@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

I want your opinion about something that I have been thinking and beginning to
work on. The idea comes because, unfailingly, once the game advances enough,
the big number of cities that a player must control increases in a way that
maintainance of them are the most time demanding and bored job.
Please note that I am not included in the mailing list, so reply this message to
all recipients. Suggestions are welcome.

I agree that if this idea is implemented, the mechanism of the game changes
considerably, but, anyway, the definition of provinces are optional by the
player. 
Moreover, as my main worries are the city maintainance, as I said before,
another possibility for this is to make the definition of provinces a client
side only feature. But the possibilities that I enumerate below are very
interesting to set aside them.

                        Nation Provinces
 ---------------------------------------------------
1 - Provinces unifies a group of cities. Basically, it is a method that
reduces the time of maintenance when a nation begins to have a lot of
cities. However, this also leads to very interesting features.

2 - Each player can specify (or change in any moment) the frontier of 
a province, and each city enclosed inside this border becomes a part 
of this province, with the condition that just one of them has to have a
courthouse. That city becomes the capital city of the province.
Only the capital city of a nation cannot becomes part of a
province. If the specified border also enclosed this city, the program must
exclude it and its radio automatically, so to assign this few tiles
to a federal territory (or district).

3 - In this way, a player is claiming a territory for him/herself. Any tile
that belongs to this territory can be worked, even if doesn't belongs to the
radio of a city.

4 - Observ that the same group of tiles can be claimed by two or more
players. This can happen in the real life, so it is a game new feature
rather than a problem. A tile occuped by a ground military unit can be
worked only by the player which that unit belongs to. However, if this tile 
is part of the radio of a city, the original rules apply. As a consecuence,
in order to securely control a far tile, it must be used the military force
or diplomatic agreements. In the last case, units cannot enter foreign
territory without the permission of its owner.

5 - The eventual province client dialog must include the following
information and actions:
        a) A list of cities that belongs to the province.
        b) Inhabitant size (the sum of cities sizes).
        c) Total Population (the sum of cities populations).
        d) Total food, shield, trade, gold, luxury, science.
        e) Information about improvements and wonders in the cities.
        g) Information about eventual province improvements, this is, not
           inside a city.
        f) Actual province productions. This productions are those produced
           inside each city, plus the eventual productions due to the
           existence of adecuate infrastructure outside the cities
               (province improvements).
        g) Because the total shields are shared between the cities and country
                infrastructure, for each province production must be a priority
            index, that determines the fraction of the total shields that
            must be redirected to that production.
        h) A province map, in order to select worked tiles and country
            improvements sites.