forum.freeciv.org

I can suggest a system to replace empire size unhappiness with a more smooth mechanism and reduce micromanagement of big empires. The idea is: make server-side governors that can manage either cities or another governors. Each governor or city is managed either by governor or by player.

A governor is given tasks like "produce unit of type T as close as possible to tile X,Y counted by map tiles/T steps/transport TT steps, better a veteran", "grow city C" or "make more science in L turns" that have priority points. Due to priority points, governors estimate costs of tiles that are disputed between their governed agents and give them to one assigned to a more favored task × more necessary resource for it.

Each governor works for a gold cost, the more high rank the bigger one. But if a governor or a player has more items to govern than N (with some respect to the size of the items), it has some waste/luxury cost, so even if a player can manage cities better than a governor since some size it will be necessary to rent a governor for parts of your empire, that will reduce the advantage of players just having more time for micromanagement.

It would be ideal if we also had generals working the same way for units, but a good military AI that can easily understand player's plans is too far from us. Maybe we can develop Civ3 idea of joining units into unbreakable stacks (armies) with a common hitbar, but they are too powerful if it is done to deepening levels. Maybe we still can use them if we don't unite the hitbar, just the army automatically selects an attacker and loss of a defender makes only limited collateral damage to other units insto stack frag (but eventually it can kill the other units to death, and if a sub-army perishes this way, a super-army loses (more?) points).

About armies, if this concept will be realized this way, we also need to join transporter capacities to be able to load an army into a fleet of corresponding size. And something shall be done to encourage joining the units defending cities. If we don't just limit number of units of certain class per tile (armies counting as one unit), we maybe provide them the bonus of common hit bar in cities and fortresses. Also, let armies, while having moving speed of the slowest unit, be always slowed down only by overall hit loss of damageslows-classes units and have the move cost of an attack divided on unit number (that requires adjustment for OneAttack units as how they are done in 3.1 since they usually are set to have attack move cost 32767). An army attacking another army spends as many attacks as many units are in that army, or maximal possible number, any way all units of a target army participate in defense while better defenders exhaust their capacity. We should probably keep the rule rhat army units stop grow in veteranship, just make army grow in power gradually by experience of the defeated enemies (with an army of a higher level and with more units giving more experience).