More polls please!!

[Marduk]

If you want the game to start soon, make more polls! There are bound to be many things nobody thought about yet. Let's fix them now rather than wait till the game starts. More discussion here, but keep it concrete and put it into a poll!

[spaceDet]

I'd like to make one about tlgive and tlrecv but can I do it without git?

[spaceDet]

I guess I messed up somehow, it says the poll is invalid: http://longturn.org/poll/32/

[spaceDet]

We need to vote on wonders. We have three options:
Old ruleset (e.g. before LT30): Great wonders which affect all cities and can be built in only 1 city and by only 1 player.
Multiplayer ruleset (LT30): Small wonders which affect all cities but can be built in only 1 city and by all players. I now think this is better (more fair) than old ruleset (especially for games with many players such as LT30)
Akfaew's suggestion: Wonders that affect only 1 city are kept and other wonders are disabled. Wonders can still be built by all players but same wonder can be built only in one city per nation. See http://forum.longturn.org/viewtopic.php?id=93 for more details.

Remove all wonders, but keep:
* Cure for Cancer - this is a pretty cool wonder with a nice effect (one player builds, everybody gets the bonus)
* Manhattan Project.
Remove all small wonders.
But keep wonders limited to city:
* King richards crusade
* Pyramids
* Copernicus' Observatory
* Sheakspeare's Theatre
* Collosus
Keep also:
* Leonardo's Workshop
* Lighthouse
* Oracle

These changes would be awesome, but if you keep oracle, why not keep Bach's as well?

[spaceDet]

These changes would be awesome, but if you keep oracle, why not keep Bach's as well?

bach is one of those mandatory must-have wonders, which is no strategy, no choice and no compromise. in other words: bach is boring.

We could always make a poll for increasing its cost to 400-500 or even 600 (since it won't obselete, even this much might make sense) perhaps? In addition, isn't staying with Oracle a fairly valid strategy as well? OK, temple + mysticism + oracle + cathedral combo is one worse than temple + mysticism + theology + bach's, but it's a lot cheaper as well. Anyway, I agree, strategy games should give players hard choices, not trivial ones. I think the choice to go for almost all of the small wonders in lt30 is quite trivial, but raising the costs significantly might help.

[spaceDet]

How about increasing the cost of wonders if another player has already built it? The more players build the same wonder the more shields would be required. For example +5% per wonder built. Everyone could still build all wonders but this would motivate us to build wonders before others. After many players build the same wonder, it would be too costly to build. For example with +5% increase per wonder, if 10 players built Leonardo, then it'd cost 1.5 times more shield to build it for the next player.

I think that's a very cool idea! I think an even higher value might be better (10-20), if there were a lot of small wonders, like in LT30.

Another option would be to have only world wonders, but more of them, proportionally to the number of players. For example, if we assume the world wonders work best with 5 players, then in a 70 player (assuming no idlers) game, there should be 14 of each world wonder (like worldWonder I, worldWonder II and so on) with the exactly same effect, cost and prerequisites. After the 14th of a given wonder finishes, no one could build it anymore. This would be closest to the original idea of wonders, and IMHO the best option.

Still one more alternative idea would be to have the wonders like in LT30, but all 2x-3x more expensive, so people would just have to pick which one(s) to go for, because of the massive amount of shields they take.

[spaceDet]

This is also an interesting idea. However I don't like sharp cut-offs that create unfair situations. It is like when you return the homework just 1 day late but you get 0 credit. I prefer cutting 10% from the grade for every late day.

That's a good point. That analogy is a bit off though, because when someone finishes a world wonder you were working on, you will normally be able to save the amount of shields you had for another wonder, so it's usually just a matter of settling for a bit less optimal wonder, at least in the early game. Later on there might not be any worthwile ones available though. So yeah, now that I think, your idea of gradually increasing the costs is even better. Is there an easy way to implement it? If so, you could make a poll for it.

[canuck101]

How about increasing the cost of wonders if another player has already built it? The more players build the same wonder the more shields would be required. For example +5% per wonder built. Everyone could still build all wonders but this would motivate us to build wonders before others. After many players build the same wonder, it would be too costly to build. For example with +5% increase per wonder, if 10 players built Leonardo, then it'd cost 1.5 times more shield to build it for the next player.

I quite like this idea.

[roemertopf]

I also like the idea of gradually increasing the costs for wonders, but I am not sure what way of doing this is best as this is my first round of longturn. Maybe a combination of your ideas would also work well: Wonders could cost 3% more shields per wonder built and additional 1% for every day since the first wonder has been built.
So is there a way of implementing some kind of this feature soon? =)

[spaceDet]

Still one more alternative idea would be to have the wonders like in LT30, but all 2x-3x more expensive, so people would just have to pick which one(s) to go for, because of the massive amount of shields they take.

I don't like this idea. If wonders are cheap enough compared to the benefit they bring, everybody will build them, if they are too expensive, nobody will. My proposal brings back the fun of racing for wonders without the unfairness of Great Wonders.

Somewhere between those two extremes is the middle point for wonders' cost, where people usually have to think hard whether to build a given wonder and at what point. It's simply a matter of trying out different values and making polls over a number of games (especially the experimental ones.)

Now I do like the gradual increase more, but it seems like a pain in the ass to implement. I may be wrong, but I think the only way to do it would be having only great wonders, as many as the number of players for every wonder, with a range of costs, in the configuration files / scripts. Can anyone who knows, confirm this, and whether it would be annoyingly much work?

The re-wonder poll is ending soon and looks like it will pass, so we should make one for increasing the costs soon. Ideas?

[spaceDet]

Why isn't anyone else making any polls or even posting anything? :/

I was thinking I could do one for changing the wonders' costs like this: Oracle:200(+100), Colossus:150(+50), Copernicus:300(+100), Crusade:200(+50), Leonardo:400(+100), Bach:450(+150), Shakespeare:250(+50), Lighthouse:100(-100). Pyramids, Cure for cancer and Manhattan Project would be unchanged.

Reasoning behind those: I think everyone agrees world wonders' costs from default freeciv are not even supposed to balanced as regular city improvements. In LT30 there are so many, that people can't make even all the good ones, but here we have significantly less wonders, so without increasing the costs, everyone would build almost all of them as soon as possible, without having to think. Pyramids is pretty expensive for what it does already and Lighthouse is quite weak in these kinds of fractal maps with little water and it obseletes early.