[Freeciv-Dev] aircraft rebasing

["Per I. Mathisen" <per@xxxxxxxxxxx>]

Currently, if you leave an aircraft hanging in the air when turn ends, the
server attempts to path find a way for it to return to closest friendly
city. Otherwise, the plane will crash.

In any case, when you operate an aircraft in freeciv, you need to always
count how far you can go without running out of fuel, and if you want to
have any control of where the airplane returns, you must also fly it home.
Combined with a lot of movement points, this means aircraft take a lot of
time and effort to control. Problem is, freeciv in multiplayer is a race
against time and you need to be able to control a lot of units quickly.

I want to replace the current automatic aircraft rebase attempt at end of
turn with an automatic teleport to the last airfield or city the unit has
visited, ignoring fuel. This is much easier and faster to play with for
human players and also easier to code AIs to use.

This would effectively double the aircraft range given in the ruleset,
since they can always get home, but that can always be corrected by
reducing the ruleset numbers.

I don't really want this to be an option set through rulesets, since
supporting different aircraft rebase modes will be a nightmare for AIs.

Thoughts?

Yours
Per