[Freeciv-Dev] Re: Calendars (Re: Re: A bunch of patches)

[Jason Short <vze2zq63@xxxxxxxxxxx>]

andi payn wrote:


> The more I think about this, the more I've begun to question the
> entire Civ calendar concept. Accelerating calendars are supposed to
> model the accelerating rate of social and technological change, which
> is a worthy goal. But there are a few problems.
>
> First of all, troops movements, spaceship travel, and other factors
> important to the game don't accelerate exponentially along with
> technology. A bomber in the last age can't go any farther than a
> bomber two ages earlier, but it only takes 1/5th as long to get there?
> That's silly. The spacerace has been forced (both in Civ2 and in
> FreeCiv) to make sense, but the way it works is clearly a hack.
>
> Second, exponentially-accelerating calendars should make more stuff
> happen in a turn, rather than more turns in the same timespan, because
> our capability to control technological and social change doesn't
> increase exponentially along with that change.
>
> I don't expect anyone to answer these two issues; I think we just have
> to accept that there are limitations to any game's modeling of life
> and deal with them. But I wanted to mention them anyway.
>
> Speaking of the spacerace, FreeCiv (and I believe Civ2?) have some
> code that forces time to travel at one year per turn once you can
> build spaceships. So if you launch a spaceship with a 28.3-year flight
> time, the game has 28 turns left (unless someone annihilates
> you). With a daily calendar, however, this 28.3 years becomes over
> 10000 turns! Should we not allow subyear calendars in games where
> spacerace is enabled? I'm leaning that way, but I haven't done anything 
> yet as far as implementation.
If we say that a bomber can fly around the world in 6 turns which may be 
either 6 or 60 years depending on the current age, then it should be 
reasonable to say that the spaceship will take 28 turns in flight, which 
may be either 28 years or 28 days.
If we don't allow for this inaccurate scaling of time, then we need a 
redesign of the entire FreeCiv system.  In real life, a bomber would 
move about 100x faster than a group of horsemen, not 6x.  And a bomber 
would be able to fly around the world something like 10,000 times (just 
a guess) in the time it took a spaceship to reach the nearest star.
jason