[Freeciv-Dev] Re: (PR#9706) Wishlist: Change homecity without visiting it

["Vasco Alexandre da Silva Costa" <vasc@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

<URL: http://rt.freeciv.org/Ticket/Display.html?id=9706 >

On Tue, 30 Nov 2004, Per I. Mathisen wrote:

> <URL: http://rt.freeciv.org/Ticket/Display.html?id=9706 >
>
> On Tue, 30 Nov 2004, Jason Short wrote:
> > Gregory Berkolaiko wrote:
> > > The homecity is quite a realistic concept.
>
> You must be joking. There is nothing remotely 'realistic' about having
> ancient armies getting supplies from a random single city on the other
> side of the world (eg).

Yep. The only historical time where such a thing remotely happened was in
feudal times where each feudal lord was supposed to contribute with a
certain amount of men, arms, clothes, etc for the war effort,

Food was usually just looted from enemy fields. When possible. In
friendlier lands I suppose the soldiers paid their own food out of their
keep. Most of the time anyway. Logistics were not very good.

> > From a gameplay perspective, I'd suggest the opposite.To reduce
> > micromanagement get rid of homecities entirely.This is what MoM and
> > MoO2 did and it worked pretty well.
>
> I am sympathetic to this idea. However, what do you do about caravans?
> IMHO, we could just as well remove them. I do not like the trade route
> micromanagement part, and I hate the help wonders micromanagement part.
>
> Of course, again we need to consider how much civ1/2 compatibility to
> retain if we change it.

I agree that homecities for units are useless, as I said before.

We should maintain as much civ1/2 compatibility as possible, design
flaws, everything. But the 'default' ruleset has none of these considerations.


I still think something that helps build wonders faster is good. In
Civilization 3 wonders took forever to build and using leaders was
laughable to say the least. Our network game players already complain
games take too long. It should be possible to pool resources from several
cities into building a wonder (like in MoM you could pool mana from
several places to cast a global enchantment - the equivalent of wonders
in MoM since there are no buildings with greater than city range effect).
If its with caravans or something else for Freeciv, I don't care. Just
make *something* that helps build wonders faster, yet make them resource
intensive (player resource intensive rather than city resource intensive).

One way would be to allow funneling production to another city. AFAIK this
is already possible (you can use caravans to speedup wonders at 0% shield
loss and you can disband units to speedup anything at 50% shield loss,
you can use capitalization at 0% shield loss into gold and buy something
with the money, at 50% money loss (75% for wonders) for 50% total resource
loss (75% for wonders)), albeith with micromanagement.

The easiest possible way would be to allow you to buy wonders far
cheaper if you have the Trade tech or something like that. On the limit we
could just get rid of shields altogether and make gold the resource that
allows you to build buildings, wonders and units. How's that for realism?

Errr, ok, maybe that's taking things too far. How would Factories, etc fit
into this mold? (I think they wouldn't).

> > Without homecities you may only charge upkeep for global output types.
> > InMoM this was gold and food (surplus food was distributed globally).
> > In Moo2 I think it was just gold.
>
> Moo2 also had global food, but you needed freight ships (another global
> resource) to match to ship food around.

The freight ships were a real nuisance. Even if they were automated, I
always needed to check if I had enough freighters or not. Fighting,
Exploring and Expanding was much more interesting.

---
Vasco Alexandre da Silva Costa @ Instituto Superior Tecnico, Lisboa