Re: General design questions

[Jim Kingdon <kingdon at panix dot com>]

> And it would be game-specific. I don't know if that's frowned upon or
> not.  How generic is kernel code supposed to be?

Well, you could always add new commands to GDL:

  (government-type anarchy)
  (government-type despotism)
  (government-type monarchy)
  (government-type democracy)

  (advance-requires-government agriculture (despotism monarchy democracy))
  (unit-requires-government palace (monarchy democracy))
  (government-affects-combat ....) ;; or whatever

that sort of thing.

> There's also an issue that happiness is relative to a city. Actually,
> a lot of aspects of the game are city-based.

That's easy to do with a material - just don't set in-length or
out-length, or let any mobile units have any capacity for the
material.

> For example, you need enough money in your treasury to support all the
> improvements in your cities. If you don't have enough, one of the
> improvements in the cities that don't have enough money will
> disappear.

I think you can do that by making money a material, setting its
treasury property, and then using base-consumption and hp-per-starve
to deal with support and disappearance.  Though the details of how the
calculation happens might be slightly different - haven't thought too
hard about it (nor do I know civ2).

> There may be way too much to add to the kernel that would be unusable
> in other games.

Probably depends on how much time you have and how faithful you want
the emulation to be.  But there is a certain history of things being
added as special purpose and then getting used in other games even if
that wasn't really envisaged.  So I don't know if I'd get *too*
worried about this.