forum.freeciv.org

In the game, when you assault a city, the only way you can find out what units are in the city is by using explorers or diplomats to investigate the city. The problem is when you do that, the result is you get the city window for that city. The combat calculator and the vision of the city is unchanged. Is this a purposeful feature, or just what happened when the game was made?

What bothers you? "Investogate city" is the action that opens city window for foreign city. Units in the city is one of the things you see in that window; there is no special action to get invisible unit stack (that maybe is bad, we have bases and loaded ships that we could also like to investigate). Well, on standard servers, bombardment reveals all units in the city for a short while.

Mainly, I want the combat odds calculator to work after I've investigated the city.

Elefant wrote: ↑Mon Sep 26, 2022 11:13 pm Mainly, I want the combat odds calculator to work after I've investigated the city.

For how long / should it give you a warning about how old information the calculation is based on?

cazfi wrote: ↑Tue Sep 27, 2022 3:53 am

Elefant wrote: ↑Mon Sep 26, 2022 11:13 pm Mainly, I want the combat odds calculator to work after I've investigated the city.

For how long / should it give you a warning about how old information the calculation is based on?

I have once proposed to save somewhere just all the latest data for the cities we can't see into. Then, we should be able to load the stack into combat calculator. The calculator, if develop it over just mid-click that has many well-known flaws, could be a separate window where you can take a tile from the map and edit its terrain, extras and units, and maybe simulate combat with several attackers. Like, could we have mini-maps with hack access within client memory?

Basically, the investigate city action should, in my opinion, give you knowledge of the units on the tile for 1 turn, hence the name of the thread.

Elefant wrote: ↑Tue Sep 27, 2022 1:52 pm Basically, the investigate city action should, in my opinion, give you knowledge of the units on the tile for 1 turn, hence the name of the thread.

I think there should be a way to reveal otherwise invisible units to a player. That is present in commercial Civs, Wesnoth and almost any other turn-based game, where units don't disappear for just going out of sight when they are not supposed to move. Also, CivIII has "Steal Plans" order that on success reveals all other player's units to you until their phase.

Maybe an effect effect_reveal_units(duration(in turns), reveal_to, tile_id) could be added to the lua api.

Ignatus wrote: ↑Tue Sep 27, 2022 5:35 pm... when they are not supposed to move ... until their phase.

With the normal phasemode, it's always their phase at the same time as yours, and their units may move at the very same second you investigate the city.

But yeah, I've had some notes about the need to remember the "latest" investigation result for each player about each city over two decades (before my long freeciv break begun early 2001) - for a long time it was not feasible for the potential memory / savegame size reasons. (Didn't want waste "sparse" resource for something that is very rarely actually used).

cazfi wrote: ↑Tue Sep 27, 2022 7:30 pmfor a long time it was not feasible for the potential memory / savegame size reasons. (Didn't want waste "sparse" resource for something that is very rarely actually used).

Off topic: Anybody with a good view of how the "system requirements" part of FAQ should be updated? It seems to me like something that has not been updated in decades, e.g., speaking of 200MHz processor as if you could somehow find something below that - and I certainly wouldn't try to run current freeciv with such a '95 computer.