Freeciv

From #freeciv 30 August:

17:09 < wieder_fi> I'm leaving the city vision to a smaller value. In the previous games cities can only see 2 tiles away (value 5 for vision radius) but they can work 3 tiles away. This is done to encourage new players to keep the cities occupied
17:14 < jtn> I guess that some tiles for some cities will be fogged sometimes, and thus not workable?
17:15 < jtn> I also guess that when such tiles are unfogged, auto-arrange-workers will either not jump on them, or will rearrange everything; either will be annoying. (I haven't checked though, maybe we do something clevererer)
17:16 < wieder_fi> yeah, true. They actually remain workable if you don't change the tiles you want to use but you can't switch back to those tiles that are fogged
17:16 < jtn> Ew
17:16 < jtn> I suspect we didn't think about this...
17:17 < wieder_fi> we only have AI players if there is a civil war. with auto workers there has not been issues with fogged tiles in the past. at least I haven't noticed anything
17:18 < jtn> I wonder what happens if an enemy military unit moves into one of these fogged tiles. Normally it would prevent it being worked, but if the city owner can't see the unit...
17:19 < jtn> (by "auto workers" I mean citizens in a city, not Workers units)
17:22 < wieder_fi> right.. yeah... No idea what happens then. maybe the tile remains workable indeed
17:23 < jtn> Or maybe the city gets booted out for no reason the player can see.
17:23 < jtn> We should probably review this.
17:23 < jtn> The obvious quick fix is to disallow working fogged tiles at all. How much would that annoy you?
17:25 < wieder_fi> I would prefer allowing working on the fogged tiles because this can easily happen when units are out of the city and killed for some reason
17:28 < jtn> The reason I'm for preventing it is because working the tiles leaks information about what's on them. They could be transformed or pillaged or whatever and change their output values. [...]
17:29 < jtn> You could argue that that leak is acceptable, but the client's map info will still be out of date, so it might make discrepancies in what client reports tile output as vs the total city production, etc.
17:29 < jtn> (I haven't checked exactly what'll happen)
17:29 < jtn> So city dialog sums could end up not adding up, etc.
17:33 < wieder_fi> yeah, that's a good point
17:33 < wieder_fi> leaking information might actually be a good thing but errors on the calculations not that much
17:34 < jtn> I think the only sane way to make it consistent would be to keep the player updated with fogged-but-up-to-date tile info for worked tiles. [...]
17:35 < jtn> And in that case, there's little point having the reduced City_Vision_Radius_Sq, because the player can temporarily work the outer reaches every turn for updated tile info (and probably deduce the presence of enemy units too).
17:36 < wieder_fi> I suppose that would work well. You still can't see the enemy units on the map but can "see" the terrain through citizens working on those tiles
17:37 < jtn> But it incentivises micro -- you get more info if you open every city every turn and fart around with its workers.
17:37 < wieder_fi> with the limited vision radius, it's not possible to switch to tiles that are fogged and that has been working quite well in the paast
17:38 < jtn> Even worse; you have a magic extra information source as long as you don't touch it, and the game likes to randomly rearrange your citizens whenever a foreign boat wanders past. Annoying!
17:39 < jtn> We do have this pre-existing problem with auto-arrange-workers. I think we ought to do something like this to mitigate it:
17:40 < jtn> Be able to right-click on tiles in the city map and say "work this if possible. Whenever workers are rearranged, try to get those tiles worked. [...]
17:40 < jtn> This would means that after any temporary fogging due to unit loss, when the tiles are unfogged, they are worked once more.
17:41 < jtn> If we did that (no eearlier than 3.0 now, I think), and banned working fogged tiles, would that do?
17:41 < wieder_fi> well yeah... if it makes sense to prevent working on the fogged tiles, then it's probably best to do tha
17:42 < jtn> (That is, I'm also trying to solve the problem where you want a city to work a gold mine but its governor insists on prioritising fripperies like feeding its people.)
17:42 < wieder_fi> it's kind of nice feature to have but nothing too significant anyway :)

[raised the idea of pinning citizens as feature #697689]

For S3_0, at least, I would consider it a bug that fogged tiles can be worked under special case (when you continue to do so, instead of beginning it), and just fix that accordingly.
With S3_1 being in semi-freeze already, same probably applies to it.
For master we could work some configurable rules? (will open a new ticket about that, then)

Current situation in master is that the worker silently continuing working is not even visible on the citymap, and there's no other way to take them out than clicking the center tile to do the full rearrangement of the workers.