Nation Selection: Random from Nation Group

What would you like to see in Freeciv? Do you have a good idea what should be improved or how?
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Bedawyn
Posts: 7
Joined: Sat Jun 06, 2015 10:59 pm

Nation Selection: Random from Nation Group

Post by Bedawyn »

It goes against my grain to request or question anything when I haven't done all possible or imaginable research ahead of time, including reading through all the forums and mailing list archives. But, alas, I have very limited Internet access, and if I wait to post until I've had time to catch up on all of those, it'll be another decade. So if there's to be any chance of influencing version 3 at all, I suppose I might as well jump in. So here's my first request:

Currently, the nation groups are used in the Pick a Nation tab, and as far as I can tell, nowhere else.

Also currently, when starting a new game, we have only two options for nation selection. Pick a Nation is fine for choosing our own player's nation, but it's not ideal for selecting AI nations; it quickly gets tedious and removes all element of surprise from the nation selection.

The alternative is Random, which is really only sort of random, since it tries to pick nations that will "look good" together. This works more or less well, but is also limited. Players can tweak the settings it uses to do this, but there's no clear guidance in the file to help them choose settings. In my experience, 1 always seems too weak (too much diversity) and 2 too strong (too little diversity). And at any rate, we shouldn't have to be editing nationlist.ruleset every time we want a different flavor of game.

What I would like to see is for the nation groups to be listed in the Nation menu (Pick nation, Observe this player, Take this player, etc.) so that instead of assigning AI players to specific nations, we could assign them to specific nation groups. The exact nation would then be randomly chosen from within that group.

This would allow us to keep the element of surprise while also allowing us to tweak the distribution of cultures the way we want it for each individual game.
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GriffonSpade
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Joined: Mon Apr 29, 2013 4:41 pm

Re: Nation Selection: Random from Nation Group

Post by GriffonSpade »

This is something I never knew I wanted. But I really want it.
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