<URL: http://bugs.freeciv.org/Ticket/Display.html?id=39845 >
"William Allen Simpson" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > ><URL: http://bugs.freeciv.org/Ticket/Display.html?id=39845 > > >Per I. Mathisen wrote: >> I would suggest that you hunt down some of the old discussions and >> read them before embarking on this. There are lots of constraints >> involved here, and I may not remember them all. >> >Thank you, as part of my research, I looked at all 300+ list messages >over the past 2 years (since I joined) with the word "border" in them. >Such as PR#13718, PR#14548, PR#14589, PR#14982, PR#15169, PR#17163, and >others that carried over.... I want to contribute some observations and suggestions to this discussion. But first I should make some disclaimers: 1) I have *not* read the tickets listed above (at least not recently). 2) I have *not* played Civ3 or Civ4. So if my ignorance in these areas is relevant, please understand. 1) IIRC, my first encounter with Freeciv's borders came when I couldn't work a tile inside one of my cities. Soon I found out that another civ had built a city nearby. That other city encompassed the same tile that I was trying to work. That part was OK. I thought that I could fix that problem by moving one of my units onto that tile (to enforce my claim to it). But that didn't work. I soon found out that the border drawing code had awarded that tile to the other civ's city. And there was nothing that I could do about it (short of conquering that other civ's city). Needless to say, I was not pleased. But I soon discovered that there was a simple way to avoid such unpleasantness - set citymindist=5. So I set citymindist=5 and, (trumpet fanfare), no more overlapping cities. So the borders code could no longer deprive my cities of the use of their tiles. 2) From the current discussion it sounds like borders are being used as part of a "cultural conquest" mechanism. I'm in favor of a "cultural conquest" mechanism. But maybe we don't need borders to implement that. So here's a proposal that I hope will be useful: Create unhappiness in cities that are close to "superior" civs. This unhappiness function could be called "envy". "Envy" would cause a city near a "superior" civ to suffer additional unhappiness based on its PF distance to a "superior" civ. Consequently, the owner of that city would have to spend more resources to keep that city from falling into disorder. That owner might soon find that it is cheaper to trade that city to another civ rather than spend the extra resources to keep its citizens happy. In some cases, it might even be cost effective to *give* that city to another civ or grant it indepedence. (I don't know of any existing "grant a city independence" mechanism. If none exists, then perhaps the code that creates civil war nations could be used for this?) Granted, this proposal requires new definitions (e.g. superior), functions (e.g. envy), and algorithms. But maybe it would be simpler (and clearer) than fixing (and continuing to maintain) the borders code. Since I'm unfamiliar with the borders code, I don't know what other purposes it serves. I'm just hoping that the ideas above might provoke simpler mechanisms to be considered (which might help make the borders code easier to fix and maintain). HTH. -Eddie _______________________________________________ Freeciv-dev mailing list Freeciv-dev@gna.org https://mail.gna.org/listinfo/freeciv-dev
