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Earth scenario and civ2civ3 ruleset

Posted: Fri Jun 14, 2013 2:17 pm
by bard
Updated version of civ2civ3 ruleset for freeciv v2.5

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The ruleset Civ2Civ3 will be included in the next official release of freeciv 2.5, where new changes will be introduced more slowly.
This modpack have been renamed to civ2civ3_earth, and I'll maintain it here in the forums, to share the changes that I use in my personal version, and to test some of the changes that are already planned for future freeciv versions (2.6, now in development).

The same rules will be available with modpack-tool, but the pack attached here also includes:
- an Earth scenario with map made by Rhye for Civ IV
- the tileset Amplio_earth, a mix of amplio and amplio2, with forests from freeland, and a look more suitable for earth-like maps. (the ruleset is compatible with default tilesets too).

Changes compared to the version included in official freeciv:
- Added Fort and Airstrip bases, required before you can build Fortress or Airbase, respectively. Bases no longer protect full stacks from being killed when one unit is defeated.
- Introduced Maglev, available with Superconductors, that allows unlimited movement for Land units (except Big Land and Merchant classes).
- A little boost to Federation (+1 Luxury per city, so it is easier to celebrate), and Fundamentalism (-50% to science, instead of total science output halved).
- Construction requires Iron Working instead of Currency. This way, Iron Working is a prerequisite to build Frigates and Ironclads.
- Increased fuel of all Air units by one, in order to allow battles for air control. All Air units lose 10% of HPs, like helicopters, when they end out of city or airbase.
- Cruise Missile allowed to attack Air units, and increased range to 16 (greater than movement of Stealth Fighters).
- Mountains receive +2 Shields from mines, same than Hills. The discovery of Refining doubles the effect of mines placed on Deserts and Glaciers.
- Deep ocean tiles must be mined in order to take advantage of the shield bonus from Offshore Platforms (buoys are no longer needed).
- Readjusted effects of global warming and nuclear winter. Ocean can no longer change to Deep ocean.
- Readjusted terrain transformations. Designed so all useful alterations can be finished in 1 or 2 steps, and all effects from Global warming can be reversibly with terraforming.
- Doubled costs of all spaceship parts, so it is harder to achieve a space victory.
- Scenario: Added Natural Wonders, that grant +3 luxuries in the tile where they are placed. Marked with a text label, and a flag icon.
Effect of climate changes
Effect of climate changes
freeciv-anim4.gif (276.61 KiB) Viewed 21152 times
Tileset view
Tileset view
Constructive criticism is welcome, as always, and it will be important to improve the ruleset, specially now that it is part of freeciv releases.

Re: Earth scenario and civ2civ3 ruleset

Posted: Mon Jun 24, 2013 4:29 pm
by bard
This version is already available with modpack-tool (included in freeciv). Thanks to cazfi.

In my latest game I used the Military server setting named "Chance of moving into tile after attack" = 100%, so the attacking unit always move to the attacked tile. This way the battle is more similar to wargames, and I'm liking it. I suggest to enable this option when you use this ruleset.
I plan to include it by default for next version.

Re: Earth scenario and civ2civ3 ruleset

Posted: Mon Dec 02, 2013 7:11 am
by bard
Updated first post with new version of the ruleset for freeciv 2.3 and 2.4

Re: Earth scenario and civ2civ3 ruleset

Posted: Tue Apr 15, 2014 11:27 pm
by bard
New version available in first post, and also available with modpack tool (v2.3-6 and v2.4-6).
Some fixes and minor changes compared to previous version.
No savegame compatible due to the change to some building/unit names.

Re: Earth scenario and civ2civ3 ruleset

Posted: Sat Jul 12, 2014 10:37 pm
by Arbogast
OK, here are my two bits:
Why you cannot irrigate tundras but you can transform prairies/grasslands into forests?
Why you cannot clean Ruins or erase roads/railroads?
Yes, I know: you need geoengineers, so:
Why are they at the end of the game of the tech tree? If you get that far.
And then: What are those Migrants? They cost money and don't seem to do better than workers.
By the way: What does Veteran status do to Engineers?

Civ2Civ3 seems very good though... execpt for those glitches. I mean it is an improvement on the good old Default3.

Re: Earth scenario and civ2civ3 ruleset

Posted: Sun Jul 13, 2014 11:29 pm
by bard
Thank you for the comments.
1- Tundras in this ruleset are equal to civ3: they gain one extra shield when mined, and one extra trade when roaded.
In real world, tundras are not very suitable for farming, and I find important in earth based scenarios that such terrains do not produce much food, else Siberia would be too populated.
I'd like the idea to transform tundras to forests, but then it would be possible to transform them to plains later, and that is not a very realistic transformation in real world.
In civ4, forests over plains were a different terrain than forests over tundra. I liked it, and it could be possible to implement it here, but such change would break the compatibility with maps or scenarios made for classic freeciv rules, and I think it is not worthwhile.
2- I agree workers/engineers should be able to clean roads or other infrastructure. But in freeciv, this is linked to the "pillage" action, and I prefer to allow such offensive action only to military units. I prefer a worker that can not destroy a road, better than a explorer or diplomat that can do it even at enemy territory (and I think it is not worth to create a new unit class just for this).
3- Terraforming was delayed to end of the tech tree in order to avoid unrealistic transformations of the earth map. With default rules, the map stops looking like earth too soon in game, in my opinion.
4- Migrants are an alternative to workers. They cost 10 shields and 1 population (10 food in the best case), instead of 20 shields as workers. Migrants do not die when attacked by land units, they are captured instead. And they can be used to move population from one city, to another city with less than 8 pop.
5- Engineers with veteran status require less turns to finish their job. One engineer is as effective as 2 workers (due to double movement points), while a veteran engineer works as fast as 3 workers. An elite engineer would work like 2 unexperienced engineers.

Let me know when you find other rules that you are not liking. I keep working to try to improve this ruleset.

Re: Earth scenario and civ2civ3 ruleset

Posted: Mon Jul 14, 2014 10:35 pm
by cazfi
bard wrote:2- I agree workers/engineers should be able to clean roads or other infrastructure. But in freeciv, this is linked to the "pillage" action, and I prefer to allow such offensive action only to military units. I prefer a worker that can not destroy a road, better than a explorer or diplomat that can do it even at enemy territory (and I think it is not worth to create a new unit class just for this).
Code structure in freeciv-2.6, with gen-extras, is such that adding new "extra removal types" to the code (not controlled by the ruleset, though) relatively easy. While you already could do tricks in the ruleset like "road can be cleaned away as pollution", my plan all along has been to add one new removal type and time is about ready for that now.

Re: Earth scenario and civ2civ3 ruleset

Posted: Tue Jul 15, 2014 2:00 am
by GriffonSpade
bard wrote:Thank you for the comments.
In civ4, forests over plains were a different terrain than forests over tundra. I liked it, and it could be possible to implement it here, but such change would break the compatibility with maps or scenarios made for classic freeciv rules, and I think it is not worthwhile.
Hmm, would adding a /new/ terrain even cause this problem, so long as you didn't alter the existing ones? While you wouldn't be able to use anything made with the new terrain in a classic ruleset, using scenarios made for the classic ruleset should still work, shouldn't they?
Mind you, I've been utterly frustrated trying to get a 'taiga' terrain to properly replace forests in cold regions. The forests keep showing up next to them all the way up to the glaciers :(

Re: Earth scenario and civ2civ3 ruleset

Posted: Sun Jul 20, 2014 3:20 pm
by bard
cazfi wrote: Code structure in freeciv-2.6, with gen-extras, is such that adding new "extra removal types" to the code (not controlled by the ruleset, though) relatively easy. While you already could do tricks in the ruleset like "road can be cleaned away as pollution", my plan all along has been to add one new removal type and time is about ready for that now.
I'm liking the idea of an additional extra used to remove other infrastructure.
GriffonSpade wrote:[
Hmm, would adding a /new/ terrain even cause this problem, so long as you didn't alter the existing ones? While you wouldn't be able to use anything made with the new terrain in a classic ruleset, using scenarios made for the classic ruleset should still work, shouldn't they?
Mind you, I've been utterly frustrated trying to get a 'taiga' terrain to properly replace forests in cold regions. The forests keep showing up next to them all the way up to the glaciers :(
I admit I have never tried to add a new terrain, and I'm not familiar with the settings related to the terrain generator.
I guess it is right what you say about compatibility, as long as you do not remove existing terrains, old maps should still load. But a new terrain also requires extra graphical effects, and even if it is easy to create the new graphic, it would force to readjust any tileset that you want to use.

While working on civ2civ3, I alwasy tried not to add new units, buildings, techs, or terrains, so it can be as compatible as possible with art made for classic rules.

Re: Earth scenario and civ2civ3 ruleset

Posted: Sun Jul 20, 2014 5:27 pm
by Arbogast
I'm back to the capabilities of engineers.
I don't understand the inability of engineers to transform swamps to plains to grasslands to forests.
I see that the argument is historical, but that does not hold.
Since the discovery of agriculture -some 4000 years ago- people (workers) tried and succeeded in transforming taigas, desserts, even mountains into productive lands. I believe that engineers are not up to par (like in default3 or default). This is very handicapping to say the least.
Those Geoegineers are too far down the tech tree.
There is an argument about it: The historical argument (which I think is false) and the playability argument.