[Freeciv-Dev] Re: [Freeciv] empty treasury and negative income

[Per Inge Mathisen <per@xxxxxxxxxxx>]

On Fri, 17 Feb 2006, Daniel Markstedt wrote:
> On Thu, 2006-02-16 at 22:15 +0000, Per Inge Mathisen wrote:
> > Some players are saying that largepox is already better than smallpox in
> > competitive games...
...
> But still, the infinite settler production and expansion of the opening
> game is awfully monotonous. I just want slower expansion mean that you
> get an edge in something else (i.e. tech.)

The problem is that if you just slow down expansion, you do not get a more
varied gameplay, you only get a slower game.

What we need for the beginning of the game is more useful options that can
compete with settlers in usefulness. This is what civ4 did and I think it
worked well.

In Freeciv the options in the beginning of the game are particularly poor
because we (or I) removed the free techs at start. So settlers are not
just the best thing to produce, but the only thing you can produce, apart
from Warriors and, well, who wants those. The problem with the free techs
was balance (some techs much better than others and bad random tech
selection) but this should not be impossible to fix somehow.

I think one (partial) solution to early game boredom might be Moo2-like
points purchase of starting conditions. The player may spend a certain
amount of points on purchasing starting units, techs, gold, extra map
knowledge, government other than default...

Another idea is to lower the requirements of some options. I do not see
why we should keep the city size limitation on specialists, for example.
Perhaps workers should be without tech requirement. Something along those
lines.

  - Per