Has there been some recent issues with longturn support? I remember having discussion about setting the city vision smaller than the actual city work area, but it's really not that big issue. We are using smaller vision for cities to encurage people to actually put some units inside the city. Now it was found out that when this happens, there may be some conflicts with enemy units blocking access to tiles that are not really seen but which the city still is able to use.
It's nice if the cities can keep working on those tiles, but it's certainly nothing too serious is that ability is removed. I don't see any real problems emerging from removing something like that.
The biggest problems we have on longturn.org games are issues with real time actions happening arount the turn changes. Stuff like moving workers to make a road just before the tc and then using that road to attack right after the tc. In a situation like that the enemy should be online when the tc happens and also try to do some fast paced defensive moves in order to prevent the road from happening. The problem is that no one has really figured out a good way for preventing the various exploits one can take during the tc.
For roads there has been an idea for some kind of setting for workers not doing work if it's started too close to tc. This is of course just one suggestion for specific tc exploit and doesn't really solve everything. The idea was that if a worker can see enemy unit n seconds before the tc, the work would never be completed in just one turn. I have no idea how complicated it would be to actually code that kind of feature and no one never really tried to design the idea as a proper suggestion to fix that kind of tc stuff.
One solution might be changing the unitwaittime to affect all the units so that the attacking units couldn't be moved in right after the tc but even that has some serious downsides and I might not want to include a setting like that on a multiplayer game.
Other tc exploits include the last minute tech target changes, switching production to some wonder (with tons of caravans:) and maybe also the classical attack where the troops are moved seconds before tc. There is unitwaittime, but also the problem that the enemy has no time to move defensive units before the tc or maybe switch the production to something that would help defending the cities/units vulnerale to those units. I have no idea how to solve issues like that.
One great problem we could have suggested fixing are the trade routes. We have disabled the trade routes for longturn.org games because the huge map sizes easily create an issue with too big one-time bonus. With a map size of 200*200 tiles you can't really set the route values to give a reasobably good bonus and routes for close enough cities while also not giving too big bonus and routes for situations where the caravans are moved on the other side of the map. Instead of even trying to suggest something we have simply disabled trade routes. This has been working reasonably well and as a compensation we have been using wonders, terrain bonus alterations and changing the costs and output values for city improvements.
Now there is also tech trading
With tech trading the "problem" happens with players getting free techs without the need for using resources to actually produce that stuff. There is of course tech upkeep, but it's something that can be exploited if you have allies who are willing to give you all the techs once they are lost at the tc. There have been suggestions how to fix those but at the moment it semms no fool proof method is yet to be suggested. At least not one without too big drawbacks. Instead of tech trading we have been using tech leakage and experimenting with some tech stealing options.
I wouldn't say we are complaining about the lack of some features or settings. It's more like we are asking what can be done and what options there are to cope with the multiplayer related issues. Freeciv is a great game and I'm personally happy with the possibilities there are to cope with some exploits.
One of the latest changes was to remove partisans inspired from cities lost to the enemy. The replacement partisan unit is yet to be tested in a real game but it looks like there is no problem in making that kind of changes with normal ruleset features.
I would be happy to talk more about the subject. For longturn.org games most of the issues, except the tc ones, have been dealed with editing the ruleset. The rulesets are really flexible and allow these adjustments we have seen necessary. No complain there, really. Instead, thanks for making all this possible!
Wow... This was a long one