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#2824 Congress is filled too quickly
I'm on very hard, but I have all 25 founders at about 1660 already. And I had only 1 elder statesman per colony most of the time.
I recall that the founders came much slower not long ago.
Because of this I had to take Tomas Paine (increase liberty bell production by current tax rate) when my tax rate was at 0% >>:((.
You may well have found a bug, but from the developer's side you have not given us much information to work from. There have been problems with bell production but without a saved game or useful log file, we have no way to tell what has happened.
Hm, I was expecting there would have been some change to bell production or similar that was too aggressive (and the corresponding commit is known). Since in the past, the founders came painfully slow, sort of.
save is here, basically: http://sourceforge.net/p/freecol/bugs/2823/
Somewhen in 1.10.x probably I had about the same number of colonies, all with newspaper and 3 statesmen and much fewer founders. Possible differences might be that I got the +50% bell production founder later and that I didn't have 2 turns per year right from the start.
Last edit: anonymissimus 2015-03-15
I would expect that to be important. Jefferson is very helpful. Another factor might be the recently squashed bug that prevents duplicate modifiers, which may have effectively doubled the goods party bonus in games using 0.11.2.
If you have two turns per year from the start, 1660 is effectively 1714 for a normal game. I just checked another test game, and the fathers there were exhausted in 1694 (normal years, Jefferson was the first father recruited). So your game is not unusual.
Looking back through the change log, there was a change a while back where fathers began being recruited using gross bell production, rather than net. This might account for your recollection. If so, then you are correct that the speed has increased, and incorrect that this is a bug because the change was made after evidence was produced that this was what Col1 did. Unless you have strong counter evidence regarding Col1 behaviour, I think we are done here.
I rejected every single tax increase attempt (so tax rate stayed zero). Several goods parties at the same time (3 or 5) isn't uncommon.
Meaning what ?
But the problem remains that founders come too quickly then. Increase the "founding father factor" maybe ?
NB Have to try manual difficulty with setting it to 100.
Last edit: anonymissimus 2015-03-18
Within FreeCol, a colonist can produce "x" number of liberty bells while working at the town hall. "x" may be multiplied when several factors (Founding Fathers, Printing Press, etc.) and if you add to that another colonists, you'll end up with "y" gross bells the colony produces.
Then FreeCol reduces the number of bells based colony's populations. The reduction is based on the difficulty settings.
For instance, three Free Colonists produce 9 bells each, for a total of 27 bells. That would be the gross bell production. The colony has a population of 10 colonists and because of this, there is reduction of 15 bells (this is an example figure only, the real formula will have to come from a developer familiar with the code). That leaves a net production of 12 bells.
Currently in FreeCol, the 27 bells in the example would be counted toward electing a Founding Father, but before the code changed referenced by Mike Pope, FreeCol used the net production (12 bells in this example).
FreeCol and Col1 Liberty Bell production is different. For instance, in FreeCol you can produce a negative net number of bells for a colony, whereas Col1 does not allow this. You can simply produce only the automatic number of bells for an empty town hall. The minimum might be 1 in that case, based on my memory.
I thought we fixed this a while back (clamped actual net production to zero if negative). The production displays may still be showing negative bells, but the FF recruitment never goes backwards AFAICT.
I was referring to net liberty bells within a colony.
For instance, -2 liberty bells could lead to a decreasing % of independent-minded colonists.
I don't know if that same -2 would have an effect on the recruitment bell numbers.
I checked the code. Currently liberty is clamped at zero for both colony totals and player FF recruitment total, i.e. it can not go negative, but it can go backwards towards zero. If I understand you correctly, you are saying that colony liberty production is also clamped at zero. Do we have a good way of telling if bell production was clamped in Col1? We have your observation in PF#72 that %-rebels never decreases, but that is not quite the same thing as it was due to moving units in and out. Perhaps I should look at Michael's Col1-savegame-reader code and see if we can get an objective measurement.
Thereby achieving the maximal possible bonus from the bug that duplicates goods party modifiers. Well done:-).
We have no evidence that this is a problem. All you have stated is that they seem to come quicker than before, and we have found some reasons why you might have that idea.
For this to be a bug, we need evidence that fathers were recruited slower in Col1 versus FreeCol-with-known-bugs-fixed. For us to then fix the problem, the evidence would need to be quantitative.
So, the development philosophy is that an obvious (balancing) problem should stay just because it was present in COl1 too ? How logical is that ?
FreeCol isn't an exact clone anyway as far as I understand the docu (rulesets).
(I never played any of the original civ type games, only remakes.)
I just realized that it's not the tax rate from the point the founder joins the congress...instead, it's the current tax rate from any point later on, the rate "updates". This could be made clearer in the founder's description. I thought I should wait to get him until the rate is as high as possible.
I think (based on my own reading) that there is a consented attempt made to replicate Col1 as exactly as possible, especially within the Col1 ruleset, and to do things differently within the FreeCol ruleset. That said, I agree that not everything has to be the same. I do think that FreeCol should replicate Col1 now and changes to rulesets can always be made later once the game is at or past version 1 (which is still the goal).
If that's true (that with Paine, bell production is mulitplied by current tax rate, not the tax rate as it existed on Paine's election), then I've been playing the game wrong. Especially with FreeCol's relatively high-frequency taxing system.
Completely. Quoting from http://www.freecol.org/about.html:
About FreeCol: The FreeCol team aims to create an Open Source version of Colonization (released under the GPL). At first we'll try to make an exact clone of Colonization.
No, but it is getting closer. You appear to want us to change direction. Please understand my caution.
Your problem occurs when:
1. Using 116 extra turns to reach the same game year as normal games
2. With a version of FreeCol that might have doubled the bonuses from goods parties
3. All possible goods parties occur
These are not standard conditions from which I would try to make a rational judgement about general game balance. You are free to play FreeCol with whatever options you like --- indeed that is encouraged --- but if it then behaves in a way you do not expect, its not a big surprise, or a bug.
All that said, you may indeed have found a bug. I hope to do some serious play testing soon, and will keep a close eye on FFs when doing so. Do any Col1 players recall exhausting the FF list? If so, about what year? The test game referred to above which finished the list in 1694 was exploiting the FreeCol extension that allowed FF recruitment to continue post-independence (1685), so I am speculating that Col1 games tended not to collect all FFs. Anyone have some numbers?
Last edit: Mike Pope 2015-03-19
// FreeCol isn't an exact clone anyway as far as I understand.
That is the main point. There are differences. To limit them I would chose the Col1 ruleset for few next games. Only playing with this ruleset, I may list defferences as incompatibilities.
What exactly do we need to confirm/clarify from the original Col1?
Bell production? The FFs exhaustion/break at the amount of 20 before year 1600 threshold?
See the second item on FFs on the WWC1D wiki.
Its been many years without further evidence that there was a bug here. Closing.