[Freeciv-Dev] A bunch of patches

["andi payn" <paynfc@xxxxxxxxxxx>]

Hi there. I'm new to this list, but I've got a whole slew of changes to my 
local copy of FreeCiv and I'd like to get comments on some of them.
They're pretty horribly intertwined at present; I'd be happy to make usable 
patches out of any of them if anyone's interested. Here are the changes:
Calendar: Replaced the hard-coded calendar system in FreeCiv (50 yrs/turn to 
-1000, 25 to 1 AD, etc.) with a flexible system that's configurable in 
game.ruleset. You can set the start year and years/turn for each age, and 
give it a name (which appears in the Gtk client). You can also require a 
certain tech before entering an age, and you can specify a tech that jumps 
to an age early (you can even have the ages completely controlled by techs 
if you want). The spaceship tech special-casing is still there as well, but 
has been made more flexible to handle gen-impr. The names are nice, except 
that I can't come up with good ones for standard FreeCiv ages. The flexible 
years are handy for the Ancients ruleset (so I can play 425 turns by 1500AD, 
as intended by the designer), but so far not for much else. The tech-based 
calendaring is a nifty idea, but I haven't found it to be too useful in 
actual play. It does seem to work perfectly, though.
Vet Levels: Replaced the two vet levels with any number, specified in 
units.ruleset. Each vet level has a name and a combat bonus, as in 
Civ2/standard FreeCiv, as well as all kinds of other stuff: multipliers to 
hitpoints (as in Civ3), movement, and firepower; settler activity bonuses 
(requires rescaling activity counts, and there are already patches that do 
this better than I did); additive move bonuses (like SMAC elite), diplomat 
battle bonuses (only useful with my Diplomat patch), trireme loss chances, 
and I think a few other things. Other settings allow units to advance 
through completed settler actions (which can depend on the complexity of the 
action), diplomat actions (defending a city, completing an attack on a city, 
bribing/sabotaging, etc.), surviving at high sea, and different combat 
results (with the withdraw patch; otherwise this last one is meaningless). I 
play with this one all the time; it seems to work perfectly, and it adds a 
lot to the game.
Withdraw: Units with >1 moves can withdraw if losing in battle. All kinds of 
configurability. Some bugs, too, but close to usable.
Diplomat: Options to change diplomatic battles. In addition to Civ2/standard 
FreeCiv diplomacy contests, you can also take the attacker into 
consideration, or handle diplomacy contests similarly to combat (as in 
SMAC). Also, diplomats can fight in the field (as in SMAC) if you select 
another option. Yet another option adds biological warfare (kill half the 
city, higher chance of failure/getting caught, requires discovering a tech 
with a new flag, so of course you also have to add such a tech to the tech 
ruleset).
Infinite Move: Allows you to specify units with infinite move rate and/or 
infinite paradrop range (like SMAC's orbital insertion). Infinite paradrop 
works great; infinite move range causes some problems, such as danger 
overflows. I've made some changes to fix the danger problem, but I'm not 
sure they work quite right.
City Report Subfields: Many columns in the city report dialog have multiple 
fields. This patch lets you sort by any of them. Plus, numerical fields are 
sorted numerically (no more "1, 10, 16, 2, 23, 3, 4"). Each client needs 
some way to pick the sort field; the Gtk client has a context menu, the 
others so far have nothing. There are a couple of minor issues with the 
implementation that nobody will notice, but I want to fix them.
Additional City Report Columns: In addition to porting the Grow Turns, 
Attack, and Defense patches from new-columns to handle the Subfields changes 
(most of the rest are unnecessary with subfields), I added some more: 
Martial Law (units present that are capable of providing martial law and 
total contentness effect of those units), Support (number of units, plus 
H/F/P/G upkeep under current conditions), and Potential Support (H/F/P/G 
upkeep before compensating for government, helpful in fixing up cities 
before a revolt). This all works. I also merged the code that handles 
counting this stuff up into one place, and stored some stuff that was being 
thrown away (potential support per unit) to save CPU time (and passes it 
across the network to waste bandwidth), which doesn't have much effect 
without the rest of the changes.
Obsolesence: Currently, once a unit can be upgraded, it becomes obsolete. 
I've added a second field in units.ruleset that changes this. If you specify 
an "obsoleted_by2" for a unit (which can be "Never"), the unit can be 
upgraded to its "obsoleted_by" unit, but can be built anyway until its 
"obsoleted_by2" unit is also available. This is useful for a few purposes in 
variant rulesets I've used (e.g., Engineers can upgrade to Formers, which 
can't build cities but don't take food cost, but they aren't obsoleted by 
them, because you still need to be able to build Engineers).
Satellites: Units that don't participate in combat or ZOC (this almost 
works, but other units can still move into squares occupied by friendly 
satellites to get around ZOC, which is silly), don't move, and don't defend 
cities (they should either disappear or be captured, I suppose). Handles 
SMAC-style satellites (basically do-nothing units with negative upkeep, 
which required minor changes in itself). Also allows "spy satellites," which 
can "paradrop" (enter geosynchronous orbit over) any square on the map (even 
on top of enemy units or cities, although this causes some serious problems) 
and see the area "below" them. Should also handle killer satellites, but 
they don't work. Maybe some kinds of satellites should be improvements, not 
units. The whole thing needs more thought.
Borders: My borders aren't nearly as good as the patch already available (or 
in FreeCiv-ac), but they are more configurable. You can specify the city 
influence radius, configure what happens when two cities are equally close, 
decide what effects borders have on the game (most of the latter settings 
don't work yet), and crash the game spectacularly.
Advanced Tech Build Bonuses: For each tech you discover that depends on a 
unit's (or improvement's) required tech, the price for that unit (or 
improvement) comes down. This is controlled by a server option (set 
atechbuild=9950, and the price goes down to 99.50% of its former price for 
each new tech). The game calculates the dependency tree when loading the 
ruleset, so there's no CPU time wasted. You can also configure whether 
future techs are dependent on all techs or dependent on none, or whether 
they give a separate bonus. This seems to work, but I haven't tested it 
much. Also, with the standard tech tree, it'll probably give weird results. 
To make this work well, it'll probably need some additional settings in the 
tech ruleset, so you can specify that tech B requires tech A but doesn't 
count as a more advanced tech in the same field, while tech C requires tech 
A and does count as a more advanced tech in the same field. This would allow 
other features of the SMAC tech system as well.
There are some other things scattered throughout that I'll try to isolate 
and figure out what they were for.
As I mentioned above, I haven't made separate patches for most of these, but 
if anyone's interested, I can. Or I'll be glad to send you my entire tree 
(which has all of these changes, and is in a completely playable state) if 
anyone's dying for one of these features right this second and willing to 
dig through my mess....


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