[Freeciv-Dev] Comments on CMA 2.6

[Christian Knoke <ChrisK@xxxxxxxx>]

I want to give some feedback from playtesting.

First, it gives a *great* performance boost for the whole game.
I've never had 111% science in 400 BC before, and I don't play
smallpox. When you eventually wage war, you needn't take much
care about angry citizens, the CMA does this for you :-) Guess 
we'll have to rewrite some tutorials if this is availlable.

Second, it seems to be stable, so, from a technical point,
it can be applied.

There are some things which make it difficult to use, though.

We've discussed already, that it is hard to have CMA'd and
non-CMA'd cities nearby. The CMA grabs all good tiles, and 
you can't correct it manually.

Second, it's hard work to *adjust* the agents. I don't find
the presets very useful; there are so many possiblities
that everybody probably ends up with his own custom settings,
and you often have to change these.

The sliders can't be set by clicking, only by drawing, that
makes it harder. The resolution for the sliders is to high.
And when the agent gives up control, because it can't fullfil 
the requirements, you start over again with the setting (the 
agent should show the last active setting IMHO).

Third, it's hard to *control* the agents: with custom settings,
looking in the city report, you have no hint what the agent(s)
does for the cities. It just says "custom".

So, one solution would be to have (mostly) user-defined presets,
with the user to be forced to give a name to each different
setting he creates, and the same name for the same setting.

Another way would be to have attributes that the user can set
(or not) for an agent/city, e.g. "no food loss", "food surplus",
"no production loss", "max gold", "much production" (in the meaning
of: gold has a higher value than production), "happy" (hey with
this one I kept most of my cities celebrating with only 60% of
global luxury). We could find useful abbrevations to be shown
in the city report.

Both solutions provide a way to control the agents from within
the city report.

Christian

-- 
* Christian Knoke                           +49 4852 92248 *
* D-25541 Brunsbuettel                  Wurtleutetweute 49 *
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