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

[Tony Stuckey <stuckey@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

On Thu, Sep 13, 2001 at 06:54:05AM -0400, Jason Dorje Short wrote:
> 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.

        Exactly.  Although rather than "useful in a few situations", I say
"preferred mode".

> 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).

        We-Go has been successfully implemented in other large-scale games.
http://www.battlefront.com sells TacOps, which is a great GREAT game that
doesn't get enough recognition.  Check it out.

> 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?

        I don't think it would be all that hard.
-- 
Anthony J. Stuckey                              stuckey@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
"And they said work hard, and die suddenly, because it's fun."
        -Robyn Hitchcock.