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

["Guillaume Melquiond" <guillaume.melquiond@xxxxxxxxx>]

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

2005/12/24, Jason Short wrote:

> 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.

I agree. When I first played Freeciv, I believed the special would
just be destroyed (case #3 below), so I avoided transforming these
tiles. Auto-settling showed me this was wrong.

A few specials make sense to be transformed in other specials though.
For example, "buffalo", "game", and "pheasant", for the first special.
And "fruit", "wheat", and "wine", for the second special.

> 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).

The strong resources are on weak terrains (that usually are on weak
regions due to the map generator), so tuning them down would make some
parts of the map really unbalanced imo.

> 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.

The most natural solution, but not really fun to play.

> 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.

#4 and #5 together seems nice to me. However, it will not be easy to
choose which resource can be used on more terrains without unbalancing
the game too much.

Imho only the weakest specials should be allowed on other terrains:
resources (+0/1/0), pheasant (+2/0/0), wheat (+2/0/0), coal (+0/2/0),
buffalo (+0/2/0), silk (+0/0/3). To keep a bit of realism, except for
"resources" and "coal", they would not live on desert, glacier, swamp,
and mountain. And none of them would be allowed on ocean tiles.

And now that I think about it, "fish" (+2/0/0) could live on any tile
with a river. It would imply that an ocean tile would be transformed
in a tile with a river. Strange...