[Freecol-developers] Prices at native settlements

[Michael T. P. <mp...@co...>]

The prices available for goods at native settlements appear to have
collapsed.  AFAICT much of the problem is that the native players do
not start with much gold (set to 1500 in the ServerPlayer constructor,
which can be pretty much wiped out with say, one scout and one sale).

What I am wondering is whether there is any point counting native gold
at all anymore?  The value of plunder and gifts from their settlements
are set in the spec and applied blindly without checking the native
player has enough gold to pay the bill (actually, plunder is not even
charged to them, although that is probably just a bug I introduced in
the combat rework).  The only place the amount of native gold is
checked is when selling goods to them, where the AI code caps
the result of prices-to-pay returned by IndianSettlement.getPrice() 
at half the gold the player has.  I checked getPrice()
and it is yielding sensible valuations of proposed trades, so removing
the cap would fix the problem.

There is a cheat for providing native players with regular income, but
its rather artificial and losing that too would be a win IMHO.

What do people think?

Cheers,
Mike Pope