[Freeciv-Dev] Re: [patch] Message windows (report, science ...)

[Jason Dorje Short <jshort@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Tony Stuckey wrote:
> 
> On Wed, Sep 12, 2001 at 11:31:12AM +0200, Karl-Ingo Friese wrote:
> > For all of the players I personaly know, it defenitely is an issue.
> > Freeciv can become a very hectic and stress game (which is good!).
> > But the popups at certain situations are nothing but a worse anoyance.
> > Just imagine: 10 seconds before turn end you see 6 ironclads appear
> > at close to your capital. You dont want the treaty dialog of your
> > team mate now. You do not want to be informed that your scientists
> > researched theology. You do not want to hear that the Irish are the
> > richest civilisation, no, you want to prepare your defenses. Move troops
> > from inland to coastline. Alert the diplomats for buybacks. Use your
> > own ironclads to block the attackers.
> 
>         See -- there are those of us who think that's the biggest reason to
> remove real-time mode.

I don't think real-time mode can, should, or ever will be removed.

It might be advantageous to offer an untimed mode as an alternative. 
This would provide a few tradeoffs; however most of them would be bad.

Consider: what if FreeCiv provided a turn-by-turn alternative to
real-time mode?  That is, each person got one turn per game turn in
which to move (rather like what happens now if you play against the
AI).  The advantage, of course, is that things would no longer be
real-time, but would instead be untimed (or time-independent?).  This
means the big "rush" would be avoided.  The disadvantage is that games
will be LONG and SLOW since each player will have to wait for all others
in between turns rather than always being active.  It might be useful in
a few situations, though.

Perhaps a more sophisticated system could be developed, although I'm not
sure that it would be an improvement.  Maybe every player would get one
"move" every certain amount of time (this idea has serious drawbacks). 
Maybe all players would submit their "moves", but all would be applied
simultaneously at the end of the turn (this would be very difficult to
implement, I think).

It might be reasonable for some games to follow a system like this.  If
you're playing a 2-player game, it would be your turn 50% of the time. 
Against friendly opposition, you might agree to use this 50% for moving
units and spend off-time during your opponent's turn handling your
production, etc.  Since city production happens at the end of each game
turn, it might then be reasonable to request an end-of-game-turn from
each player before having this (so that all players can move their units
during their turn and then have longer to change production).

The real question, I think, is how much work would it be to implement
this?  Right now FreeCiv makes no distinction between different players
as far as turns go.  How hard would it be to order the turns?

jason