[Freeciv-Dev] Union vs Research Treaty

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

I and Raimar discussed this on IRC, and came to the conclusion at that
time that there was another idea that might just as good: Adding a new
treaty, like Shared Vision, that implements a Research Treaty in the
following way:

In tech dialog: Show two panels, one for player and one for RT. There
should be a slider to control how many research points you devote to your
own research and how much to RT. You can change the RT's research item and
goal, but not to a tech that any other RT member is researching or already
has. You get info about all other RT members' techs, current research and
research goal. The cost of the tech being research is the average of all
members'. (If there are tech restrictions, then all restrictions apply.)

An obvious problem is that treaties are not transitive, thus you can get
multiple RTs at the same time, maing it necessary it have multiple RT
panels. The interaction between the various research panels would be
difficult.

(One possible solution is this: The RT is transitive, meaning you get RT
with all those who have an RT with the player you get an RT with. In order
to agree to an RT, you must first have 'contact' or embassy with all those
players and they must at least be Neutral towards you. However, in
previous discussions, the idea of transitive treaties did not receive a
warm welcome.)

Having slept on this, I found some additional problems: Using default
rules, you usually want to concentrate on one research path in any case
(Republic, Steam), thus splitting of research points won't be used or will
be used only be newbie players to their disadvantage (further increasing
divide between good and bad players along the fault line of good players
intentionally not using the full feature set of the game). The interaction
between the two research panels is going to be messy. Since the two
targets and goals must be mutually exclusive for all players in the RT, it
will be very easy to disrupt the RT setup unintentionally unless you
remove both RT's researched tech and RT's goal tech from the player's
panel, in which case this will easily lead to confusion. Instant effects
provided by the RT researched tech have nowhere to be applied. Popup of
the research dialog must flip to correct panel. This all requires quite a
bit of client changes.

Finally, I will not have time to implement it, while the Union patch is
already mostly complete. So I believe that while an interesting idea, I do
not believe it would be worth the effort or additional complexity.

  - Per