Barbarians Appropriate for Later Eras

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

Barbarians Appropriate for Later Eras

Post by Bedawyn »

Pirates are pirates no matter what their tech level; if there are ships, there are going to be pirates. We have them today. But the land barbarians are a different story.

"Barbarians" by definition should not be running around with high-tech weapons, and it's dissonant to see them show up when the regular nations are well into the modern era. This doesn't happen too often, though, because they spawn from unseen territory, and there's less and less of that as you get into the modern age. But this leads to another problem -- fewer barbarians means more predictability, which helps lead to late-game ennui.

What I would like to see is some new land-barbarian nations that would phase in as the old barbarians phase out. I'd go with Outlaws (Renaissance to Early Modern era) and The Cartel (Crimelords, for the Early Modern era into the future). I'd also add Marauders, an alien barbarian with air units come to spice up your end game -- perhaps if you can recover a crashed spaceship, it will give you a boost on your own spaceship development.

Creating the nations would be easy enough. The trick is making them appear at the right times. The user option for barbarian onset is fine for the original land barbarians, but for pirates, I'd want to see it tied to the player development of MapMaking. I'd also want to see the criminal nations tied to tech development, and the aliens to the Apollo Program. But since all rulesets won't have the same techs or the same wonders, that might be a problem. I could add the new nations to my own ruleset, but is there a way to tie the spawn time into the ruleset?

The spawning locations would also have to be changed, as unseen territory becomes rare. I'd have them spawn near cities with a lot of unrest (bandits) or corruption (crimelords). Again, I don't see any way to do that with only a ruleset. If there is, please tell me!

(http://gna.org/bugs/?func=detailitem&item_id=17606 seems to have started off this way then wandered on to a different track. I wasn't sure if it was appropriate to comment there or if that was reserved for Actual Coders as opposed to Idea Planners.)
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