Longturn Forum

Yes remove them, theyre just a pain. Would be better to spawn an actual player with some ships and attacking units every 10 turns or so (Players who have been wiped out or new players waiting to join)

I should add that the pirates did capture a city of mine. However, I did manage to log in and see that it had been captured - maybe the crash only happens the next turn?

kevin551 wrote:If this bug is the same one recurring - server crashes when pirate captures a city intact - and it is not being fixed, then we have to find other solutions.

I think we should all strongly defend all coastal and near coastal cities from surprise attack. I think the pirate AI has the power to cheat. It sees the entire map, and can see inside all cities. A pirate boat can appear at TC anywhere.

I don't know if 'slow_invasions' or 'unit wait time' applies to the AI. If not it means the AI can unload units which can then move and attack immediately.

Despite these 'cheats' it really is very easy to beat the AI.

It is getting quite annoying not to be able to log in and perform my turns... Is it even possible to turn off the pirates?

Lord_P wrote:Yes remove them, theyre just a pain. Would be better to spawn an actual player with some ships and attacking units every 10 turns or so (Players who have been wiped out or new players waiting to join)

That would be fun

Yes, I think that with the possibility of adding players at any time the LTex game would be great if it worked something like this:
-The first half of the players (First to sign up) get added as normal with plenty of land in an archipelago map, with a variety of land types surrounded by sea.
-After enough turns to build some good nations and eliminate idle players (Who go to the back of the respawn list) the next wave of players is added as 'Pirate' nations (As many as the server can handle each wave?).
-Each new player is not actually pirates like the ai ones but has any tech that three or more nations have (Kind of great library effect), the best attack and transport ships and ground units available with thier tech. Maybe one settler but no more as the aim should be to capture existing cities with thier invasion force.
-Established players have to defend, new players have to attack or die (Maybe some 'killunhomed' effect to reduce pirate players health until they get a city, and to sink idle players)
-Killed players go to the back of the respawn list and can try again later.

I think this would be a great way to make a fast moving game with lots of action and high player turnover. Also to win a player would not only have to capture all the cities but defeat ever increasing numbers of pirate players as eliminated players come back.

Thanks for the input, but this is actually the way eX games work :b. akfaew has been busy and he has not had time to spawn new players ;b

Er yes....kind of. Only I am waiting to see if newly spawned players will appear with huge numbers of settlers (Equal to average pop?) like they did in the last game, or if in this game they will be primarily military units as I was suggesting above.
In LT23 I thought it was ridiculous that new players could, within a few turns, build nations as large as the players who had been building up from the beginning (Why bother with all that research and settling? Just turn up late and if the games not going your way suicide and come back with a nation as strong as the neighbors who defeated you...).
I think limited land area (In this game most have filled thier islands) and new players having to fight to get a foothold before they die and have to try again would be a better balance.

So, is there an ETA on this game coming back up?

Not unless you want to volunteer to debug the server code and figure out why it is crashing. I'm sure it's on akfaew's list of things to do, but it may not be near the top.

It's times like this that we need terror...

Ho ho ho. Maybe it is not a bug

det0r wrote:Not unless you want to volunteer to debug the server code and figure out why it is crashing. I'm sure it's on akfaew's list of things to do, but it may not be near the top.

It's times like this that we need terror...

It takes all of 30 secs to confirm that the "No nation found!" bug is because of the pirates.
The only reference to this phrase in the entire code is the last line in function pick_a_nation() in file plrhand.c
The comment says This function returns a random-ish nation that is suitable for 'barb_type'.
We removed barbarian_type = "Sea" from the nations list therefore there are no suitable nations.
This is a longturn error not a freeciv one.

The more interesting bug is why the pirate can exist at all. Why does this function not cause a crash when the pirate is first initiated.
Given that the function pick_a_nation() is called from function create_barbarian_player() in file barbarian.c

Thanks for the info Kevin. akfaew told me that the server was giving a segmentation fault, hopefully he has time this weekend to look into the problem.

det0r wrote:Thanks for the info Kevin. akfaew told me that the server was giving a segmentation fault, hopefully he has time this weekend to look into the problem.

Can an admin please change the top of http://longturn.org/ so we all know that ltex23b is halted.

I guess LT30 is finished, so that should be removed.