[Freeciv-Dev] Re: Game Design: put up or shut up

[Mark Metson <markm@xxxxxxxxxxxx>]

On Thu, 18 Dec 2003, Brandon J. Van Every wrote:

> annoying as you will not grow and will not produce.  I've stopped
> playing Freeciv exactly for this reason.  You wouldn't need CMA so much
> if you had a reasonable default behavior.

Heh I think you have a point there. I hate the way the automation assigns 
workers to tiles. Makes me have to micromanage constantly. Arg. I have 
tried a couple of times to use the CMA to do it but so far I haven't 
figured out how to make it do what I want so I still end up just 
micromanaging everything. Every turn I check every city that is about to 
grow to make sure it won't go into revolt and every city that did grow to 
make sure the new worker wasn't put someplace stupid such as out at sea 
instead of on a tile that has some production. Part of why I can't play 
public games on the pubserver: it takes way too long to do each turn, 
those guys dont have enough patience they seem to be looking for a hand 
eye co-ordination game not a strategic game.

> > Got to get the guts working properly first before you add more organs.
> 
> You *have* working guts.

Hmm. Maybe now? Certainly not for much of the last few years, during which 
the extremely sucking nature of the original AI code was a major problem. 
Much of the work has been simply re-writing the A.I. to make it more 
feasilbe to eventually improve its actual behavior.

> I am, however, disappointed that you are squandering your talents IMO.
> I do think it's time to put up or shut up about major game design
> changes.  What's gonna change?

OK, here are some more of the kinds of things I hope can eventually be 
achieved by use of free open-source code. Again this comes from a RPG 
background. In various RPG experiences I have found that a larger 
socioeconomic system in which the players do their adventuring is severely 
lacking. Admittedly most of my players never got into being lords and 
rulers and running nations. But I still wanted to have loardships and 
fiefs and nations on the map. So eventually I would like to be able to use 
various larger scale strategic games to do the framework, and insert 
individual characters inot that framework. The guy whose house I am living 
in has done some stuff along thse lines in the Kingdoms MUD, making 
regiments and such a la "En Garde!" with layered command structures so 
that a private's character moves with the regiment but a higher ranking 
officer can log on as a higher unit he commands and move the whole unit. 
In FreeCiv the kind of thing I'd want to do would be to compute a 
character's chance of surviving, or, better, generate a detailed 
character-level scenario for the player of the character to play, based on 
which unit the character was part of (or encountered) and what happened to 
that unit. Eventually it would be nice to also allow the individual 
characters to somehow effect the larger scale, such as maybe count a party 
of players as being effectively a "diplomat" or "spy" unit so that if 
their character-level play succeeds then that diplomat or spy action on 
the Civ scale would succeed whereas if their individual character play 
field that failure could be plugged into the Civ game as a failure on the 
part of the corresponding diplomat or spy unit.

The idea being that a game master of a RPG could use a strategic game such 
as FreeCiv as a framework to provie the larger scale activities on their 
RPG world that the players might now want to bother actually controlling 
in detail but which the players would be effected by thus occsssionally 
might want to intervene in somehow.

-MarkM-

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