[Freeciv-Dev] Re: (PR#13859) Data: Antarctican nation

["Jason Short" <jdorje@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

<URL: http://bugs.freeciv.org/Ticket/Display.html?id=13859 >

Brian Dunstan wrote:
> <URL: http://bugs.freeciv.org/Ticket/Display.html?id=13859 >
> 
> With so many nations, is there perhaps a worry that
> people will be bewhildered?  Maybe, for the default
> list, there should be a 'core' group of 15-20, so that
> for the first time user who just wants to find the
> egyptians or babylonians or chinese or romans, doesn't
> have to sort through the 100 different ethnicities?
> 
> What happens when African, Indian, or Amerindian users
> start registering each of their favorite ethnicities,
> nations, language-groups?  The list will balloon into
> the thousands.

Absolutely.

While I don't think there's a fundamental problem with an unlimited 
number of nations, there is definitely a problem with the interface we 
have to choose them.

My suggestion:

* The "all" group in the dialog should be removed.

* One of the existing nation groups (or a new group "Core" or "Default") 
should be made the default, and this group should be limited in size. 
For instance if the nations dialog brought up the "Ancient" group by 
default (which is the smallest of the groups) most of the problem would 
go away.  The group to be brought up by default can be chosen as the one 
with the highest matching priority.  This also means this group should 
be preserved by the server as new nations are picked at random.

Note that with maxplayers at 30 15-20 nations won't be enough in all 
cases.  Perhaps the *default* maxplayers should be decreased.

-jason