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

[Brandon Craig Rhodes <brandon@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Thanasis Kinias <tkinias@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> writes:

> Does the will exist within the Freeciv community to do a
> from-the-ground-up review of the tech tree?  The more I think about
> it, the more excited I am about the possibilities.

The prospect is exciting and I hope we proceed, though how we will
create balanced gameplay aligned with both history *and* everyone's
favorite ideas of what units and technologies should go where, is not
clear to me.

I think one goal should be to maintain a strong sense of freedom, at
least early in history, with many possible and desirable technologies
among which the player must choose.  Technologies that are unusually
powerful tend to send everyone scapering down the exact same branch of
the technology tree, instead of choosing novel openings.  I suppose it
is inevitable that everyone rushes quickly towards governments to
replace despotism, but in general I would argue that we should avoid
creating a tree in which obviously "best" routes emerge.

Gunpowder sort of brings this to an end, but historically explosives
*were* a goal that everyone had to rush to achieve once their
neighbors had it.  And from there the tree becomes more and more
spindly as modern technology winds down an ever narrower corridor
towards nuclear weapons and spacecraft.

At the moment I find a rough logic to the units available in each era,
with units ranging from offense to defense available in each period.
(For my thoughts on this see the table of Units at

        http://mail.rhodesmill.org/civman/game-units.html

but be warned that the top of the page is unfinished.)

I noted a recent poll that suggested Freeciv needs more types of
units, and am note sure I agree that more is necessarily better; I
would assert that new units should only be admitted if their function
is clearly different from that of an existing unit, and would further
suggest that we eye the existing units to see whether they can in any
way be better differentiated to offer an interesting range of
capabilities.  From what I can tell the current tree does a good job
of this but that goal should be explicit in our minds before we do any
tinkering.

-- 
Brandon Craig Rhodes   brandon@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx   http://rhodesmill.org/brandon