things i'd like to be implemented
Posted: Wed Dec 29, 2021 4:43 pm
i had some look at the wiki and this forum, but i'm far from understanding what is or has been going on in the community and what has already been discussed or proposed or is being worked at. so i'm sorry, if i repeat stuff you already have an eye on. but maybe and hopefully my suggestions help making freeciv even better.
i'm refering to version 2.5.3. and only single player mode.
1) when adding a settler to some already existing city, the new citizen won't be assigned to work the way new born citizens or the first founding citizen are. would be nice, if they were. especially for new players who haven't figured it out.
2) when loading a saved game or probably just when opening anew tech tree, the most advanced tech known is at the left of the screen. i would like it better if it was on the right of the screen or, probably preferable, if the game just displays it the way it was displayed the last time before saving or closing tech tree.
3) when playing with lots of nations, it's really hard to keep track of the diplomatic states of all those nations to each other. therefore it would be nice to have another report giving a table with each nation in rows as well as columns and all of the diplomatic states in cells (if known by player).
4) i'm quite always going for tech leadership. selling techs to other nations can make you a lot of money, especially when playing with dozens of them. therefore i would appreciate, if there were additional columns in the nations report: a column with the amount of gold owned by a nation and two columns with yes/no/not known, if i have at least one tech that nation hasn't et vice versa.
5) as far as i can see, the amount of gold owned by a nation is always known, if there already had been contact. that's probably a hint for players, telling them how poor or rich they are. and of course, diplomatic proposals are limited to the amount of gold owned by a nation. but it's not quite natural knowing such things about foreign nations - unless having an embassy, maybe. same with diplomatic states: even with no emassy you can know the diplomacy state of another nation even to a nation not known at all by the player. good to know, but not very natural to have that knowledge. so it would be nice to have an option when starting a game, making it possible to have those informations only if there is an embassy.
6) the whole concept of diplomacy could be improved, it seems to me. for example, while i always like to have the map of those other nations, they don't seem to care at all about mine. even if i know quite the whole map and encounter some small nation at the end of the world, it won't care too much about my map. that seems strange. i would like the ai to value every piece of map it could get knowledge about, making it more desirable to get my map the more unknown tiles it reveals and the more unknown nations it includes - probably multiplied by some factor depending on how desirable map knowledge is for that specific nation (maybe by nature of that nation and/or by social-economic state of that nation). the other way around: it should be more costly for me to get a map with many unknown tiles and/or nations than one with only few unknown tiles/nations. selling advanced techs can give you every piece of gold of another nation. i don't think ai should do so. 75 % of the gold for an advanced tech maybe, but not 100 %. if you won't know the exact amount of gold of that nation (see 5), it could be quite difficult to hit that 75 %. all in all i would like to have some additional concept of cultural influence and entanglement that would influence diplomatic trade and bribary. for example, trade routes with a foreign nation, migration, close borders, switching cities should somehow make it more easy to have diplomatic trade. at least, if both nations don't cancel pacts and behave peaceful (at least for some centuries). if they don't, close cultural relations should probably make diplomacy even more complicated. anyway, often i don't even get why ai_love (see https://freeciv.fandom.com/wiki/Diploma ... _behaviour) falls. is it just because i'm too powerful? maybe i built a wonder they desperately wanted to build? or i made a kind treaty with another nation they hate? or another nation tries to make them hate me? often i really don't get it - which is frustrating. so at least it would be nice to have more transparency on why a specific nation has as much ai_love to me it has. an option when starting game to set, whether those ai-nations more tend to peace or war would be nice, too. i can understand, when a peaceful nation hates me, because it wants to grow and it thinks i grabbed its land. but often it's just opaque to me, why they behave so complicated.
7) http://forum.freeciv.org/f/viewtopic.php?f=18&t=91980 made me want to have more types of terrain and more types of resources. speaking generally. specifically, i'd really like to have a differentiation between elevation of terrain and type of terrain. there's no reason, why there shouldn't be forest on hills, for example. and i think the vision of an unit should depend on elevation of terrain, compared to the elevation of surrounding terrain. even more specific, i'd really like to have cliffs, impossible to climb directly or control adjacent tiles, except for archers (and later units) when standing on top of a cliff.
i'm refering to version 2.5.3. and only single player mode.
1) when adding a settler to some already existing city, the new citizen won't be assigned to work the way new born citizens or the first founding citizen are. would be nice, if they were. especially for new players who haven't figured it out.
2) when loading a saved game or probably just when opening anew tech tree, the most advanced tech known is at the left of the screen. i would like it better if it was on the right of the screen or, probably preferable, if the game just displays it the way it was displayed the last time before saving or closing tech tree.
3) when playing with lots of nations, it's really hard to keep track of the diplomatic states of all those nations to each other. therefore it would be nice to have another report giving a table with each nation in rows as well as columns and all of the diplomatic states in cells (if known by player).
4) i'm quite always going for tech leadership. selling techs to other nations can make you a lot of money, especially when playing with dozens of them. therefore i would appreciate, if there were additional columns in the nations report: a column with the amount of gold owned by a nation and two columns with yes/no/not known, if i have at least one tech that nation hasn't et vice versa.
5) as far as i can see, the amount of gold owned by a nation is always known, if there already had been contact. that's probably a hint for players, telling them how poor or rich they are. and of course, diplomatic proposals are limited to the amount of gold owned by a nation. but it's not quite natural knowing such things about foreign nations - unless having an embassy, maybe. same with diplomatic states: even with no emassy you can know the diplomacy state of another nation even to a nation not known at all by the player. good to know, but not very natural to have that knowledge. so it would be nice to have an option when starting a game, making it possible to have those informations only if there is an embassy.
6) the whole concept of diplomacy could be improved, it seems to me. for example, while i always like to have the map of those other nations, they don't seem to care at all about mine. even if i know quite the whole map and encounter some small nation at the end of the world, it won't care too much about my map. that seems strange. i would like the ai to value every piece of map it could get knowledge about, making it more desirable to get my map the more unknown tiles it reveals and the more unknown nations it includes - probably multiplied by some factor depending on how desirable map knowledge is for that specific nation (maybe by nature of that nation and/or by social-economic state of that nation). the other way around: it should be more costly for me to get a map with many unknown tiles and/or nations than one with only few unknown tiles/nations. selling advanced techs can give you every piece of gold of another nation. i don't think ai should do so. 75 % of the gold for an advanced tech maybe, but not 100 %. if you won't know the exact amount of gold of that nation (see 5), it could be quite difficult to hit that 75 %. all in all i would like to have some additional concept of cultural influence and entanglement that would influence diplomatic trade and bribary. for example, trade routes with a foreign nation, migration, close borders, switching cities should somehow make it more easy to have diplomatic trade. at least, if both nations don't cancel pacts and behave peaceful (at least for some centuries). if they don't, close cultural relations should probably make diplomacy even more complicated. anyway, often i don't even get why ai_love (see https://freeciv.fandom.com/wiki/Diploma ... _behaviour) falls. is it just because i'm too powerful? maybe i built a wonder they desperately wanted to build? or i made a kind treaty with another nation they hate? or another nation tries to make them hate me? often i really don't get it - which is frustrating. so at least it would be nice to have more transparency on why a specific nation has as much ai_love to me it has. an option when starting game to set, whether those ai-nations more tend to peace or war would be nice, too. i can understand, when a peaceful nation hates me, because it wants to grow and it thinks i grabbed its land. but often it's just opaque to me, why they behave so complicated.
7) http://forum.freeciv.org/f/viewtopic.php?f=18&t=91980 made me want to have more types of terrain and more types of resources. speaking generally. specifically, i'd really like to have a differentiation between elevation of terrain and type of terrain. there's no reason, why there shouldn't be forest on hills, for example. and i think the vision of an unit should depend on elevation of terrain, compared to the elevation of surrounding terrain. even more specific, i'd really like to have cliffs, impossible to climb directly or control adjacent tiles, except for archers (and later units) when standing on top of a cliff.