Freeciv is a game about civilization. This leads me often to ask from myself "What aspects of civilization we are lacking, or are modeling inssufficiently" Designers of commercial civilization games probably think the same way, as exactly same things I've been pondering often end to those games. There's two answers I constanlty ome up with. I'm less interested about the "Religion" part. It's currently just branch in most tech trees - Ceremonial Burial, Polytheism, Monotheism, Theology - and all the benefits those give. I'm definitely not into bringing individual real-life religions into the game. And not even invented religions which someone might then think to represent specific real-life religion. As for abstract religion handling I have no idea for such an improvement over current tech tree based model that would be worth the effort. What I am interested about, is the "Culture" idea. While it's modeled in many ways (I'd say fragmented), it's so important aspect of civilization that I'd like to have it as clear concept in Freeciv. This would weaken some of the existing concepts - sometimes "happiness" rules even seem like "culture" rules under different name. Culture is not only entertainment, but it gives satisfaction. Most rulesets use buildings that would logically produce culture to produce happiness effects. But maybe this just means that we have to make "culture" and "happiness" concepts to interact - maybe culture could contribute to happiness. As for other effects of culture, I've found lack of satisfactory motivator for players to build up culture main problem of any model I've been designing. Capturing cities with superior cultural influence is the obvious solution, which many other games have also implemented, but that wouldn't work well with our existing migration concept. People are already moving to better place. Again, culture could contribute to migration score, but it cannot replace it. But there's one very simple solution. Let's not make culture to give unrealistic bonuses to be used in a way to victory, but to be the victory condition itself. Let's simply add optional victory condition for cultural domination, and everyone has to build their culture at least to prevent others from winning. I've been toying with models where we track current culture production, models where culture is cumulative from turn to turn, and models where both exist. I think last one gives best flexibility for ruleset authors. Some of the produced culture is cumulative, some is one time performances, and effects of culture are based on sum of the two. Ruleset author can define effects giving either, neither, or both kinds of culture.
Now I'm trying to decide if I start with this already, or only after S2_5 branching. This is going to be quite a long patch series, and I still hope that 2.4.0 release and S2_5 branching happen within reasonable time. Then again, I don't see big obstables of implementing only some parts to 2.5, and continuing to 2.6. - ML _______________________________________________ Freeciv-dev mailing list [email protected] https://mail.gna.org/listinfo/freeciv-dev
