[Freeciv] Re: Freeciv goals

[Thue Janus Kristensen <thue105@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

> Personally I dislike the Civ2 compatibility goal, but since it's that
> important to somebody, I'm absolutely in favor of splitting it up into a
> Civ2 mode and a Freeciv mode.

Hear hear - let those who object to everything not civ 2 play with the civ2
ruleset.

> I dislike the idea about "civ2 compatibility" because it's cloning of an
> (even quite old) concept rather than trying to create something new and
> innovative, and because it's setting limits on our creativity.

Not to mention create some just plain better

> The good thing about a goal like this is that it makes negotiation easier.
> I think it's hard to find a common consensus about what a game should be
> like, especially in such a large group.  It's important to have a
> consistent and balanced game with good gameplay, I think it's difficult to
> achieve when everybody have their own opinions about what thing should be
> like.  I've heard about other open source game efforts which was shut down
> before a single line of code was written because each person at the
> mailing list had their very own idea about how the game should be, and
> because most of the ideas was too complex.
> 
> Anyway, FreeCiv is a working game today - and that's when the Open Source
> is strongest.  It should be a lot easier to accept, test and discuss
> patches and discuss whether they contribute to better gameplay and reality
> or not than to do the same with loose design documents.
> Backgammon, Poker etc for free at http://www.funcom.com/ (Java)

It is very tedious to make design decisions based on consensus - maybe we
should have a maintainer for the gameplay decisions with decisive power to
implement or not implement the ideas put forth? But again - that wouldn't be
nice when he and I actually disagreed on something, but no worse than if no
decisions ever made it because of a lack of concensus...

-Thue