Some Conceptual Ideas (Are They Good?)

[Eusebio Ptolomeu]

This post is more about some mechanic ideas that I've seen being suggested for different 4x games on the web, I would like to know if they are possible and, most important, interesting gameplay-wise for a game like Freeciv. Really this post is more to see the opinions around these concepts and mechanics: would they be feasible in Freeciv? How hard would it be to implement then, given the game's current capabilities? And how desirable would they be for the purposes of the game? So here are they, in no particular order:

1- LIMITED EARLY EXPLORATION
It's apparently quite possible for a civilization to discover and map its whole continent while in the Bronze Age. Now, the ancient world could be more connected than we assume, but I don't think any civilization before the Modern Era had a good comprehensive grasp of the whole of Eurasia, for example. This could be fixed implementing some sorte of mechanic related to how the reveal status of tiles work in the earlier games. The idea is that every explored tile outside the player's FOV (those who appear greyed-out, in shadows) would revert back to an unexplored tile (those who appears as completely dark spots on the map), until some specific tech were researched, map-making or cartography, for example. Sure, you could still send explorers to uncover the continent, but given that their discoveries would disappear again as soon as they moved, it wouldn't be very that cost-effective. I think this would have the interesting effect on making the world appear "constrained", small, in the early game, thus simulating what I assume to be a feeling real earlier civilizations might had in the past.

2- LOGISTICS
Army logistics always play a major role in battles and war, a role big enough that I think it could be interesting to emulate in a game like Freeciv. There are different ways this could be attempted, here. One of them is to do as that Charlemagne campaign in Civ IV, where they have a supply wagon unit: basically speaking, most units wouldn't be able to heal themselves in outside (or at leas enemy) territory anymore, unless under the aura of a supply wagon unit, maybe a 3x3 grid around the thing. Of course, some specific units could still be able to do so as an special feature, and maybe we could allow units to heal themselves in enemy territory if stationed in certain worked tiles, like farms (you know, your troops abusing the resources of the enemy). This could create an interesting weak link on what is, otherwise, an unbeatable army. Imagine having your major force neutralized because the enmy sent a spy to sabotage your supply wagon unit? Sure, your soldiers would still be there, but they would be unable to heal thenselves, while your enemy's troops retain this ability given that they are in friendly territory.

3- WAR AFFECTS MORALE
When Hanibbal was marching trough Italy, each lost battle just made the Romans more and more nervous and doubtful about the power of their leaders; similarly, Russia's failures in its war against Japan and WWI made the tzarist power weaken more and more, helping to pave way for its abolishment. Wars can build or destroy the morale of a nation, depending on how it is going; I think this could be simulated more in Freeciv. The idea being that each unit lost in a battle would incur a temporary negative effect in every city across the nation, making people a little more angry and a little more prone to revolt, thus making war even more costly; losing cities would be even worse, depending on how big the city was. Now, on the positive side, victorious engagements could have a positive boost troughout the empire, so if you're so sure of your odds, this could be a way to persuade an otherwise impatient population not to revolt.

4- "COLONIES"
The idea here would be to make colonies more expensive to maintain, and easier to seceed. Now, first, we need to define the concept of a "colony": a colony would be any city which is not continuously connected to the territory of your capital. Cities far away enough for the territory generate by them to not be able to attach to your main territory: those cities which create "pockets" of territories far away from your capital. Any city inside such a territory should be treated as a colony, and it should suffer a penalty that makes it harder to maintain it; perharps corruption suffers an extra boost here (compounding with the already present effect of simple distance to capital); maybe units and buildings are more expensive to create and maintain. You know, things that make colonies somewhat harder to control than your normal city on your mainland. Naturally, a city status as a colony can be erased if you're able to connect its territory with your capital's.

5- SECESSION
Cities already revolt in the game, but what if they really, really couldn't take it anymore and decided to outright secede from your nation? Kind of a small-scale civil war, it could be one city only. Once seceded, this city would retain any unit "homed" to it, and a proportional amount of your money.
This proportion could be based on your number of cities: 1 of your 9 cities revolting would "inherit" 1/9 of your treasure. Or we could take its population share into account. Suppose it is a size 9 city, and the sum of all city sizes in your empire is 26. This city would thus inherit 9/26 of your current wealth, so you have even one more reason not to annoy your metropolises. This proportionality mechanic may be quite simplistic, but I'm trying to find a nice balance between realism and ease of implementation.

6- TECH BRINGS CHAOS
This one can be a bit odd, but consider this: advancements in tech bring a change in lifestlye and views, and a change in lifestyle and views could affect the prevailing order somewhat. Maybe each technology you discover could cause a bit amount of chaos around your nation. Maybe just a little temporary bit, but if you acquire lots of tech in a single take, this could add up towards a major upset. This could make the idea of gaining tech at all cost have its costs and make it harder to counterbalance your edge on innovations with the very stability of your nation.

These are some ideas I've seen being trhowed around on foruns and such, I would like to know what you guys think of concepts like this? Feasible? Or event interesting? All of these would make the game even more complicated (not to mention having to change the AI in order to accomodate such chages ), I guess, so this could be a negative; but as Dwarf Fortress teached us, sometimes losing can be fun

EDIT: Just some further details added.

[cazfi]

1- LIMITED EARLY EXPLORATION
It's apparently quite possible for a civilization to discover and map its whole continent while in the Bronze Age. Now, the ancient world could be more connected than we assume, but I don't think any civilization before the Modern Era had a good comprehensive grasp of the whole of Eurasia, for example. This could be fixed implementing some sorte of mechanic related to how the reveal status of tiles work in the earlier games. The idea is that every explored tile outside the player's FOV (those who appear greyed-out, in shadows) would revert back to an unexplored tile (those who appears as completely dark spots on the map), until some specific tech were researched, map-making or cartography, for example. Sure, you could still send explorers to uncover the continent, but given that their discoveries would disappear again as soon as they moved, it wouldn't be very that cost-effective. I think this would have the interesting effect on making the world appear "constrained", small, in the early game, thus simulating what I assume to be a feeling real earlier civilizations might had in the past.

You other suggestions could might work as ruleset features, but problem with this is that we can't take the information back, from the player (human), once we've released it. If player has seen the map, hiding it in the game is only a usability misfeature - player who wants to have the advantage of knowing the map then just have to maintain the map on paper, or take some other similar action.

[Ignatus]

Yup. We just can make primary exploring units slow and shortsight. Or maybe so: a unit can't see unexplored tile until it tries entering it, and when it enters, it loses all movement. Land tiles are seen in smaller radius when looking from sea tiles, and most units are not seen on them.

[Elefant]

Or make it so units can only move in known territory, and use Lua to reveal tiles according to the players technological and cultural status.

[Eusebio Ptolomeu]

Thanks for the answers, everybody.

but problem with this is that we can't take the information back, from the player (human), once we've released it

When you say that, do you mean the problem lies more on the code, as in it would be very hard to change the system?
About the human player easily dealing with it away, yeah, I admit is not the most fail-proof mechanic ever . I don't think it would be well suited for multiplayer games for said reason, but maybe a single player could decide to play a match honestly about it, just for the sake of fun and challenge. I think it should be easy to make sure AIs don't have this kind of edge (of course assuming such a change is even possible, considering the chance of the code not being suitable for this mechanic).

Or maybe so: a unit can't see unexplored tile until it tries entering it, and when it enters, it loses all movement

I like this idea; maybe we could make a unit spend all of its remaining movement points whenever a black tile gets explored. Is it possible for the code to understand which particular unit explored a dark tile? Such a knowledge would be necessary in order for the game to give this movement penalty for the correct unit.
Of course, in a square-grid map, savy players would realize that, given that no matter how many dark tiles were explored this turn (if 1 or all possible 8) the pentaly would be the same, one could make exploration more efficient by moving units always in a diagonal path (more dark tiles explored per turn), but that's fine. Idk, maybe Freeciv Sun Tzu would write a chapter about it
We could make said penalty only apply for land units, leaving naval and air units unnafcted, making exploration trough these methods somewhat preferable trough these means. We also could lift this penalty for explorer and scout units, to represent their speciality in exploration.

[cazfi]

but problem with this is that we can't take the information back, from the player (human), once we've released it

When you say that, do you mean the problem lies more on the code, as in it would be very hard to change the system?

Oh, I think that the change is possible in freeciv-3.1 even without any engine changes, in a ruleset or scenario level. The lua scripting has ability to hide tiles, and likely someone can come up with a satisfactory ways to hide correct tiles at satisfactory time.

[Jacew]

I like your lines of thinking, there's few good ideas I've been thinking as well.

1) This I think simply boils down to the size of the map vs. research speed. If you think about it, Romans, Egyptians, Persians, Greeks etc... had connections to at least a dozen peoples around them. So for a normal Civ game if you manage to map the whole world in Bronze Age, your likely playing small map with not that many opponents, or have very slow research. I often play big maps with 20-30 AI players, and usually the exploring speed is pretty realistic. Now I detest the "shared vision" thing which breaks this. Sharing maps with allies is good and realistic feature though.

2) I've been thinking about this logistics issue, but any tactical addition to it I've come up with does double whammy to game mechanics. It both breaks the AI, and adds annoying micromanagement to warfare, which I think is quite well designed (and expensive) already. I have simply added gold upkeep and a rule that each turn spent on tile that doesn't offer support (mountains, desert, glacier) causes damage to a unit. AI being exempt from it, because it won't understand it.

3) I agree. It could work best as opposite of Republics, where every tile with enemy units in City Radius would make one Citizen unhappy. Wonder if this could simply be done with adding new rule?

4) I think this is currently handled well by corruption, trade and incite cost mechanics. No need the specify far away outposts as "colonies" specifically in my opinion. I'm running high corruption, high unhappiness ruleset, where different governments have much larger effect on them, which produce greatly differing ability to have large empires with colonies, vs. contained highly developed state.

5) Yes! I'm definitely in favor of adding Civil War as a separate rule where you could specify number of factors, including amount of unhappiness in a city, distance to capital, amount of corruption etc... as a inciting factor. Even better if it can be set as 0-100 % chance per turn dependant of said factors. I want to have to fear my citizens!

6) This concept I don't think I've encountered before, and have to ponder a while. Similar effect comes in my games from having dozen different governments and real need to switch them at a times, which can be triggered by new techs.

[Eusebio Ptolomeu]

I like your lines of thinking, there's few good ideas I've been thinking as well.

Thanks for all the answers (and sorry for such a late response).
Jacew, I find some of your ideas interesting, they could be a better way to address the suggestions I mentioned. You mentioned playing with a ruleset, is it a custom one?
Here are some comments for each one of the six topics:

1) I agree "Shared Vision" could be dealt differently. I don't think it is a problem by itself, I just think it should happen only in later tech levels, with the possibility of such a mechanic linked to techs like Computers, or something. Until them, shared maps could be the way to go.
There is already a mechanic for stealing maps trough espionage, complete with functions like Maps_Stolen_Pct from 3.1.0 to better control this effect; what if there was the possibility to purchase maps? The mechanic could be pretty much the same as the map steal one, only that you exchange the possibility of a failure (and its relationship penalty) with a guaranteed monetary exchange. The other player could refuse, but at least this wouldn't cause a worse relationship.

2) Yeah, I agree my idea could leave to explosive levels of micromanagement. Not to mention the problem with AIs. Your idea could be usefull, it is simpler to work with.
I wonder if such a penalty would be interesting with naval units, in which early naval units (from the discovery age) suffers the terrain penalty when in high seas, deep water tiles maybe. This could make naval explorations more interesting, perharps? This would make such sea explorations a risky, uncertain endeavour, kind of like they were in real life: too many unlucky ships would eventually be lost at sea, trough terrain damage, and the loss of said unities would incur into the happiness penalty I mentioned in the combat section. So, before investing in such endeavours, the player should take into account the risk of annoying its empire with so man failed expedictions. Further techs and naval units would eventually be spared of such terrain penalty. The player might want to wait until such times to brave the seas without risk; but this would mean letting go the chance of expansion, allowing risk-averse players to possibly reap some good results.

3) I think such a mechanic should be easy to implement. Whenever a unit is killed in combat, applies a penalty to your civ satisfaction, perharps with an additonal penalty to the unit's home city. A single loss shouldn't be that bad, but too much units killed in combat adds up the happiness penalty, so the player should go easy with suicide missions. And if one really wants to carry such a mission on, avoid using units from a single city; its inhabitants won't like seeing their family and friends being killed en masse.

4) Maybe the "find territories detached from the capital" is a little hard to add in the code. One other possibility that could work, and perharps it would be easier to add (at least I think so, as a layman): find the city's trade connectiveness to the capital. This means check if the city is connected to your capital by trade routes; or it is eventually connected. For example, city A may not be connected directly to your capital; but it is connected to city B, which is connected to city C, which is connected to city D, which connects to the capital. It's kind of like a tree agorithm with a root at the capital city, I guess? A city not connected to your capital in such conditions would, perharps, suffer penalties in its efficiency. Perharps a penalty of happiness, perharps a penalty in production or costs.
Then again, the high corruption and unhappiness you mentioned in your ruleset could easily deal with this.

[Eusebio Ptolomeu]

I was checking some of the Lua functions present in FreeCiv. I found some that could be useful to implement the Secession mechanic I suggested. Here are some of them.
-edit.create_player: Can be used to create the new player representing the nation formed by the seceeding city.
-edit.transfer_city: Transfer the revolting city control to the new player. It looks like this function already transfers the city's units as well, which is good.
-edit.unit_teleport: I think it is fair to, in the event of a sucesfull revolution, to teleport evey unit beloging to this city to this city tile. The new player should decide what to do with these units afterwards.
-edit.create_building: Perhaps we need to apply this function as well to build a Palace in said city, to make sure the new player has a capital. Or would the game automatically build a palace in the city if it realized that no city belonging to this player (i.e., this one) has a capital already?
-edit.change_gold: This one needs to be applied to both the new player and the player from which it seceeded from. The proportion of gold to be transfered needs to be addressed: based on # of city or share of national population?
-edit.give_tech: The game needs to collect every tech already discovered by the initial player, and transfer it to the new seceeding one. The new player should inherit every tech already discovered by the original nation.
-edit.change_citizen_nationality: This one is interesting. We could simply ask the game to change every citizen nationality in the seceeding city to that of the new nation; or maybe we could leave some with the old nationality: maybe not every citizen agrees with the revolutionary ideals, and to placate these doubters could be one initial challenge for the revolutionary player.
-edit.trait_mod: Maybe we could add random traits for this player. Just to make things more interesting.

However, some key mechanics aren't addressed by the above functions, namely diplomacy and exploration. The new player shouldn't begin as if it has no knowledge of any other nation, obviously it retains knowledge and relationships present in its original nation (not to mention, it would be necessary to make this new player an enemy of the original one, for obvious revolutionary reasons). And the same should apply to visibility, there is no reason the seceeding nation should lost knowledge about the world.