Ideas for better online game experience

Planning and discussing Freeciv Longturn gaming
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Corbeau
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Re: Ideas for better online game experience

Post by Corbeau »

To change the topic a little bit, I remember a discussion somewhere about borders being too far from cities which makes it difficult for latecomers to build cities. And, basically, whoever gets a settler into an area has effectively blocked off a disproportionally patch of land. Which setting controls this?
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cazfi
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Re: Ideas for better online game experience

Post by cazfi »

Corbeau wrote:To change the topic a little bit, I remember a discussion somewhere about borders being too far from cities which makes it difficult for latecomers to build cities. And, basically, whoever gets a settler into an area has effectively blocked off a disproportionally patch of land. Which setting controls this?
See game.ruleset borders section.
wieder
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Re: Ideas for better online game experience

Post by wieder »

The thing about ZOC is that it's easy to bypass. You only need to get a unit to the tile you want to go and after doing that ZOC doesn't matter that much. Explorers, spies and diplomats are great for this since they all ignore ZOC. Removing the ability to ignore ZOC from those units might result with some unwanted situations like where you can't establish an embassy because of the ZOC.

The tech upkeep for tech trading is one solution but it's relatively easy to bypass. Someone in your team needs to give back you the lost techs. It's just an annoyance in the early turn but nothing too serious if you have a dedicated player allied with you. This would be different if it would be possible to limit techs given / turn to for example one as already mentioned. Or if you would actually lose as many techs as needed for balancing the negative upkeep. Root reqs will help but they will not remove this possibility. i have done this successfully and I've seen it been done by others. Relatively easy, really.

Not trying to spoil this for others. Instead I'm only saying how I would abuse this stuff if they were enabled in a game. Nothing wrong with that as long as everyone understands that's the way to go.

With longturn.org games we have this idea that everyting the server allows you to do, is allowed. With the exception of staying online 24/7, hacking the server, implementing auto moves to the client and multi accounting. For example if you want to steal from your ally, in the era of diplomats, you can do that. It makes that city immune to stealing with diplomats and some people consider that unfair. Since it's possible and enforcing a rule about not doing that would be impossible it's better to allow stuff like that.

Another trick we just removed from our games is the one with partisans. Once you can spawn partisans by conquering a city, you can create partisan factories. Just build migrants or settlers in small and unimportant cities, move them to the partisan factory city, add them and you can build an amazing amount of almost free units every turn. I have used that to create maybe 30-40 partisans every turn for a very long time. Those can be used to protect the cities or they can be disbanded for other units. You only need an ally who can switch to war whenever needed and spend 5 minutes for conquering, emptying, getting the city back and conquering again. The city will shrink but you use migrants to grow it back instantly.

Now it's of course a matter of taste if stuff like that should be preveted or not. What do you think?
wieder
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Re: Ideas for better online game experience

Post by wieder »

Btw... Does anyone know if it is possible to have a setting for some new units not to have home cities?

I would like to change partisans into units that can only be built in cities but so that they would not have a home city. The idea would be not only having a zero upkeep but also make it so that if the city building the partisan unit is conquered, the partisan unit would be unaffcted.
pungtryne
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Re: Ideas for better online game experience

Post by pungtryne »

Corbeau wrote: This is your personal view. I don't know how many Longturn games you have played, but people who have played more than you and me combined say that "no restrictinfra" is a sudden death situation after which the victim doesn't want to play anymore. And no, it's not about "not being dumb to set up your road network".
I could just as well say that when a defender is well prepared, no attack will be able to stop him.
You absolutely need a road network, you can't set it up "strategically defensive" in order to "slow down a potential attacker". When an attacker is well prepared, no defence will be able to stop him. It's only a matter of numbers. Roads are an integral part of a civilization. If you are playing Civilization, you build roads. If you are playing Warcraft, then you submit everything to conquest.
There is no absolute need, one could easily play without. You can be defensive about it too, for example, you can make your road and city set up in a way that doesn't give full access to the roads through ZOC rules. This can be archived by making it so that to pass a city, or a fort, a foreign unit has to 1. take out the unit or 2. move out of the road to pass.
You want easy conquest. To you, building a nation is the means to go to war. To me it's the other way round. Gamewise, both methods are legal as is the either restrictinfra variant. The only thing is: no restriction is less realistic and leads to sudden death which is also unrealistic for larger empires.
The other way around? War as means to build a nation? I don't understand. And why do you say I want easy conquest? I want the game to be balanced.
You want a quick conquest, where the defender should be prepared all the time because, if he isn't, he will perish within a few turns. But, again, if the attack is well prepared, no defence will be able to stop it. It's a game of numbers.

I want a more realistic situation where it takes time to conquer a territory (as long as the land is large), just as it happened throughout history. Both variants are playable in its way, but, like I said, one is called Civilization and the other is called turn-based Warcraft.
I think a player should be prepared all the time that he might be invaded, that's right. I also think it should be fully punishable when someone let's their guard down. In this game you have to try to get to know the intentions of your neighbours, their strengths and their likeable targets. If you build unprotected rails right next to a player that has the power and will to attack and put you in sudden death situation, then I think you are playing the game wrong. And I don't think the game should be changed because of that. That is, I don't think sudden death situations we have to day are undesirable. The problem arises when, usually newer players, don't see the implications of their actions (or lack of actions).

It's really hard to talk about realism and Freeciv (often because players set themselves in unrealistic situations), but I think that often when sudden death situations happen in freeciv, you have the real life equivalent of the complete unrealistic scenario that a nation doesn't pay (sufficient) attention to his neighbours and happily live life while neighbour makes huge troops to just roll over the unprepared victim.

Playing against humans can be though, and one really has to expect the same nastinesses as in ordinary world politics. Those that want a gentler game are maybe at the wrong place from the start.
wieder
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Re: Ideas for better online game experience

Post by wieder »

pungtryne, what about the real time aspect of restrictinfra? In real life the defender defends and moves the troops at the same time as the enemy. Going past several cities, like on a game witout restrictinfra, is ntt really possible. And even if moving past cities would be possible, in real world other units would not stand there waiting while the enemy kills them one by one. In a game this could happen because the opponent may not be online.
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Alien Valkyrie
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Re: Ideas for better online game experience

Post by Alien Valkyrie »

wieder wrote:Btw... Does anyone know if it is possible to have a setting for some new units not to have home cities?

I would like to change partisans into units that can only be built in cities but so that they would not have a home city. The idea would be not only having a zero upkeep but also make it so that if the city building the partisan unit is conquered, the partisan unit would be unaffcted.
In units.ruleset, you can give them the "NoHome" unit flag. If you want them to not appear when a city is conquered, either remove all "Inspire_Partisans" effects in effects.ruleset, or overwrite default.lua (which is not recommended unless you need to) and remove (or sufficiently modify) the function _deflua_make_partisans_callback(). I'd go with the former.
Note: I don't think anything should be drastically different in other recent versions, but for your information, this is based on 2_6 ruleset format.
~ AVL
pungtryne
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Re: Ideas for better online game experience

Post by pungtryne »

wieder wrote:pungtryne, what about the real time aspect of restrictinfra? In real life the defender defends and moves the troops at the same time as the enemy. Going past several cities, like on a game witout restrictinfra, is ntt really possible. And even if moving past cities would be possible, in real world other units would not stand there waiting while the enemy kills them one by one. In a game this could happen because the opponent may not be online.
The real time aspect is definetively a strong argument I think, but as restrictinfra doesn't prevent sudden death, just demands more planning, it is'nt that strong. Balance between good and bad players is also a good argument without being sure how much this really helps.

After having this discussions some days, I think both options would be fine for me, the difference wouldn't be that big really.
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