[Freeciv-Dev] Re: Artillery and sea units (PR#1476)

[Thanasis Kinias <tkinias@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

scripsit Richard Stallman:
 
>                          It would make battleship availabe at the same time as
>     destroyer/cruiser, which would make those two units useless.
> 
> That is historically accurate.  All three were developed at the same
> time with the same technology, for different tactical purposes.
> Destroyers are much cheaper than battleships, and their original
> purpose was to keep torpedo boats away from the battleships.
> ("Destroyer" is short for "torpedo boat destroyer".)  Later on they
> were used to fight submarines.
> 
> It is hopeless to model naval tactics in Freeciv, so I have the
> following suggestions:
[snip]

One can make a very similar argumant about land combat.  If you look at
the arsenal of a modern military, you will find tanks, APCs, `leg'
infantry, helicopters, towed artillery ( = Civ `artillery'),
self-propelled artillery ( = Civ `howitzer' ), etc., with air-droppable
and amphibious variations.  It is totally beyond the capability of the
Civ 2/Freeciv combat system to represent this.

An argument might be made that an entirely new combat system is in
order.  Whether that is desirable is an open question.  I fear that
trying to introduce too much detail here might simply bring into focus
the multitudinous other ways in which Civ-style games don't accurately
model reality.

You mention the problem of building destroyers or cruisers without
steel; what about the very real problem of trying to build a
pre-ironclad fleet without trees?  Historically, access to extensive
forests was a prerequisite to building a fleet, but Freeciv has no
mechanism for representing dependencies on specific terrain or
resources, and I'm not certain that adding such things would be
advisable.

Is ``realistic'' modelling of technology and combat (e.g., something
like Trevor Dupuy's Operational Lethality Index and Quantified Judgement
Model) really something Freeciv wants to get into?

-- 
Thanasis Kinias
Web Developer, Information Technology
Graduate Student, Department of History
Arizona State University
Tempe, Arizona, U.S.A.

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