[Freeciv-Dev] (PR#6112) Civ3: Reforest tech

["Jason Short" <jdorje@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

<URL: http://rt.freeciv.org/Ticket/Display.html?id=6112 >

> [marko.lindqvist@xxxxxxxxxxx - Tue Sep 09 17:29:58 2003]:

>   In civ3, engineers can reforest only after Engineering is discovered.

Current freeciv has neither deforesting (harvesting) or reforesting
(planting).  SMAC and Civ3 both have this.  Whether it's good or not is
another question, but it certainly adds variety...

The main "problem" here is that forest is a terrain type not a special.
 Just like in civ1 rivers were a terrain type not a special (which
changed in civ2 and again in civ3).  For a while freeciv supported both
river terrain and specials.  Whereas now freeciv has rivers as a special
only, and it's easy to emulate civ1 mode by restricting the river to
grassland only.

A similar argument applies to forest.  In civ1 and civ2 forest gives (?)
-1 food and +2 shields, and removes the road bonus.  And it's limited to
grassland.

But is it possible to generalize the concept of a "special" even
further?  So in specials.ruleset, you'd have

[special_road]
name = "Road"
effects = "IgTer"
terrains = "Glacier", ..., "Swamp"
shield_bonus = 0
food_bonus = 0
tax_bonus = 1

this is clearly not workable in the form I give here (I've considered
this idea for a while but never put in the time to come up with a
workable form).  I believe there is strong merit to the idea, but
without gen-terrain it is of little or no use.

How many specials are there?  If you count the S_SPECIAL_1 and
S_SPECIAL_2 for each terrain separately (which you should) I think there
could be about 30.

jason