[Freeciv] Re: Dirigible

[Marco Tarini <tarini@xxxxxxxxxxx>]

My recipe for adding Dirigibles in freeciv.
Just my opinion.

1) Dirigible = better explorer.
Nothing bad about obsolating an unit. There are only a few units-threads in
free civ game philosophy, it would seem worng add another one just for this.
And the poor explorer is currently alone in is unit-thread. Make explorers
appear earlier, and then let dirigibles obsolete them later.
((An extra reason to do that: exploring is done very late in games: it is
not like Hitler had to scout Asia around to find where Moscow is, while in
FreeCiv that happens an awful lot; so, earlier -and then better- exploring
units are welcome in the system IMO.))

2) Troops are NOT carried by air.
At least not easily, and not until a huge amount of effort and technology is
spent to do that.
To carry any significant amount of troops by air is really difficult and
indeed very rare in history,
expecially if by "significant" you mean "significant in the extra large
scale of used in free-civ".
Airlefted paratroopers mechanism captures the reality quite well IMO. For
comparison, thinks about ships. Now _these_ are units carrying units. Entire
nations has been conquered or destroyed by troops carried by sea, even very
early in history. So, ships do carry units, dirigibles obvoiusly not.

3) Attack = 0
Dirigible does not have that much attacking capabilities, and has been used
mostly
for spying really. True, some bombing has been done by dirigibles, but not
that many, or that important in effects. Air warfare came later, really. If
dirigibles lasted any longer before being hopelessy burned by early
fighters, any decent regular army would have very soon embedded something to
kill them. They are sitting ducks; actually, sitting very inflammable ducks.
Not a threath. And it takes to stay really still to be their target.

In summary:
Dirigible = flying unit, defense 1 or maybe 2, attack 0,
Can be attacked by ground units, probably (to balance game if not for
realism).
Vision and/or movement 1 higher than explorer, probably no more.
They still have the big advantage of flying over anything, right?
They do not scare huts, quite the opposite: they land peacefully nearby and
are usually greeted as divine ;) (it is a better explorer, remember? it
actually get bonuses at huts).
Cost: 30 - 40

Tune exact vision radius, defence rating, movement, required techs, immunity
from ground units (unlikely) and cost in any good way to balance things,
keeping values in the above mentioned ranges. Exact tuning probably requires
some testing.

end of recipe!
thank you for reading