So just have patience, maybe? Or maybe even throw some bounties into encouraging more players to get involved? Or throw more bounties at Open Transactions developers? Or into whole new technologies to make all this stuff more accessible to folk who maybe are not into running around on two-dimensional maps with individual characters? Or to attract more players into the various clans? Or to encourage folks to make whole new clans, parties, associations and such?
-MarkM-
MarkM, now I get what you mean! The Galactic Milleu is something I would like to try sometime, is any freeciv server still around?
Regarding your proposal, I think you agree to invest effort and money on something that brings Devcoin back on the growing track. I think that has to happen along with revival of leadership.
The Freeciv scale of play moves slowly when it moves at all, because the speed of time moving forward is set by the MUD / Crossfire-RPG scale (the individual-character adventurer scale), which moves about twelve times as fast as time here on
the planet known as Earth.
Thus the one-gameyear turns in Freeciv scale should work out to about one such turn per Earth month.
Which is way the heck slower than the so called "Long Turn games" some Freeciv players are used to thinking of as having "long" turns.
The situation is complicated too though by the timelines concept in which we save all the turns of all the planets in case timetravel gets discovered in some timelines. We have the concept of a Temporal Nexus like in Dune, and the "current" Nexi being worked on are not all working on the same year at the same time.
There is also the fact that running the timeline of a planet forward while not all of the civilisations on that planet have an actual human live player playing them here on Earth does not make for worthy opponents, as the non-player-nation system (the artificial intelligence for controlling nations) is not really all that great in Freeciv, especially at the star-trek-like levels of technology used to enable interstellar travel.
So most of the planets in play are mostly sitting idle on the Freeciv scale waiting for more of the nations located on them to find themselves actual players, or, if there are actual players on the individual character scale who claim to be citizens of that nation, or even human players who happen here on Earth to hail from that nationality here on Earth, for one or more of those players to scale up to the Freeciv scale of play.
Right now there is no tool for moving starships from one planet (Freeciv server instance) to another while the Freeciv server is running, so in any case we have to shut down a planet in order to move ships to and from it as we move them by editing the save-file then re-loading the game. So in any case we could not currently move time forward for planets affected by starships without allowing time for that moving of starships phase each turn. So the fastest we'd move on planets affected by starships would be one turn per week.
Right now the most promising place to start play on that scale would be
the planet known as M4, because the "current" year (turn) there is so far back in history compared to other planets so by the years most other planets are up to a lot of development could be accomplished.
The catch with starting on M4 though is that it is, as the M designation indicates, a Martian planet. The other civilisations are mostly basically city-states and almost all are at war with the Martians, most of them implacably so. The
Battle for Wesnoth campaign
Martian Invasion 1594 shows how the Nova Scotians - represented on the Freeciv scale by the Scottish since there is no Nova Scotian nation in the standard releases of Freeciv and we have so far only been using Rulesets to adapt the game for our purposes no actual graphics etc mods such as would make for a full Modpack - fared.
Some further insights into the fate of the Nova Scotians can be seen in the
Mystery in 1596 campaign, and the character
Scotty is also seen again in the
Between the Worlds campaign.
One of the advtantages of the slow or even sporadic movement forward of time is this ability to take the time to create
Battle for Wesnoth docudramas documenting events, providing players with an interesting, interactive view into history so they can experience for themselves the drama of various Temporal Nexi and potentially, some day, when such campaigns can be played live with multiple players at once, even to change the timelines.
For civilisations that would not be content to start on a planet already basically taken over by another civlisation there are some startup planets, for example we are shown in the campaign
Mystery in 1596 a glimpse into the initial startup phase of a startup planet, maybe some players would choose to play one of the currently unplayed civilisations found on that planet...
So far the main hook into the overall economy for the Freciv planets is the hosting fee, which for many players is a huge "catch" that discourages them from that level of play.
Basically each civilisation is charged fees based on the number of "square miles" of territory Freeciv shows that civilisation as controlling. That fee is levied per Earth month, and amounts to typically less than five bucks for a single-city state but into the thousands for large civilisations controlling huge swathes of large planets (such as the Brits and the Canucks; the planet M4 which the Martians mostly control is only a size four planet so works out cheaper.
These fees are paid to
General Holding Corp, known here on Earth as General Hosting Corp, and are deliberately high compared to just the cost of running a Freeciv server because it is intended that three-dimensional views on individual-character scale eventually be created using, probably, Open Simulator, so folks can walk around on the planets if virtual reality.
General Holding Corp is not listed usually in the publicly traded Corps listings because it is not publicly traded; it is intended that its shares be owned by civilisations, so that civilisations can balance their fees against share ownership, ideally being able to own as large a percentage of the shares as the percentage of the total fees of all civilisations that their fee is, so that in effect they are paying those fees to themselves. But of course how much the civilisations that currently own the shares will be willing to part with some for, and how many they will turn out to be willing to sell to which newcomers, remains to be seen...
..Which is one of the places where the
Galactic Diplomacy Planet can be useful. By creating a science-fiction character (rather than a fantasy character) in the "
CrossCiv" server it is possible to meet up with individual characters from other civilisations, in order to dicker about such inter-civilisation matters...
NOTE THOUGH that this is a big reason why we do not tend to favour using dividend-paying Corps: if the existing holders received dividends instead of having to realise any gains by means of actually selling shares, why would they ever sell shares? They could sit back collecting money, having a monopoly. By not using dividends we create a situation in which as the shares appreciate in value more and more incentive is created to sell a share or few in order to "realise" those gains...
I should probably clarify here that a very big reason why these fees are a big turn-off for many potential players is the fact that one cannot even depend upon a game-turn happening on the Freeciv scale on any given Earth-month. The prospect of paying fees for potentially years without even having the timeline move forward a turn is a big barrier to many potential players.
The Brits, Canucks, and Martians have no problem with the fact that time has not moved forward on their planets in literally years of Earth-time, but then again they own the lion's share of General Holding Corp, so they are basically paying their own Corp.
To counter this problem it would maybe be best to not just start Freeciv-scale play oneself but, rather, to round up enough players that all the unplayed nations on one planet can have players, so that time can then proceed to move forward without any of the civilisations on the planet having the huge handicap of not having a player to guide what they do.
-MarkM-
