SlowScience ruleset ideas and plans

[3plus4i]

I need a break from techs, so let's talk about some buildings instead.

Fog of war is a concept that's new, compared to Civ II, I'm pretty sure. It makes a lot of sense, but you also feel kinda blind while playing, unless you have a ton of units surveilling the territory constantly. I think other rulesets have already things to increase visions, I'd be curious how they do it exactly. I found the watchtower from the Augmented mod only a couple days ago.

I was thinking about Watch Towers as an early extension to City Walls, increasing vision range of the city by one. I could simply add them to Construction although I kinda want to make them dependent on Construction and Iron Working, but I can't really think of a matching technology. Upkeep could be 1 or 2, I'm not sure. By now I settled for an upkeep of 1 and requiring Warrior Code. I found an image for it long before I learned about the watchtower from the Augmented mod: https://opengameart.org/content/viking- ... r-low-poly

watchtowers.png (3.63 KiB) Viewed 26830 times

The Watch Towers should become obsolete towards the modern times, maybe with Flight. I'd like to replace it with a more advanced way of reconnaissance, extending the radius to 4 tiles beyond the city border, maybe 3. Btw, does the limit of 5 for city radius also apply to vision? The wiki is kinda ambiguous on that. It would throw in a wrench here. I'm still somewhat on the fence about what building could give the effect. I think some other ruleset introduced a Radar Tower for it, but I'm not really a fan, radar only really can monitor the airspace and is already part of the airport image. I could simply add the effect to the Airport, in the sense of air surveillance with planes, but I'd also like to make it it's own building, that extends the airport.

[cazfi]

Is there newer version of the ruleset available somewhere, than what was attached to some ticket? I'd update the version I use in the autogame (just AIs playing against each other) runner machine. These autogame tests are beneficial both for the freeciv engine development (reveal problems in our support of some ruleset features) and the ruleset development (I can give some hints about how to adjust the ruleset based on problems detected)

[3plus4i]

Is there newer version of the ruleset available somewhere, than what was attached to some ticket?

There is. For playing it's about as useful as a car with 30% of it's parts missing. But for feature testing that isn't required, so I'll update the upload at https://drive.google.com/file/d/1cVaT0Q ... sp=sharing with the exact current status (I interrupted editing in the middle of adding buildings and effects yesterday night). I can do that more regularly in the future.

[3plus4i]

Hm, how do I make a requirement vector that requires either one, or another building? This is the vector for a building, so I can't simply make two of them, like for effects.

[cazfi]

Hm, how do I make a requirement vector that requires either one, or another building? This is the vector for a building, so I can't simply make two of them, like for effects.

civ2civ3 has resolved a bit similar issue by providing separate buildings "Aqueduct, River" and "Aqueduct, Lake" - one require Lake and the other River.

There isn't even user flags, that are often used in cases like this, for buildings (now that this was brought up, I should make a ticket - it's unlikely that we will get better overall system in 3.2 time frame, so just extending current one by adding support for those building user flags would make sense).

[3plus4i]

Urgh, I'm trying to simulate multiplicative science bonuses, but I'm getting myself confused so hard from all the different combinations, that all need their own effect, to add up correctly. Maybe this wasn't such a good idea after all, the number of effects needed rises exponentially with each new factor. I probably will have to create myself a table, to keep track and an overview.

civ2civ3 has resolved a bit similar issue by providing separate buildings "Aqueduct, River" and "Aqueduct, Lake" - one require Lake and the other River.

There isn't even user flags, that are often used in cases like this, for buildings (now that this was brought up, I should make a ticket - it's unlikely that we will get better overall system in 3.2 time frame, so just extending current one by adding support for those building user flags would make sense).

I don't think two separate buildings would work in this case, because we're talking about a wonder. I'm going to move the space race enabler way up in the tree, to the Ares Program (one can't really attempt to fly to another star before managing to reach even Mars). It requires the nation to have a space program, which is split in two possible variants: The Apollo Program, which needs to be completed by any nation, or the Space Program, which can be built by the other nations, once one of them has completed the Apollo Program. I have to check custom flags again, I know I read about them before, but that was a while ago.

[cazfi]

I don't think two separate buildings would work in this case, because we're talking about a wonder.

They could have a requirement that the other one has NOT been built. Variant2 has an example of this, preventing the same player from grabbing both of the early happiness wonders.

[3plus4i]

Yeah, but it would still require two separate versions of the wonder and I fear this could lead to unwanted side effects. But I'm not quite at the point yet where I will implement this wonder.

[cazfi]

Downloaded the new version of the ruleset. As next autogame round is going to launch using freeciv master branch (3.2 development version) I first try to run ruleup of 3.1 and then 3.2 for the ruleset ( 3.0 -> 3.1 -> 3.2 ).

- effect_fortress_vision effect's Fortress requirement has a bad range.
- effect_fortress_hp_regen effect's Fortress requirement has a bad range.

I changed those from "Tile" to "Local".

At this point 3.0 -> 3.1 ruleup goes through.

- The resulting game.ruleset tries to include description from classic/README.slowscience, as that's what description_file entry told the ruleset saving part to use. There's no such file in classic/ ruleset.

I changed that to "SlowScience/README.slowscience"

At this point the ruleset loads to current freeciv-3.1 just fine.

3.1 -> 3.2 ruleup goes through.

Ruleset loads to current freeciv-3.2 just fine.

[Elefant]

Maybe there should a and_reqs field and a or_reqs field. So instead of:

Code: Select all

genus		= "Improvement"
reqs	=
    { "type", "name", "range"
      "Tech", "Radio", "Player"
    }
graphic	= "b.airport"

you would have:

Code: Select all

genus		= "Improvement"
and_reqs	=
    { "type", "name", "range"
      "Tech", "Radio", "Player"
    }
or_reqs	=
    { "type", "name", "range"
      "Building", "Factory", "Local"
      "Building", "Mfg. Plant", "Local"
    }
graphic	= "b.airport"