Follow-up Comment #1, patch #4723 (project freeciv):
While I agree that the help system is having an increasingly difficult time
understanding the requirements structures and describing them well, I worry
that providing a "quiet" flag will encourage ruleset authors to embed secret
rules, easter eggs, and similar constructions. While these might seem fun at
first, they encourage reading raw rules files for distributed rulesets and
provide significant familiarity bonuses for undistributed rulesets (or,
alternately, encourage hacked clients that download nominally undistributed
rulesets from servers).
Patch #3361 seems a reasonable way to help reduce unreadable lists: the
(potentially untranslated) property becomes only referenced, and users can
check to see the contents of the affected set. Removing the lists may leave
the player guessing as to which units can do something (I know I spent a vast
number of hours trying to reconcile the information in the various help
screens prior to learning to read rules files directly).
"Does not apply to city centers" is just poor text choice, as a result of poor
compromises imposed by the textual generation (this particular one being a
result of patch #3841): insert_requirement() could presumably accept another
argument indicating the thing being described, to provide flexibility in cases
where different strings are desired for different sections. Failing to tell a
player that a Fortress cannot be in a city may leave them surprised that it is
destroyed when the city is built (or not restored if the city is disbanded).
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