[Freeciv-Dev] Re: (PR#12638) Remove reputation from the game

["Per I. Mathisen" <per@xxxxxxxxxxx>]

<URL: http://bugs.freeciv.org/Ticket/Display.html?id=12638 >

On Sun, 27 Mar 2005, Christian Knoke wrote:
> Its not long time ago that people begged for a senate in Freeciv and this
> was welcomed as a feature.

No, senate has been in Freeciv for many many years and nobody knew about
it. It was not recently added at all. I made some changes (made reputation
regain more slowly) that made senate more apparent, but still the senate
is mostly unknown.

> I'd say micromangement *is* a core concept of Freeciv (that I like).

This is different discussion, but anyway...

Freeciv is a 4X strategy game, it is not a puzzle game. The four x'es
stand for: explore, expand, exploit and exterminate. The 'expand' part
means that we start small and grow incrementally from start until the end
in terms of game entities in need of management.

The game fun can be seen as a balance between chore tasks and novelties.
You do the chore tasks (moving units, placing citizens, etc) in order to
achieve novelties (new achievements in the game). If the ratio of chore
tasks to novelties becomes too high, the game becomes boring to the
overwhelming amount of the players. Each game entity has some chore tasks
associated with it - moving, placing, etc.. As the number of game entities
grow, the amount of chore tasks grows too. If the number of novelties
increase in the same scale, this is okay (eg in Freeciv late game, techs
come much faster). But this is rarely possible, and we can see many
examples of games that have been ruined by not managing to deal with this
increase in scale of chore tasks, or how otherwise good games have
suffered from them.

In Freeciv the best example of this is perhaps placing citizens. When you
get a large number of cities, this chore tasks becomes just impossible if
you play with someone else. Hence CMA - but CMA is fundamentally a kludge
around a broken rule; if the rules were well designed in the first place,
CMA would not have to exist. I am told that Moo3 is the best example of a
game using AI kludges to get around a broken micromanagement design, but I
have not played it myself.

So I am unsure what you mean when you say that you like micromanagement.
There is no problem with in the early game, when the number of game
entities is small. But do you really like it equally well when each turn
takes almost forever doing them? Do you not use CMA to speed up your
turns?

> Back to reputation, without reputation there cannot be a senate, without
> senate no anarchy, without anarchy not concept of peace and war.

This is totally wrong. The senate after removing reputation is _much_ more
powerful. Now nobody will not know about the senate existing. Try to
declare unjust war with Republic and you will be thrown right into
anarchy.

> Imagine there were only client side AI's: what kind of diplomacy mechanism
> could serve as a communicator between peace and war? How could players (AI
> or human) trade/handle their diplomatic states?

The AIs already use a different mechanism for tracking diplomatic states,
called sometimes 'AI love'. You see it in the player dialog already, as
'attitude' IIRC.

  - Per