[Freeciv-Dev] Re: Comments on CMA 2.6

[Raimar Falke <hawk@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

On Sun, Oct 21, 2001 at 12:54:23AM +0200, Christian Knoke wrote:
> 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.

Prepare that there is no solution to this in the next time.

> 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.

Ack.

> The resolution for the sliders is to high.

I don't understand.

> 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).

Yes.

> 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.

I'm currently working on user defined presets. These will be either
local (for this game) or global (defined for all future games using
.civclientrc). I will also implement the enforcement that every custom
setting has to be named by the user. This should address all your
points?!

I have also experimented with generated descriptions of the
settings. However this leads to very long names.

        Raimar

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