Time delay for tributes

[mimo]

The present implementation of tributes is not satisfactory as it has an immediate effect, which is neither realistic nor desired. Having some delay between the action of sending a tribute and its use by the ally would force planning in advance of tributes and not wait for the last minute (i.e. when your ally is attacked).

I've seen that someone proposed to have caravans for tributes : that could be ok, but would require a lot of code addition.

An other, easier option, would be to add a delay between the sending of the tribute and its use by the ally. I could think for example of a delay of 40s for the first 100 resources + 10s for each additionnal 100 resources. The first delay can be seen as the travel time while the second is the time to prepare the resources for the tribute. And no new tribute (to the same ally) could be sent as long as the current one is not finished, so being warned when your tribute has arrived would be useful.

[quantumstate]

It is an interesting idea. A similar thing would be to add a tax for tribute to discourage too much tributing. I'm still unsure about either idea though.

[alpha123]

I think the caravan tribute option would make for really good gameplay. We should decide what to do based on gameplay, not how hard it is to program. Besides, I don't think caravans would be too hard.

[mimo]

Concerning the gameplay improvements, I think the most important one would be to add the delay, so that the effect of the tribute is not immediate. Then what does the caravan adds up ?

- visually it would look nice.

- could be destroyed by the ennemy before reaching its destination.

But how would it be done ? from our's civic center to the allied one ? and what if you have several cc ? should we choose the nearest pair ? then in practise people will build a cc just at the border of their ally territory and all the benefit of the caravan in term of gameplay will be lost.

So while I agree the caravan idea could be nice, it needs more tinking.

On the other side, adding only a delay should be quite fast : the main change is on the diplomacy gui. Now, each time you click on a resource, 100 of it is sent as tribute. The needed change would be that such clicking allow you to gather your tribute, and having a "send" button to send it when ready. And this "send" would trigger a timer for the delay. Sometime in the future, when the caravan proposal has matured, we would just have to replace this timer by a caravan.

But at least, the main fonctionnality (adding a delay to avoid abuse of tribute) could be in the game quite easily.

[alpha123]

For details, see http://www.wildfiregames.com/forum/index.php?showtopic=16743

That should answer most of your questions.

The main benefit is that it could be captured (not necessarily destroyed, but captured like livestock and females) before it reached the intended destination.

[Nolanjoker]

you must implement player request resources to the allies Ai.