[Freeciv-Dev] Re: (PR#14969) Ressource specials are no longer modified when a terrain is transformed

["Jason Short" <jdorje@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

<URL: http://bugs.freeciv.org/Ticket/Display.html?id=14969 >

Guillaume Melquiond wrote:
> <URL: http://bugs.freeciv.org/Ticket/Display.html?id=14969 >
> 
> Due to a patch committed on December 23th, when an engineer transforms
> a tile, the special on the tile is no longer modified. As a
> consequence, you will get oasis on plains, gold on hills, and so on.
> To reproduce, load a game with engineers and transform a tile with a
> special. The special will not be modified.
> 
> Saving and reloading the game does not help, so it is not a display
> issue. Moreover, the engineers seem to know about this "feature",
> since in auto-settler mode they will work on tiles they usually don't
> transform (namely the gold mountains and desert oasis).

This was a known bug when I committed the patch.  However I didn't think 
it critical since it's no worse than the previous bug that the special 
would magically be transformed into some other special.

However there are two problems with it:

* You can get nonsensical resources.  For instance if you transform 
ocean you can end up with swamp/fish or hills/whales.

* Some of the specials that are normally on "bad" terrains provide 
really awesome bonuses, and are imbalancing when those are converted to 
good terrains.  For instance Fruit gives +3 food and +1 trade, which 
would make your plains with irrigation into 5/1/3 under republic with 
road (or 5/1/4 with river), I think.

So how to fix it?

1 Transform the resource when the terrain is transformed.  In my opinion 
this is terrible.  It is not intuitive, and has always been a bug in 
Freeciv IMO.

2 Let the resource stay, and fix the rulesets to be balanced.  This 
would mean weakening Fruit and numerous other resources, and disallowing 
terrain conversions that give nonsensical results.  Also bad since it 
prevents reasonable compatibility (civ2 resources would have to be changed).

3 Remove the resource on transformation, unless it's allowed in the new 
terrain.  This is a reasonable choice, the only problem is it will annoy 
players since once they destroy the resource they can't get it back.

4 Like #3, but we also add more info to the resources ruleset to allow 
more different resources on more terrains.  For instance we can allow 
wine on plains, but set its probability to 0 so mapgen will never 
generate it.  Then you can get plains/wine through transformation, but 
you can never get plains/fruit or plains/whales.

5 Like #3 or #4, but let the resource stay when transforming, just 
"hide" it.  Thus ptile->resource will always remain the same when 
transforming, but if the resource is not one that is allowed it will not 
be drawn and will not provide any benefit.  Changing the terrain back to 
one that does allow the resource will cause it to reappear.

-jason