Longturn Forum

École Militaire (War School) or probably just as Ecole Militaire to make the text safe for everyone. This small wonder would give the units additional veteran level. Together with barracks the units produced from this city would be vv and with Sun Tsu the units would be vvv. It would also keep three units content even if the unhappiness is caused by military units.

Forge. This is the ancient version of the factory. It will give the city centre +2 production bonus. However the trick is that even while this is not a small wonder, it would be obsoleted once the player is able to build factories. There is also a reasonably high upkeep of 1 gold for this city improvement making it much less powerful compared to the factory. It would be worth building in cities with not that high waste and corruption. The cost for this city improvement would not be that high.

What about some kind of greenhouse building giving the city tile one more food? Might be too much but the upkeep could be high.

I have the notion your Ecole Militaire is way to powerful. Perhaps it makes sense if it has the right tech as precondition.
No objections against the others, though my problem with food in freeciv in general is that it can't be
transported, say with caravans or so. That's what you usually do with food, you transport it.
[On the very long run it even may be desirable to have villages that produce food, which in turn is transported
to cities. Forgive me, just a little bit fantasy ]

http://forum.freeciv.org/f/viewtopic.php?p=92386#p92386

Nice

I should read the entire thread so I wouldn't be re-inventing the wheel

Ecole Militaire could be valid only for a short period of time maybe. Or perhaps it should have another name if it would better suit in the early game instead mid game?

Actually, cramming the game with new city improvements will nit make it much better. Most of the tike people barely have time to build the existing ones. I have a feeling you are catering to specific tastes when creating new buildings. One or two are good, but I have a feeling this is going too far. Hell, Civ1 had a nice closed set of improvements, Civ2 didnt really make it *better*, only a bit more diverse.

You may be right about adding too much stuff. The greenhouse and forge improvements were attempts to let the players to have different routes to building the great empires but now when I think about it, something like greenhouse or artificial food sources do very little in the late game and those would really be needed only in the early game. Not being able to build everything, on the other hand, is kind of another way at letting the players to choose the best path. In some previous games the idea with higher cost small wonders was to prevent the players from building everything. Or maybe not prevent but let them to make choices. Is it reasonable to build a happiness wonder or some economic one. The small wonders used to be more expensive.

Anyway, if it feels like there is too much stuff already, there may be too much stuff. I'm guessing that some of the improvements LT40 has will be removed if they do not work well or make the game less interesting to play. LT40 now has all the stuff but some of it may be removed. This happened with Zeus and Mausolos. Nice stuff but made the governments too similar in the end.

Another example is the pyramids. After all it may not be such a good idea to split it into two different wonders. The actual issue is the penalty with despotism/tribalism which makes the early game a race towards something that will remove that penalty. I'm not sure what could or should be done to it but the current setup kind of makes the early game always the same. Might be interesting if it would be possible to have slightly different kind of goals in addition to switching to monarchy or building the pyramids. Or maybe that's not really a problem

You may be right about the improvements. Basically, there is no *harm* with a lot of improvements, people simply don't have to build them all. On the other hand, it does reward a bit more experienced players, but on the third hand, oh well, it also rewards those who are willing to do some side calculation and see what may turn out to be the best.

On the fourth hand, it may destabilise the game a bit with some combinations being too powerful, but I don't see improvements really interacting that much so yeah, maybe there is little risk of that.

About early game, despotism and tribalism, I did make my suggestion: make tribalism favour going "wide" - build many cities, but not growing them too much - and despotism allowing them to grow a bit more, but with abundant corruption and a lot of need for making people happy.

Actually, it may be a neat trick if some early governments have a barrier that prevents them from crossing a line, like mid-game, but then suddenly becoming useful later in the game. But that may curb realism which is my mantra, it seems

Many hands

Would be cool to allow more ways to build the empire. Now there is nothing wrong with taking the current paths but some alternate routes might not do harm if they wouldn't unbalance the game. In the commercial civs there are religious elements or more of those. Probably not possible to add that will ruleset changes but it might be possible to have a religious building A that will make some other building working not that well. Or the other way around. Religion here is only an example as there are so many ways to build a society.

There was a joke about a "poison pill" wonder. In that joke it was the Berlin Wall wonder the player can't destroy without destroying the city. It was supposed to give the owner -20% or more penalty for trade. That made me think about economic wars. Would it be possible and make sense to do some kind of anti marco polo hurting the world economy. I have absolutely no idea what this would actually be or how to implement it but real life examples include some financial crisis. There is actually this kind of stuff with global warming and nuclear winter but nothing on the economical/scientific side. This is currently just a thought.

The growth suggestion for despotism/tribalism might work. I'll need to let that sink in and return to it at a later time. A big change and could actually work if properly implemented.

Nationalism was actually added with that thought about making the early gov usable in the late game. The first suggestion was to add a wonder to make tribalism relevant again but that change was said to be kind of clumsy or not that elegant. Instead the idea was turned into a new gov with new kind of advantages and downsides. I guess the same could be done to some other early gov if wonders are not the way to do it. That way it's not completely unrealistic.

About not building everything and never really needing to build all the stuff.

At some point some of the best cities have all the improvements. This is almost unavoidable if the player chooses to buy the buildings. Might not be that bad if the hard limit for improving the cities would happen a bit later. Mfg Plant costs 180 and gives 50% production bonus. Maybe there could be few ridiculously expensive improvements for those players who want to have the best city ever. Something like AI Production Lines costing 400 and adding 25% to the production capacity.

While this is not that important to the game play, the game is kind of missing the last 10% type of polishing. What this means? On some products making something that has 90% of the features costs only 50% of a product that has 95% of the best possible features. And the last 5% may cost triple the fist 95% was. This wouldn't of course really improve the player's empire that much but it might add a nice touch to it. A feeling that you can keep pushing the limits even further but always with a higher cost.

Might also be a nice way to brag with your powerful empire