[Freeciv-Dev] Re: (PR#13642) New behaviour of upgrade

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

<URL: http://bugs.freeciv.org/Ticket/Display.html?id=13642 >

On Thu, 11 Aug 2005, Guest wrote:
> I have played one game with these rules. They are really good, at least,
> for me. You have to plan more carefully your strategy since you know
> that you cannot upgrade a unit in any city. Besides, it adds more
> importance to the Barracks, Port facility, Airport, and Leonardo workshop.

It has been previously complained that it was too bothersome to have to
move your units to a city in order to upgrade it, and this is particularly
true for attacking units (giving defenders an edge), hunters and
transports. I somewhat sympathise with this complaint. It would get even
worse if you would have to shop around for cities with the right buildings
to upgrade your units.

If cities provide continual upkeep from afar, they should also be able to
upgrade from afar, IMHO. I think I would prefer that a city can upgrade
any supported unit if it has a barracks/airport/port. However, this gets
problematic if other people's plan of making rulesets (perhaps even
default) have upkeep drawn from a global resource pool instead.

I want the rules here to be consistent, easy to use and not too
bothersome. The same rule should work for both city support and global
resource support units (one way to achieve this may be to allow a unit to
have a home city even though it draws no upkeep from it, for example).

Another complaint is that upkeep costs are too high. This should be
addressed at the same time. In the forums, there have been suggestions
to the effect that upgrade cost should drop for each unit of a given type
that is upgraded. I'm not sure how wise this idea is.

(Personally I am a bit bothered by the instant upgrade mechanic. In most
RTS games I can think of with upgrades, on the other hand, upgrades
usually take some time by the unit being upgraded, in which it is busy and
helpless. This would address the problem that players often keep warriors
or other outdated defenders around long into the nuclear age, and merely
upgrade them when an enemy approaches.)

Not that all of the above must be addressed by a single patch, but I would
like to know the direction changes should be going before changes are
made, so that we can get a consistent set of upgrade rules.

The complaint that the Port facility comes too late in the tech tree, so
that it becomes too hard to upgrade your transports (triremes!), must be
addressed too.

  - Per