1.
Restricting roads/rails or whatever that is:
I don't agree. "Dumbing down" the game is a bad way to solve problems. In my opinion, the greatness of longturn is that the slower pace allows a much more sophistication in negotiation, economics, transportation structure, diplomatic agreements, and so on.
No one is forced to make roads or rails in a way that exposes their cities to easy invasion. This rule almost sounds like it is preventing you from making dumb mistakes. But we are allowed to make our rails go through occupied fortresses, mountains, border check points, or to not build them at all. Can we just admit something? Unguarded transportation infrastructure can be used by an enemy in real life, so it should be in the game also.
2.
Restricting deal making, transactions, and diplomatic possibilities. Once again, "dumbing down" the game is bad. Removing gold trading, city trading and other clauses handicaps the best part of longturn freeciv!! ... the unlimited and infinite potential for humans to negotiate agreements and deals and trades. Think what we got rid of. Gold for peace (tribute). Gold for tech. Gold for land and cities. Cities for peace. Cities for gold. Cities for tech. Tech for peace. Two techs and a city in exchange for that nicer city over there. The ability to give a city with a wonder in it for a turn to an ally, to make something possible. The ability to give a city to an ally so that it looks like he's attacking instead of you (wearing false uniforms). A million other wonderful things have been disabled! Most games with restrictive rules have a "meta": a single best way to play. This way is "forced" on you by how the rules work. When you can combine any number of pacts, technologies, gold, money, or cities, all into a deal, this gives your country limitless possibilities for being a real deal maker. It lets unthought of skills and talents in your personality come out. It unleashes the human spirit and opens the doors of diplomacy. It gives you a reason to talk to other nations and create ways to benefit each other mutually. In the slow pace of the longturn game, you can really become a global dealer and negotiator in amazing ways. The full creative potential of the human mind is unlocked. You role-play being a true leader of a nation who makes deals with other nations.
Sadly, multi-account cheating can really take advantage of this. Restricting the rules will never fix it. If you disable gold and city trading, the multi-accounter will just empty cities and loot them. Or use the nations to attack enemies. Or set the nation up as a research lab. What restriction comes next? We can disable city conquest, tech transfer, looting, and twenty other things, and the cheater will just find another way to take advantage of having multiple nations. We have seen that whatever restrictions you come up with to prevent cheating, it will just dumb down the game while the multi-accounters will simply find another way to take advantage. The true solution has to be real anti-cheating policies. The answer is not to get rid of the best part of the game because of multi-accounting, but to find a way to stop multi-accounting. I'm sure combining a few easy policies and rules could restore the integrity of the game. Let's give back a national leader's natural right to negotiate and make deals.
3.
Restricting uncontrolled tech proliferation. Turning off tech trading completely eliminates the dealmaking role of playing a national leader. But not limiting it results in wild and unrealistic tech proliferation. The user poll shouldn't be whether to allow or disable tech trading. It should be voting on how to lightly
limit it.
How about this? Just like you can only sell one building in a city per day, what if you can only give one technology to one player per day? This leaves everything exactly as it should be for normal play, while preventing wild abuse of proliferation. Now you have to decide who to use your one deal a day on, and make it actually count for some real purpose.
Just like some of the other wonders were changed, Darwin should be changed.
If you made it this far, thanks for reading my long post!
Cheers!
What I wanted to say is that the games start when they start and for a reason no more players can be added there. The reason is that people are competing and adding new stuff or changing the ruleset is considered something that was not known when the game started. And that's what we try to avoid. That's why it's not possible to be a casual gamer and just join at any time. Another matter is that people like to figure out how the rulesets work and this gives more challenge to players who don't check the rules. 