Bugs and irritations
Posted: Tue Feb 26, 2013 2:05 am
Mods, please move this post to your new "Bug reports" forum, and also to your new "Irritations" forum
Bug report - Ver 2.3.4 and previous: There are two movement problems. A bomber with surplus extra movement (4 to 7 spaces, for example) directed to go to a city or a target that is closer (2 or 3 spaces away for example) will just stop at a nearby city until the next turn when it has a full "fuel" level for 8 spaces. That means I must waste extra effort to manually move the bomber to the desired spot. Clusters of units (like several Caravans, for example) can be selected and directed to move to another location. All of them begin the move, but only one has the destination. The others stop and blink (even though they have zero movements remaining) until each one is specifically told where to go.
Irritations - Ver 2.3.4 and previous: When a city grows, it may do two things that are irritating. First, it may set the city to maximum food for growth, even if I wanted much more production instead. A better algorithm would be for the city to try to keep approximately the same proportion of food and production that it had before it grew. Second, when a large city grows, it can shift resources to the useless 1-0-0 ocean tiles, even though there are available tiles with much higher food or production available. That requires me to babysit every time a city grows.
On the subject of irritations, two with Caravans are problems which should be corrected. When a Caravan moves to a city that it already has a trade link with, the message "Enter Market", that otherwise looks identical to the normal message to establish trade, is a PITA. Surely that "Enter Market" message (which really means discard the value of the Caravan) can be displayed in a different shape of box, or perhaps with a different color (bright red, for example), to save some of the user's mental aggravation. The other problem with trade links is the Ctrl-D method to display the links. That works OK with only a few links to only a few cities, but when lots of cities have several trade links, the resulting display just shows a useless mass of green lines. A much more useful approach would be for each city to show the number of trade links to it, so it would be easy to know if the city has reached its maximum of 4 links.
I am still addicted to Freeciv, but reducing some of the bugs and irritations would help to shift the ratio from pain to pleasure.
Bug report - Ver 2.3.4 and previous: There are two movement problems. A bomber with surplus extra movement (4 to 7 spaces, for example) directed to go to a city or a target that is closer (2 or 3 spaces away for example) will just stop at a nearby city until the next turn when it has a full "fuel" level for 8 spaces. That means I must waste extra effort to manually move the bomber to the desired spot. Clusters of units (like several Caravans, for example) can be selected and directed to move to another location. All of them begin the move, but only one has the destination. The others stop and blink (even though they have zero movements remaining) until each one is specifically told where to go.
Irritations - Ver 2.3.4 and previous: When a city grows, it may do two things that are irritating. First, it may set the city to maximum food for growth, even if I wanted much more production instead. A better algorithm would be for the city to try to keep approximately the same proportion of food and production that it had before it grew. Second, when a large city grows, it can shift resources to the useless 1-0-0 ocean tiles, even though there are available tiles with much higher food or production available. That requires me to babysit every time a city grows.
On the subject of irritations, two with Caravans are problems which should be corrected. When a Caravan moves to a city that it already has a trade link with, the message "Enter Market", that otherwise looks identical to the normal message to establish trade, is a PITA. Surely that "Enter Market" message (which really means discard the value of the Caravan) can be displayed in a different shape of box, or perhaps with a different color (bright red, for example), to save some of the user's mental aggravation. The other problem with trade links is the Ctrl-D method to display the links. That works OK with only a few links to only a few cities, but when lots of cities have several trade links, the resulting display just shows a useless mass of green lines. A much more useful approach would be for each city to show the number of trade links to it, so it would be easy to know if the city has reached its maximum of 4 links.
I am still addicted to Freeciv, but reducing some of the bugs and irritations would help to shift the ratio from pain to pleasure.