What to do about micromanagement?

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marioxcc_
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What to do about micromanagement?

Post by marioxcc_ »

There is too much micromanagement in Freeciv, especially in city-specific unit upkeep. When playing under a rule-set and government where aggressively deployed military units make citizens unhappy, one has to more or less distribute the “home” cities of soldiers to keep the cities that have the highest production from being overwhelmed by unhappiness when those soldiers are deployed aggressively. In the classic ruleset, there are governments that do not require those acrobatics, but those governments do not have rapture either, and in the classic ruleset, rapture is a must, and involves lots of micromanagement as well.

How can the level of micromanagement be reduced? I am already using the city governor.
Hans Lemurson
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Re: What to do about micromanagement?

Post by Hans Lemurson »

I agree that the need to shuffle units from one city to another to manage their support costs and unhappiness is a great annoyance. I am glad that later Civ games did away with that, but it remains in FreeCiv.
Wishes he could convert Civ2's scenarios to FreeCiv...
But instead, he made his own tileset variants, RoundSquare and Sextant-enHANSed, and refuses to play on anything else. Check them out!
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mir3x
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Re: What to do about micromanagement?

Post by mir3x »

There is not much micromanagment.
Use h shortcut - just move unit to city press h, and home is changed.

In middle game you can build city size 1 on coal or mine, set citizen to elvis, with railroad city on coal will upkeep 7 unhappy units, normal hill 4 without any unhappiness. You can also use Sheakespeare Teatre in one of cities and rehome all units there.

Anyway you should invade "wisely". On land map just take city in 1 turn ( eg. connect enemy road to yours), use 30 dragoons or 10 cannons, or scout with diplomat first, check how much you need. Or build some city near AI and put all units there - you might need to build fort first there.
On sea map use marines to take cities in 1 turn, create bridge cities.
There is 0 unahappiness in such cases.

If map is big and fast invasasions is pain - just farm - get stocks exchanges, trade routes, without wonders 20% luxury is enough for cities to be content, during war switch to 40% luxury - every unit should be able to upkeep 3-5 while staying content. Extra 20% for war time is almost nothing.

If you want to defend just put 1 defensive unit + walls, use few fast units or strong, because AI wont attack and will be moving around with stack of units waiting to be killed. Or just move units to AI land, it just moves units in any random direction. In early game it often 'escapes' from cities leaving cities empty. In later game if you put unit at all AI cities it will leave them empty too very often.

Or just farm whatever you need in republic/democracy, switch to communism/monarchy. No need to micromanage unhappiness there.
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Corbeau
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Re: What to do about micromanagement?

Post by Corbeau »

Invading another nation shouldn't be too easy.

Also, there is always Tetris.
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marioxcc_
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Re: What to do about micromanagement?

Post by marioxcc_ »

Hans Lemurson wrote:I agree that the need to shuffle units from one city to another to manage their support costs and unhappiness is a great annoyance. I am glad that later Civ games did away with that, but it remains in FreeCiv.
How does unit upkeep work in proprietary Civilization games?
mir3x wrote:There is not much micromanagment.
Yes, of course it is. Your whole post is just an elaboration of what the micromanagement of units consists in. Also, there is not only unhappiness but shield or gold upkeep, and all governments have unhappiness in the civ2civ3 ruleset.
Corbeau wrote:Invading another nation shouldn't be too easy.
Nobody in this thread said it should be.
Hans Lemurson
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Re: What to do about micromanagement?

Post by Hans Lemurson »

marioxcc_ wrote:
Hans Lemurson wrote:I agree that the need to shuffle units from one city to another to manage their support costs and unhappiness is a great annoyance. I am glad that later Civ games did away with that, but it remains in FreeCiv.
How does unit upkeep work in proprietary Civilization games?
Civ1, Civ2, Alpha Centauri: City-based unit support. Every unit has a home city, and different governments determine how many are supported for free, and how much unhappiness they cause when in the field. Changing the home city requires physically moving to that city.
Civ3: Units are not tied to cities and their upkeep is paid for by gold from your treasury. Cities will add to the number of "free units" you can support without cost, and this changes depending on your government and the size of the city.
Civ4: Units cost gold from your treasury, but your "free units" is based off of total population and difficulty level. Units outside your territory cost extra gold to maintain.
Civ5: Unit upkeep cost is based on your total number of units, modified by the turn number. A base number of units are supported for free based on difficulty level and policies.
Civ6: Every unit has a distinct maintenance cost. Some early units cost 0(!), but later more powerful ones cost more.

Civ3 and beyond have global support costs, so you never have to worry about shuffling units around. I believe this is as it should be.
Without "Home Cities", some mechanics had to be changed, but I think it was worth it. Any unit that really needs to be tied to a specific city can be done so by a special rule (Setting the origin points for Trade Routes in Civ5/Civ6).
marioxcc_ wrote:
mir3x wrote:There is not much micromanagment.
Yes, of course it is. Your whole post is just an elaboration of what the micromanagement of units consists in. Also, there is not only unhappiness but shield or gold upkeep, and all governments have unhappiness in the civ2civ3 ruleset.
Hehe. When you get too accustomed to something, you forget that it's there. Also some people enjoy such optimization tasks, so asking them about reducing micro is like going to an authentic South-Asian restaurant and asking for something "mild". ;)
Wishes he could convert Civ2's scenarios to FreeCiv...
But instead, he made his own tileset variants, RoundSquare and Sextant-enHANSed, and refuses to play on anything else. Check them out!
marioxcc_
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Re: What to do about micromanagement?

Post by marioxcc_ »

Hans Lemurson wrote: Civ1, Civ2, Alpha Centauri: City-based unit support. Every unit has a home city, and different governments determine how many are supported for free, and how much unhappiness they cause when in the field. Changing the home city requires physically moving to that city.
Civ3: Units are not tied to cities and their upkeep is paid for by gold from your treasury. Cities will add to the number of "free units" you can support without cost, and this changes depending on your government and the size of the city.
Civ4: Units cost gold from your treasury, but your "free units" is based off of total population and difficulty level. Units outside your territory cost extra gold to maintain.
Civ5: Unit upkeep cost is based on your total number of units, modified by the turn number. A base number of units are supported for free based on difficulty level and policies.
Civ6: Every unit has a distinct maintenance cost. Some early units cost 0(!), but later more powerful ones cost more.
Thanks for your reply.

This information leads me to the inescapable conclusion that Freeciv is garbage and its development team is incompetent. Freeciv has been in existence for over 20 years and it is nearly as primitive as Civilization II. There are 414 854 lines of code among “common”, “client” and “server” according to “cloc” in the latest release (2.6.0) and despite so much complexity, the software still lacks essential features like a queue of orders for workers, automatic assignment of transport ships and the gameplay inherits the bad decisions made in Civilization II. Moreover, the gtk2 and gtk3 clients regularly segfault.
Hans Lemurson
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Re: What to do about micromanagement?

Post by Hans Lemurson »

What they have done is taken a very conservative approach, and focused primarily on flexibility and moddability. The game development cycles have been slow because this project is done by volunteers contributing when they can. An open and collaborative development environment also contributes to the slow refinement of core features, because there is no one person who can just decide "THIS is the way things should be done".

Attempts have been made with other clients to improve the UI, but the results have been rather...mixed in my opinion.

Does that make FreeCiv garbage? I would say not. But it's certainly not comparable to what has been delivered elsewhere by a tight-knit group of professionals working full-time under a lead designer. Take it for what it is, rather than lament what it is not.
Wishes he could convert Civ2's scenarios to FreeCiv...
But instead, he made his own tileset variants, RoundSquare and Sextant-enHANSed, and refuses to play on anything else. Check them out!
marioxcc_
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Joined: Sat Oct 22, 2016 4:02 pm

Re: What to do about micromanagement?

Post by marioxcc_ »

There is no point in making the engine very general if no mod/ruleset is good enough. A game with a hardcoded but good rules of gameplay is still a good game. A highly customizable game engine with several mediocre rulesets and graphics (like Freeciv) is still a mediocre game.

It is a shame that “I am a volunteer” is taken to be synonymous with “I do not take this seriously and I make mediocre and sparse contributions” in the free software community. Developing a game is no joke and if one chooses to undertake that endeavor, one ought to do it well. Being a volunteer is entirely irrelevant and not an excuse to doing a mediocre job. Only a person of despicable ethics would find money to be the sole reason to perform well, and perform poorly when money is not offered in reward.
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mir3x
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Re: What to do about micromanagement?

Post by mir3x »

marioxcc_ wrote: This information leads me to the inescapable conclusion that Freeciv is garbage and its development team is incompetent. Freeciv has been in existence for over 20 years and it is nearly as primitive as Civilization II. There are 414 854 lines of code among “common”, “client” and “server” according to “cloc” in the latest release (2.6.0) and despite so much complexity, the software still lacks essential features like a queue of orders for workers, automatic assignment of transport ships and the gameplay inherits the bad decisions made in Civilization II. Moreover, the gtk2 and gtk3 clients regularly segfault.
Civlization 1-6 is garbage, it has pathetic multiplayer mode, every game I tried all players left bc of boredom/time waste without finishing game.
Server is run on of players comp. That player can easily run Cheat Engine and boost his gold or whatever.
Managing units/cities is garbage - 10 units and 5 cities - and managing it takes ages - with this time I could manage 50 cities, 200 units in freeciv.
AI is garbage (but better than freeciv).
It carries bugs from one version to another - linux version sometimes crashes when using missionaries in civ5, bug was carried to civ6 to crashes there too. Firaxis is garbage team not fixing bugs.
Many garbage ideas in every game which they abandon in next game.
Figuring that Spaceship is bullshit took them 20 years, In civ6 they changed it to Martian Colony ( thats bs with those techs too). Tech tree is crap, eg. will they ever learn that frigates require cannons ?
Civ6 tileset is garbage, it takes many hours to get used to it, they should release free update with civ5 tileset for ppl wanting to change that in game. Ofc they never did it.
For playing such garbage they should be paying money not taking it. Even on Ryzen 1700X that playing vs 10 civs game is so slow. Playing vs 10 or more AI you can see how stupid AI is.
Every version is so buggy so its wisely not try to run it at least 1 year after release.
Winning on normal mode requires mostly clicking "next turn"

Will they ever learn that Great Ppl are not slaves ?

Overall you shoudln't be suprised that freeciv is small garbage when it tries to mimic big garbage.
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