[Freeciv-Dev] Re: WAITER! There's a BARB LEADER in my TRIREME !!! (PR#881)

[Kevin Brown <kevin@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Reinier Post <rp@xxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
> On Fri, Aug 10, 2001 at 09:48:21AM +1000, dnh wrote:
> > I think it would be a cool way to stop barbarians. Subvert the barbarian
> > leader and all the barbarians that came in that attack run away and
> > disband.
> 
> Or they join you!

Actually, I think that *both* should be possible, and the results
should be somewhat random (or, rather, that whether what happens is
random or goes one way or another should depend on a configuration
variable).

I'm sure both cases have been known to happen to leaders and followers
through history (certainly both cases are *plausible*, if nothing
else), and a lot of it depended on whether or not the followers felt
that their leader really had been subverted or not.  If the followers
feel that the leader is still true to their cause, they'll follow that
leader regardless of the leader's true motivation.

This all leads to other interesting possibilities in the future.  For
instance, as with Civ3, you could build armies and have leaders
associated with them.  I don't know how Civ3 would handle this, but in
our case subversion of the leader could result in his army effectively
becoming loyal to you.


We could expand on this further: those elements that have been
successfully subverted such that they join you have some chance of
betraying you later!  Their loyalties, after all, probably reside
elsewhere.  It could be a real trick to figure out how to
automatically detect the conditions under which betrayal might
happen...


Lots of interesting possibilities here, such as sending out a Diplomat
to persuade a Military Leader to defect (with some chance, of course,
that the Diplomat will be killed and the enemy army will attack).
Such an action, if it failed, would obviously be an act of war.  :-)


As with most any other game behavior, these things should be
configurable on a per-game basis.


-- 
Kevin Brown                                           kevin@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx

    It's really hard to define what "unexpected behavior" means when you're
                       talking about Windows.