Longturn Forum

We may want to bring back some features we had with Freeciv 2.3 (LT30-LT35) but we may also want to keep some of the surprising changes we now have.

Maybe a city of size 1 to have smaller borders until it grows to bigger size? Early game founding cities blocks from building other cities on enemy territory but with citymindist=4 you can build closer if the borders allowed.

Possible and probable changes for LT37:

- no unhappiness if the troops are inside national borders but outside cities
- the attacking unit moves to the tile where the unit was killed. This may be changed
- some adjustments to the move bonuses
- fixing the help for the lighthouse and for the magellan's expedition
- restoring the additional free units for size 8 cities
- checking the promotions for spies. Restoring the move bonus and perhaps more veteran levels?

- restoring the ability of maximum of 20 units upholding martial law in despotism and tribalism

--- LT36/data/LT36/effects.ruleset 2016-01-04 15:36:42.955447711 -0600
+++ LT37/data/LT37/effects.ruleset 2016-03-18 12:21:26.025297645 -0500
@@ -289,7 +289,7 @@

[effect_trade_routes]
type = "Max_Trade_Routes"
-value = 2
+value = 0

--- LT36/data/LT36/units.ruleset 2016-01-04 15:36:42.955447711 -0600
+++ LT37/data/LT37/units.ruleset 2016-03-18 12:20:47.965295749 -0500
@@ -2351,7 +2351,7 @@
uk_shield = 1
uk_food = 0
uk_gold = 1
-flags = "TradeRoute", "HelpWonder", "NonMil", "Capturable"
+flags = "HelpWonder", "NonMil", "Capturable"
roles = ""
helptext = _("\
A Caravan carries goods or material for trading with foreign countries,\
@@ -2360,11 +2360,6 @@
Caravans can only travel on roads, railroads, rivers or ships, and\
are not affected by movement modifiers.\
"), _("\
-Caravans can establish trade routes with the cities of other nations\
- (even your enemies). A trade route's ongoing revenue is doubled if the\
- two cities involved are on different continents. Each city can support a\
- maximum of two trade routes.\
-"), _("\
Every Caravan that is used to build a wonder will add 50 shields\
towards the production of the wonder.\
"), _("\
@@ -2398,7 +2393,7 @@
uk_shield = 1
uk_food = 0
uk_gold = 1
-flags = "TradeRoute", "HelpWonder", "NonMil", "Capturable"
+flags = "HelpWonder", "NonMil", "Capturable"
roles = ""
helptext = _("\
The Freight unit replaces the Caravan, and moves at twice the speed.\

If roads are kept at 1/2 MP, then Alpines should also have 1/2 MP. In fact, maybe even Alpines at 2/3 makes them not as super of a unit... just a thought.

Not even commenting anything about trading.

- The attacking unit moves to the tile where the unit was killed. Not sure if this is good or bad, but i would say that older setting was better.
- Definitely alpines are way too fast, i would be happy if their move would cost 1 MP everywhere (or 2/3 MP maybe also), doesnt matter if its road, plain or glacier and removing that 1 MP penalty if starting turn from mountain. Those would be still very good units. Maybe explorer would have same and giving 6 MP for them instead of 3 MP? Then they could travel faster by road if needed.
- Not sure if this roads 1/2 MP is good, i liked more that 1/3 MP. Now its difficult move units between cities.
- Maybe desert with river could give food_incr/food_bonus also? But is it strange if it would be as good as plain with with river for food production?
- Borders before was much more nicer.

But couple things what i really liked so far
- Attacking to non-native tiles (eg. mountain/sea) with specified units eg. catapults/cannon
- Sailing thru rivers is also quite nice, but i would like that some other ships could do it also but it can be problematic
- Second palace sounds very good also. Even i dont have it yet.

Here is a partial list of fixes/changes that we may want to have for LT37.
The following changes are mostly reverts to bring back settings used in LT prior to the 2.5 switch.
Special thanks to Wieder for his help in making this list.

general:
- disable trade everywhere (just in case ) (game.ruleset, units.ruleset, effects.ruleset)
- restore the x3 moves of roads and rivers:
increase move fragments to 9 so that roads and rivers (with 3 moves cost) give back x3 moves.
Also set igter_cost to 3 so that alpines and explorers get also x3 moves (just as if using a road).
Railroad give x3 on top of road, that is x9 moves.
- update the veteran_move_bonus to take into account the 1/9 move fragments: 0, 3, 6, 9, 12, 15, 18, 24, 30, 39
- set back citymindist to 5
- restore 20 maximum units to bring martial law under despotism
- bring back the doubled number of upkeep free units for all cities which size is greater than 8 (under any kind of govnerment)
- deactivate all settings in game.ruleset:
this will reset some settings to the longturn usual values:
-> happyborders is made true again (default value)
-> occupychance back to 0% (default value)
- allow (pre-)fortresses to be built on rivers as it was possible prior to LT36
- disable tech upkeep

units:
- make engineers capturable again
- make caravans/freights upkeep free again
- fix the movement radius of stealth bombers (to 36) so that they are again greater than normal bombers (24)
- make helicopters vulnerable to fighters attack (as it is the case in the classic ruleset) [NEW]
I've noticed in LT36 that with 30 HP and 3 defense, veteran helicopters could hardly be wounded by veteran fighters.
Classic ruleset works around this by halving helicopters' defense when attacked by fighers (and stealth fighters).
- make sea units able to attack from non-native tiles (it allows for instance destroyers to attack from inside a city) (as in the standard civ2civ3 ruleset) [NEW]
- slows down wounded sea units (as in the standard civ2civ3 ruleset) [NEW]
- increase diplomats and spies veterancy bonuses [NEW]
veteran_power_fact = 100, 110, 125, 140
veteran_move_bonus = 0, 9, 18, 27 (that is +1, +2, +3 full moves)
- add new fusion powered units (fusion bomber, submarine, transport, carrier) with a 50% increased cost and 50% more moves (like other fusion powered units, they do not obsolete the ones they improve). [NEW]

city improvements:
- fix the help for factories , electrical plants and mfg plants to report the actual +50% production bonus (respectively +100% with electrical plants / mfg plants and +200% with all of them) instead of the wrongly described +25%, +50%, +100%. [old minor issue]

small/big wonders:
- magellan's expedition: gives +3 moves as described in the help (instead of 2)
- trade company: gives the 10% extra bonus to all the cities and not only to the city with the Marco Polo's embassy
- free techs (typically given by a wonder) are the ones the player has set as his tech goal instead of the cheapest one (free_tech_method = "Goal" in game.ruleset)

All those changes have been written to my local LT37 ruleset and are ready to be tested.
Please give your feedback on those suggestions and feel free to add your own wishes!
Maybe players will want to keep some accidentally introduced features in LT36.

Looking good!

Please comment arkan's list of changes. We could start the test games soon if there are not that many additional changes.

I'll also look the full list from here. We had an irc chat about the changes last weekend and all this needs to be evaluated. No comment means accepting the change

next we will have this stuff on git, then we will pick some map size (tiler/player) and start the test games. Hopefully we can get to start the real action relatively soon.

I'm expecting a maybe 30 player game.

Kryon wrote:I prefer citymindist=4. Also please fix the border issue. That is, the borders remain fixed when a city is built near enemy border which I think is very annoying. Is it possible to fix this?

I don't think the borders are fixed. The bigger city the farther it pushes the borders. So, if you build a new city near the border of an enemy who already has a city of size 8 there you'll have to wait some time for the borders to move. There are some settings for that in ruleset though, but how to change them and keep it balanced?

Building a mine on a hill with a city should remove the free irrigation.

zorn wrote:Building a mine on a hill with a city should remove the free irrigation.

http://forum.longturn.org/viewtopic.php?pid=5833#p5833

I don't remember, was there tech upkeep in LT36?

In my opinion, tech trade on AND tech upkeep AND setting root techs for the whole tree (so that you can't receive a tech that you don't have prerequisites for) is the best combination there can be. Only you need to know what you're doing when setting the tech upkeep values. Even though, the GT game that everybody complained about because of heavy tech upkeep seemed fine to me.

What about pyramids? Should their effect be country wide or city wide?

elrik wrote:What about pyramids? Should their effect be country wide or city wide?

The pyramids (as they currently are) have 2 effects:
- 1 local effect that adds 1 production for every worked tile that already had at least 1 production
- 1 nation wide effect that cancels the -1 penalty to any tile output exceeding 2 under anarchy / despotism / tribalism

So do you ask whether the first effect could be nation wide?
I think that would be somewhat too big of an effect.

arkan wrote: - 1 nation wide effect that cancels the penalty that restricts output to 2 under anarchy / despotism / tribalism

Actually, it is not restricted to 2 but subtracted by 1 where a tile yields more than 2 something.

Thank you Handuman, you're right.
I've corrected.

Corbeau wrote:I don't remember, was there tech upkeep in LT36?

In my opinion, tech trade on AND tech upkeep AND setting root techs for the whole tree (so that you can't receive a tech that you don't have prerequisites for) is the best combination there can be. Only you need to know what you're doing when setting the tech upkeep values. Even though, the GT game that everybody complained about because of heavy tech upkeep seemed fine to me.

Yes there was tech upkeep in LT36 but the effect started to show only with further techs than the ones you had at the time you had to leave the game.
As you describe the complaints met in GreatTurn about it, I'm not sure if it would be a good idea to have it on again here.
Other players opinions on the matter are welcome!