[Freeciv-Dev] Re: (PR#12271) RFC: allowing more players

["(Eddie Anderson)" <saywhat@xxxxxxxxxxxx>]

<URL: http://bugs.freeciv.org/Ticket/Display.html?id=12271 >

"Jason Short" <jdorje@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
>
><URL: http://bugs.freeciv.org/Ticket/Display.html?id=12271 >
>>>Benoit Hudson wrote:
>>>
>>>>Am I the only one who wants lots-of-player games?Is anyone interested
>>>>in helping development?
>>>
>>>Seeing as 30 hard AIs are too easy, I suppose it would be nice to have
>>>the possibility for larger games.

    Is this perhaps a documentation problem?  It seems to me that
this question should not arise from players who know how to create
teamed AI players.  Unfortunately, that knowledge may not be easy to
find.

    When I first heard about teams (in Spring? 2004), I tried to
find out how to create them by reading the included Freeciv
documentation files.  IIRC, at that time, the documentation for
teams was either scarce or non-existent.  Even the instructions that
appeared in a post on a forum were incomplete.  Fortunately, I
eventually figured it out on my own.

    Has the documentation improved since then?

    To find out, I just searched through some of the files in the
Beta8 binary distribution.  I found *no* references to player teams.
In fact, the only occurences that I found of the string "team" were
in relation to Settlers, Engineers, and/or Workers combining their
efforts on an improvement project.

    Note that I didn't search every file in the distribution; I only
looked at a few likely candidates.  So maybe the documentation for
teams is in some other file(s) and I just missed it.

    Would it be possible to add some options for creating teamed AIs
to the civclient dialog where difficulty level is selected?  That
might help more users to become aware of the teams facility and
eventually try it.

    Persuading users to try using teams might be easier than
recoding Freeciv to support more than 30 players.


>> If you want, I can make a patch for such a difficulty level AI, where the
>> AI starts with twice the startunits amount of units and researches faster.
>
>I'd rather play against teamed AIs than against AIs who cheat.

    I agree completely.

    With teamed AIs, AI players being "too easy" shouldn't be a
problem.  I've seen teamed AIs that started building Darwin's Voyage
in 3350BC (each civ started in 4000BC with no techs and 2 Settlers
with techcost=20 and the new tech_cost_style=1).  That seems more
than "hard" enough to me.


-Eddie