Citylow/less games?

[morphles]

I was wondering if there could be kinda kampaign style game with no cities only solders battling (possibly workers for support). And there would be no builfing just fighting. There are some interesting possible variations:
Allow leaders to capture enemy solders (I though to allow anyone to capture anyone, hoping that you would first need to win a battle, but it does not work like that, you simply capture unit and thats it), of course leaders death means you loose game.
Have huts and setup it in a way that you could only get units from them, thus you could enlarge your forces by finding huts
Also have workers for base creation, I think this is a must.
Have huts, make huts always transform into cities, no setler units in game, you can only find city from hut or conquer it.

I think by editing ruleset it is quite possible to make starting units represend whatever you want, i.e. start with planes paratroopers, spies and stuff, though there are some limitations, but the point is that it is not necesarrily stone age battles only, though even that could be interesting.

Some other observations:if game is totaly cityless map should be quite small, and most likely should have leaders for easier quicker end. If game has cities from huts map can be quite large and hut density should be adjusted to our preferences.

One last important thing - huts are a bit limited, it seems you can not change much from the ruleset, so always get units or always get cities might require source modification, though considering that we had game with 3 leaders and it also required source modification it shouldn't be too problematic as changes shouldn't be difficult, also changes would be server only as with leaders.
EDIT: my mistake, hut behavior is controlable in rulesets lua script file, so there is no need for code modifications!

I would also guess that such games would be much shorter (if completely cityless) and might be nice/interesting to have in between long games.

[Davide]

Thought this might easily look like a crazy idea and would require an engaged person to spend time on trial and error to set up a concrete match of this experimental kind, I'm for it.

We may call this hypothetical game "ML00", or Morphles' 00

For the starting units, there's a server option called startunits which doesn't require intervention within the ruleset files. If you'd like to write any patches for the C server, I'll be glad to insert them into Greatturn.
But also consider that I'll need co-admins to manage it all, as I won't be on the front line.

[morphles]

Davide, you should be at THE front line sometimes and play a game with us

As for patches in C it seems there is no need for any of that. as mentioned in edit, which I think is very nice.

I might be up for something like that about month or two in a future. Also as I said it shouldn't take that loong. Well if hell does not break lose in the world (or my country considering its proximity to some places:)) with all the Crimean stuff. Lets hope front line stay in our games only:)

[morphles]

Actually I lied:) One small modification is still needed: allow starting game without city founder units, there might a check when loading ruleset that city founding unit must be present in ruleset, so that might need editing out too. Shouldn't be much of a problem, though I'll look into ways of achieving similar effects without patch modifications (i.e. maybe one could create ruleset with no terrain that would allow building cities or some such hack:) )