[Freeciv-Dev] Removing citizens working tiles

[Per Inge Mathisen <per@xxxxxxxxxxx>]

The single design mistake in Freeciv that I think has given us the most 
trouble is citizens working tiles. It gives lots of rather pointless 
micromanagement, unless you ignore it or use automanagement like in Moo3, 
which is not fun. It also makes the AI incredibly much harder to 
implement. This was done much better in MoM, and in Moo2, and I think we 
should look to them for a better implementation.
We have spent a -lot- of time on automanagement features and improved AI 
heuristics for citizen and city management, when what we should have done all 
along is to make the rules better.
So here is my proposal for how to change this:
 - Each tile within city range gives output and output %s bonuses divided 
by the number of cities that are within range, like in MoM.
 - All citizens are specialists, with farmers and workers in addition to 
the existing three.
 - Specialists can be happy, content or unhappy. Remove mostly unused 
angry status.
 - Trade output is no more. Then tax settings will also be no more.

(Vasco has a proposal for change to the build system that may reintroduce 
tax settings, though. I hope he can post this proposal on this list.)
This will allow us to reduce micromanagement, and to greatly simplify the 
code. It will make it much easier to improve the AI, as calculating 
citizen placement and path-finding are by far the biggest CPU sinks in the 
AI, and it places great limitations on what kind of calculations we can do 
within reasonable timeframes.
Yes, this will break quite a bit with "civ 2" compatibility. We have 
already gone quite a bit down that road, and this will continue that 
journey. But I think we should rather make the best game possible for the 
future, rather than cling to the possibility of emulating past games 
accurately.
Unless this change is considered unacceptable, I will make a patch. But I 
will need someone to help out with the drawing of new specialist graphics. 
See this post in the forums if you want to help out with that:
http://forum.freeciv.org/viewtopic.php?t=1770

  - Per