[Freeciv-Dev] Re: movement

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

On Wed, 14 Aug 2002, Jason Short wrote:
> The inverse system seems a little more fair, actually.In that system
> (from Ben Mazur's e-mail) if you don't have enough move points to move
> from A to B, you get to make the move but lose the points from your next
> move.This is more fair for the opponents of the player moving, since
> the "extra" move comes in at the end of this turn (when you're just
> moving from tile to tile) rather than the next turn (when you could
> actually move further than you normally would, *and attack*).
...
> The question is, how does this apply to a unit moving onto a tile that
> requires more movement points than it's total?If a musketeers
> (movement 3) moves onto mountains (movement 9), does it lose 6 movement
> points from its next turn?If it does, do 3 of those carry over (so
> that it, in effect, takes 3 turns to make the move)?Obviously, having
> this happen would be a major change to the game rules.

I agree this is a better idea.

But no matter what move model we end up with, it should meet the following
conditions:
 - It is simple and intuitive.
 - No unit can start the turn with more than maximum moves.
 - No unit can start the turn with negative moves.

More than maximum moves: This will lead to very strange play styles, as
players deliberately move their units up into difficult terrain so that
they can get more move next turn. It will look extremely silly, and
besides, other players will go "huh, where did that unit get the extra
movement from??".

Negative moves: That would look downright stupid ("hey, maybe it can move
backwards_!?"). It also would make mountains nearly impassable (how many
hundred years to pass one tile of mountain, again?).

> Note that all of these systems could use the above data structures for
> storage, and could all be dealt with by the AI.So it would be feasible
> to have this be a ruleset/server variable:
...
> Note also that it would probably be a *major pain* to have the AI deal
> with all these systems.

We enough AI woes, thank you.

As Greg said in the first post on this subject: "Please note that
introduction of a server option moverule or such will only make things
worse." That is _so_ true.

> But perhaps it would be productive to implement
> them all so that players could try them out and decide what's best.

Then implement them as patches that people can try out.

> Actually implementing them should be pretty easy - it's getting the AI
> (specifically warmap/pathfinding code) to work with all of them that
> would be tricky (probably very ugly).

While testing it out for playability and fun factor, you don't need an AI
implementation.

Yours
Per