Re: Bug in "time" game

[Hans Ronne <hronne at pp dot sbbs dot se>]

>AI controlled sides were not developing the technology to upgrade
>their cities in the time.g game. Needless to say, this makes them
>rather easy pushovers. It appears that the problem is that
>the one city which was assigned to developing the technology
>has a "passive" plan, which is explicitly disallowed.
>
>A quick work-around seems to be the following patch. I'm new to
>xconq, so I can't be sure that this has no side effects, but it
>certainly allows me to play a more interesting game against the
>computer :-).
>
>(The patch is based on a Dec. 24 checkout of the CVS sources.
>Later checkouts give me errors about bad mtypes when I try
>to play...)
>

Thanks for tracking this problem down, and welcome to xconq! I also noted
that the time game didn't work any longer, but didn't realize why. The
mandatory replanning for passive units under AI control is there to solve a
problem where such units got trapped in reserve mode, which effectively
took them out of the game. This was mostly a problem for mobile
(non-building) units, so your patch might work. I will test it and include
it with my next CVS commit if it doesn't cause cities to go into reserve
mode.

A long-term solution could be to give these cities a plan of type
PLAN_IMPROVING, which is used by advanced units (cities) in the Civ type
games that build improvements. You could argue that these time game cities
are doing something similar. There is a special game class for the time
game in the mplayer, so handling them as a special case should be easy.

As for the mtype errors, I think they come from the new code used by
civ2.g, which causes problems for the other games. You can still play
civ2.g itself without problems. I'm sure Stan will fix this when he is back
from his vacation.

Hans

Hans Ronne

hronne@pp.sbbs.se