[Freeciv-Dev] (PR#9172) Wishlist: Choose nations in pregame

["Jason Short" <jdorje@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

<URL: http://rt.freeciv.org/Ticket/Display.html?id=9172 >

> [per@xxxxxxxxxxx - Tue Jul 06 18:26:04 2004]:
> 
> On Mon, 5 Jul 2004, Jason Short wrote:
> > > This is not solved by scenarios, since then you do not get random map
> > > generation and random start positions.
> >
> > A scenario can give random start positions if the start positions aren't
> > included in the scenario, I think.
> >
> > What about having scenarios without any maps, causing the map to be
> > generated?
> 
> How would you go about creating such scenarios? Civworld cannot do this,
> and this would also be cumbersome and not many people have it.

What?  It should be easy for civworld to do this; just don't edit or
save the map.  It doesn't seem cumbersome...

> Say you have 2 different nations and a maximum of four players total, of
> which one through three should be played by humans (same nation type) and
> the fourth by AI (second nation type). How do you set this up in a
> scenario without creating the maximum of four players? We may want to play
> only with three players.

Well that you can't do.  Nor can two players ever have the same nation
type (nor should they be able to IMO).

> You (player) may want to alter settings from what they are in the
> scenario. This means added dependencies on rulesets and server options,
> and it is not wholly clear to me what these would have to be. Currently we
> have to use the load game option to use scenarios, and thus the connection
> dialog cannot be used by set these options, which is bad.

Once you are connected you can still set server options, in the game
menu somewhere.  Of course the conndlg should know more about scenarios;
it should have a "load scenario" option giving you a sensible (e.g., not
filenames but actual scenario names) list of scenarios and allowing you
to set up extra properties before connecting. 

> It would be real nice to be able to divide up the nations between the
> players before the game starts. This is common in games like Starcraft and
> C&C Generals when the game is cooperative against AI or teams.

I agree.

> It would also be nice to associate user names and flags in pregame, so
> that you don't have to recheck this after game start to see who's who.

A minor issue.

---

I have no objection to nation selection being in pregame.  I think this
will be very difficult to do, but would give good results.  Merging the
nation selection dialog with the options editing at server launch dialog
is the main difficulty, but once done will be a very nice interface I
think.  Compared to this the core changes should be trivial.

jason