[Freeciv-Dev] Re: (PR#13009) Island-based generator

["Peter Schaefer" <peter.schaefer@xxxxxxxxx>]

<URL: http://bugs.freeciv.org/Ticket/Display.html?id=13009 >

Well, I noticed this problem, but I figured that there should be some
variation in the maps.

You might wish that freeciv was like chess, but once you go into this,
it just goes on.
For example, if islands and second islands are completely fair, then
players might still get a different starting position - in fact the
player placement code at the time I looked at it had the problem that
the first player to be placed has a slightly higher chance to start in
the center of his island, especially on small maps.

So suppose players where placed fairly on their island, then all
players would also need to receive the same specials, and this would
eventually lead to this, that all players would need to get identical
islands.

And after that players could complain that they moved their explorer
moved the wrong way, and they couldn't know that, so you'd have to
reveal the map.

Of course you can try to partially amend this, and to compute some
metrics that calculates how good the starting position and island of
the player is and then you could place extra specials or move the
islands around, but your metrics is just a heuristics, it is not
exact, you'd have to play the game to find out which detail really is
important. Adding more whales would have been an alternative to
devaluating the whale special.

I have an idea for a map generator that can be both random and fair,
which would work around symbol trees like those for creating/parsing
languages, and would constantly asses fairness, but this is not going
to happen until either the win32 client works again or I buy a new
computer and I properly configure the freeciv compilation process on
my machine. Also, this generator might turn out to be slow.

Greetings,
   Peter

On 5/9/05, Thomas Müller <lists@xxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
> 
> <URL: http://bugs.freeciv.org/Ticket/Display.html?id=13009 >
> 
> Am Montag, 9. Mai 2005 05:54 schrieb Jason Short:
> > <URL: http://bugs.freeciv.org/Ticket/Display.html?id=13009 >
> >
> > > [lists@xxxxxxxxxxx - Sun May 08 22:44:46 2005]:
> > >
> > > Hi.. i played lots of freeciv games with islandbased generator now,
> > > and i think a very important factor to win is to find a second island. The
> > > problem is, that sometimes you just have to go round your
> > > ilsand and find a new island, because there is only 1 ocean tile 
> > > between them, then its quite easy to expand fast.