Galactic Ruleset

[markm]

The Galactic Ruleset still exists and is still available for download from the files area of the Galactic Milieu project's Sourceforge presence:

https://sourceforge.net/projects/galact ... /releases/

I have just done a first pass at updating it to work with Freeciv 2.4, not sure yet if I missed anything.

Most of the "docs" about the Galactic Milieu are on the Devtome wiki, starting from the main topic:

http://devtome.com/doku.php?id=galactic_milieu

Is there a "continue play even when you are the only player" option yet in Freeciv?

I am told commercial Civ games tend to allow that nowadays, since who does not enjoy playing around on THEIR planet once it is truly, exclusively, only THEIRS?

It gets kind of silly everyone having to keep a zoo city of some foreign nation on their planet simply so they can proceed from single-planet play into the Galactic Milieu...

One of these days it would be nice also to not have to stop the games and hack savegame files to move starships from planet to planet. But simply being able to have a planet to yourself and still play would be a nice start toward having Freeciv work nicely in the Galactic Milieu without having to custom patch it or keep a zoo.

-MarkM-

[dunnoob]

Is there a "continue play even when you are the only player" option yet in Freeciv?

I am told commercial Civ games tend to allow that nowadays, since who does not enjoy playing around on THEIR planet once it is truly, exclusively, only THEIRS?

It gets kind of silly everyone having to keep a zoo city of some foreign nation on their planet simply so they can proceed from single-planet play into the Galactic Milieu...

Makes sense, I sometimes "avoid" to build a spaceship, because I want to finish some really mad terra-forming projects (land bridges between continents etc.) You can disable spaceship-victories (or spaceship at all), you can disable team-victory, you can define new victory effects (I haven't tested it yet), but I fear you can't disable the "normal" victory at the moment.

[markm]

Hi, I am back at last.

The Galactic Milieu ( https://www.devtome.com/galactic_milieu ) is still active.

As I have not updated the Galactic Ruleset for some time I am using a now-old version of FreeCiv to run it.

It has now reached a point where there is enough Starship travel going on that my manual method of moving Starships and their contents between planets (FreeCiv game instances), involving using Edit mode to place arriving units then manual hack of savegame file to give those units any "Veteran" status they had, and manually hacking savegame files to remove departing units, is becoming more of a chore than will be compatible with the numbers of such tasks that will be required as the game continues to advance.

Ideally I suppose the best solution would be something that works without bringing down the servers and hacking the savegame files.

I also have been finding that switching to edit mode on the client only works if the server had cmdlevel hack first already in place when I connect, which is a security risk as anyone could come along in those moments and grab hack mode. I tried setting hack mode for my connection while it was connected but the client did not seem to react to that, it still did not enable its edit mode toggle. Setting it for my connection before actually connecting also did not seem to work, turning on hack mode for a connection seems to require that the connection already be connected, which would be fine if the client would recognse it had gained that ability and enable its edit mode toggle but alas it seems not to.

I have been thinking along the lines of having a script triggered by "Disband"ing a unit, that, if used on a Starship unit, will ask whether you really want to disband it or, rather, want to file it away in a transit file of some kind, complete with its contents, for later picking up by some kind of import routine to import it into another game/server/planet.

With the "bear market" in Cryptocurrencies the last few years the "spot markets" whereby game-currencies can be traded toward "planet Earth fiat" currencies have not been very robust, so there is still not a whole lot of budget yet to hire programmers. You can see at http://makemoney.knotwork.com/ the various currencies/assets, on the HORIZON platform (http://makemoney.knotwork.com/horizon/assets/) and the Stellar platform (http://makemoney.knotwork.com/stellar/). The individual pages about the Stellar assets include links to an online Stellar Explorer's pages about those assets, such as for example he explorer page for IXCoin (IXC) at https://stellar.expert/explorer/public/ ... W2NKRXMHA5

By comparing against the calculated values of the assets, based on their "treasuries", as shown in the links found at http://galaxies.mygamesonline.org/digitalisassets.html (which include historical values going back to 2012 or so) it can be seen that typically the routes out toward "planet Earth fiat" tend to be highly discounted, probably largely due to there still being so many "bagholders" from years gone by who still hold large "bags" of various of the ancient cryptocoins that the game has adopted. Such "bagholders" often assumed for years their coins were worthless so are happy to "dump" them for anything they can get without seeming to concern themselves with the fact that by wiping out the (often somewhat thin/meager) stack of buy offers they "drive down the value" of the coin in the perception of the "CoinMarketCap" type sites that assume the value of a coin is whatever the highest offer for it currently happens to be and that the "market cap" of a coin is that price multiplied by the number of the coin in existence. (The Galactic Milieu takes an opposite approach for most of its coins: the coins have "treasuries" whose total value can be computed and taken as the "market cap" and the value per coin can then be computed by dividing that total by the number of the coin minted / in existence; that allows the game to arrive at a value without requiring a huge number of active traders constantly arbitraging etc on "spot markets" to do "price discovery".)

So anyway, I am back and seeking a way forward toward making it easier for Starships to travel from planet (game-server) to planet (game-server).

Maybe also some details such as rules governing technologies carried along from planet to planet could also do with some thought.

-MarkM-

[markm]

Because Cochran's Flight (granted by the technology Warp Drive) gives two new technologies it opens a loophole once you colonise another planet: you could rapidly get two new technologies at a time by going on to the next planet and the next and so on and doing Cochran's Flight on each.

So I need to put some kind of block on that loophole, maybe something like making that Wonder depend upon NOT having any of the three technologies that depend upon Warp Drive, so your window for building Cochran's flight lasts only from when you get Warp Drive to when you have used it to advance further.

Until I get something like that in place I'll just have to manually disallow the loophole.

P.S. Almost failed to think too that of course Darwin's Voyage presents the same problem, so both need fixing.

-MarkM-

[markm]

The Galactic Milieu has continued to chug along all these years, and another problem has become apparent:

Running out of the numbers of techs and unit-types the system supports.

It had been intended that after warp 1 through warp 9, giving interstellar travel of 1 to 9 parsecs, there would be two more layers of beyond-warp technology, one giving jump distances of 10 to 90 parsecs then one giving jumps of 100 to 900 parsecs, or something like that.

However even just implementing warp 1 through warp 9, with their corresponding three types of starships each - a standard ship with unit carrying capacity equal to the warp number, a scout ship that carries only one unit, and a stealth ship termed a "warbird" otherwise pretty much like the standard ship but assumed able to defeat scanners and sensors up to its own number/level (1 through 9) - we came too close to running out of number of units types implementable.

It is starting to look like it might be necessary to kind of phase the most advanced civilisations out of active play, since once they "top out" the current ruleset how to handle them beyond that is not yet clear.

One idea has been to develop a ruleset that lumps everything before maybe factories and mass production into one "basic industry" tech to free up tech and unit slots.

I took a quick look at simply increasing the code constants that set those limits but that seems to "blow out" the networking protocols so it is not clear yet how hard it would be to increase them as in how much reworking of the whole networking layer would be needed.

Any insights or suggestions would be appreciated...

-MarkM-

[cazfi]

Running out of the numbers of techs and unit-types the system supports.

What a timing! Just a couple of hours ago I opened a ticket, and made a patch, to increase number of techs: https://redmine.freeciv.org/issues/355

[Elefant]

Why limit it to 400? 16 bit ids should support 65000, right? So is the 400 limit just for memory management or is there some other limiting factor?

[cazfi]

Why limit it to 400? 16 bit ids should support 65000, right? So is the 400 limit just for memory management or is there some other limiting factor?

Memory and performance.

Edit: And conservative approach, as we can always increase the limit in the future, but for backward compatibility reason can never make it smaller.

[markm]

I suspect more techs won't really help without also more units, because I think I already held back on units to go with techs in order to get as far as I did. Not positive on that though as it has been so many years.

I limited it to just a standard starship, a warbird, and a scout for each warp tech, not totally sure now whether I had had more types in mind or simply ran out of unit types when I tried to make those same types of starships for the first trans-warp tech so stopped adding techs before creating transwarps 1 through 9.

There had been plenty of time way back when because the "Civilised planets" of the Galactic Milieu ( https://www.devtome.com/galactic_milieu ) only run at a rate of one turn per planet-Earth month, but it is now reaching a point where moving forward the turns on the most advanced planets will hit problems real soon now. Though another help with that has been that the most advanced planets are also the players most equipped to be able to keep paying monthly "per square mile that FreeCiv shows your civilisation as controlling" fees despite not actually advancing the turns every month.

Side note on that: the monthly fees are paid to General Hosting Corp aka Galactic Holding Corp, the shares of which can only be held by Civilisations, so by owning shares commensurate with the percent you control of all the "square miles" in play the fees end up costing you nothing just moving the funds from your Civilisation's treasury or slush fund to the treasury or slush fund of GHC thus by your choice of how many shares to own you can, like those most advanced civilisations, basically keep the funds in your pocket just in a different pocket. Those advanced civilisations also have their own currencies to use with plenty on hand so for them stalling the progress of turns isn't a big deal yet, just part of game development / playtesting problems one runs across in building developing and playtesting.

I do not now recall whether many years ago when DeVCoin (DVC) was created the FreeCiv project had a BiTCoin (BTC) donation address thus whether we managed back then to assign the project shares of DeVCoin minting? DeVCoin addresses were deliberately made identical to BiTCoin addresses so that free open source projects that had published BiTCoin donation addresses could be sent shares of minted DeVCoins as they were minted, by using their BiTCoin donation address as a DeVCoin address to send to so that some future day they could choose to dump the private key of their BiTCoin address and import it into DeVCoin to access their DeVCoins...

-MarkM-