[Freeciv] Re: An idea about diplomacy

[moz@xxxxxxxxxxx]

> John Paul Rodman wrote:
> > Supposedly, there's an option in SMAC 4.0 to make their version of Spies
> > "flagless".  As in, you can see the unit, but you can't tell who owns it.
> > This would make it easier to "frame" someone else for certain things.  I
> > haven't actually witnessed this in effect, I just read about.

Brian said
> Actually, it doesn't make it any easier to frame someone else when you have
> the flagless part on, it is just to confuse the person who you're going to
> use the probe team (that's what the spies are called) on.

It makes the "frame" option useful, in other words. There's not much point
in framing someone else when your enemy gets to watch your spy/probe team
wander up to the target and stand round looking suspicious for a while.


Making spies invisible would be a bit radical. To work they'd have to be
intangible too, so you'd have the possiblity of multiple enemy units in
the one square which I don't think has come up in freeciv before. Otherwise
your "invisible" unit would keep getting run over by enemy units blundering
into it. With fog-of-war this becomes almost moot, since any unit that's
out of direct sight will be effectively invisble.

Actually, with fog of war we can also start adding visibility-enhancing
improvements to cities. As one example, an airport should increase visiblity
of air units to perhaps three squares instead of two. And maybe a satellite
ground station could boost that to seeing all units at three or four squares
from a city? Could make it one for early cities, addition of city walls or
any second stage improvement (cathedral, university etc) boosts that to two?

Moz