Freeciv

That said, I feel all the possible gold_upkeep_styles are somewhat wanting. "City" and "Mixed" rely on city processing order, in that
buildings/units only get sold if a city running a deficit gets processed before enough profitable cities have been. This may make a player
rely on the total balance over all cities being the number that matters, likely causing surprise and confusion when the city processing
order is not in their favor. On the other hand, with upkeep style "Nation", the final balance is what matters, but there if the nation runs
a deficit, the buildings/units sold may come from any cities, even the most profitable ones.

I thought about an upkeep style that would combine "City" and "Nation" so that a) upkeep costs would be included in the calculated
surplus for the cities, meaning that cities running a deficit would be visible in the Cities list, and that the total balance of the nation would
match the sum of the city balances (building Coinage being still an exception), BUT b) negative nation treasury would only be checked
after processing all cities, and not with individual cities. Then, c) if the nation was in debt after all cities, buildings would be sold from
the cities running the worst deficit.

In my mind, this would combine the best parts of all options. Only the final total would matter, which makes sense since the nation
only has one treasury, not individual ones for each city; but the player could still predict which city would suffer the consequences of the
deficit, instead of having it happen randomly. (And it would prevent possibly selling city walls from the one city under attack, even after
carefully balancing the budget there to avoid it...)

If there's no strong opposition to this, I'll take a look at implementing it.

Ilkka Virta wrote:

If there's no strong opposition to this, I'll take a look at implementing it.

-> Open a new ticket. Target to master only.

About the patch here:
- Why do you turn switch - case constructs to if ... else if constructs? This loses compile time checking that all the enum values are handled.
- When you have a comment "This should not be possible" you probably should be adding fc_assert()
- Coding Style nit: In the very last 'if' there should be no space after '!'

Will you make an updated revision of the patch?

Ilkka Virta wrote:

It's added here: https://github.com/freeciv/freeciv/commit/92f41c487bae5ed28798bc109c9ec4f7f54c801b
If the original bug report is still online, I can't find it.

I think it's this archive page: https://web.archive.org/web/20170307091019/http://gna.org/bugs/?24132

Ilkka Virta wrote:

punit->server.upkeep_payed (sic.) ... I can't see it being reset anywhere so it appears to just shadow punit->upkeep.

Maybe it's punit->upkeep that gets recalculated when server.upkeep_payed is not, after the upkeep has already been paid. I remember there being a related issue in stable branches (unit getting "free upkeep" when it actually has already paid for upkeep). I'll try to find the ticket later...

Yeah, it makes sense if support gets recalculated and the unit getting a free pass changes, so it could then "forget" about an upkeep already paid. I thought initially about undoing a payment that hadn't been done, but I don't think that can happen, upkeep_payed is only looked at for the units that just got paid. (It does come to mind that it might be simpler if the free upkeep wasn't marked on individual units at all but just reduced from the city's upkeep total, but that's hindsight..)

Could probably change to update upkeep_payed only from inside (player|city)_balance_treasury_units*(), since the unitlist set up there is the only place that uses it.

Ilkka Virta wrote:

if the free upkeep wasn't marked on individual units at all but just reduced from the city's upkeep total

That's ancient code, but my guess would be that it was needed that way for the clients to display unit upkeep icons at least somewhat sensibly. Of course the icons are not accurate in that even if the unit has no upkeep icon shown when you disband it, total upkeep will reduce (and some other unit will lose upkeep icon)

Otherwise; any updates about this patch?

Marko Lindqvist wrote:

Ilkka Virta wrote:

if the free upkeep wasn't marked on individual units at all but just reduced from the city's upkeep total

That's ancient code, but my guess would be that it was needed that way for the clients to display unit upkeep icons at least somewhat sensibly. Of course the icons are not accurate in that even if the unit has no upkeep icon shown when you disband it, total upkeep will reduce (and some other unit will lose upkeep icon)

Exactly.

The way it's shown makes it slightly hard to see on a glance if some unit doesn't cost upkeep because its type doesn't have upkeep to begin with, or if it doesn't cost upkeep because it happened to be one that got a free pass.

Otherwise; any updates about this patch?

Forgotten under all other things. I'll see if I can dig it up on the weekend.

Anonymous wrote:

update_city_activity() [2] ignores the calculated surplus value, and instead
deducts both unit and improvement upkeep city during city processing whatever the gold_upkeep_style
is.

This part causes also trouble other than gold_upkeep_style breakage, so is the most critical part to fix.