I'm curious what ruleset or what settings I need to configure to test this setting as I'm interested in testing such a setting and have never encountered it. I've never seen chance to escape in practice and generally set up frequent or raging horde barbarian invasion games
This is a bit of a corner-case. At least you need to have a unit type that is both a barbarian leader and able to escape in your units.ruleset. Rest can be set up in editor; you would need a stack of these barbarian leader units, with no other units in that stack. Ransom is paid only when there's no other units defending the leaders, and you need multiple of them for one to escape when one is killed/captured.
And further; the barbarian player must have enough gold to pay the ransom of all the units (both the actually captured one and the escaped one)
Reply To cazfi
This is a bit of a corner-case. At least you need to have a unit type that is both a barbarian leader and able to escape in your units.ruleset. Rest can be set up in editor; you would need a stack of these barbarian leader units, with no other units in that stack. Ransom is paid only when there's no other units defending the leaders, and you need multiple of them for one to escape when one is killed/captured.
This could be a dumb question, is there a specific ruleset that already has this built in (in either the stable 2.6 or unstable 3.0) that is generally available or do I need to custom create such a ruleset (I assume the latter, but I've never seen this as a configurable setting as I recall) and have no idea how to custom create a rule from scratch, though I can read the documentation to make such a game to test the setting if it isn't a possible setting.
I've ran games in 2.6.5 (or whatever the latest stable release is), I have had multiple barbarian leaders on the same tile in games (and disabled the stack deaths if defender dies, meaning each unit has to be killed individually), but so far, other than when its only a single barbarian leader left has the ransom been paid out (provided the barbarian/pirate government actually had gold which they always had in the game).
Under settings where there are stack deaths with the defender and the only units are barbarian leaders usually 2 (as I recall), no gold is paid (but I had chalked that up to because there were 2 unit thus not qualifying the attacker to be eligible to get the ransom.
freeciv-3.0 is not unstable (3.0.0 was released in February, and 3.0.1 is the latest stable release), 2.6 is end-of-life already (last release from 2.6 was 2.6.6)
I don't know any ruleset that would have anything like this. The issue doesn't apply to 2.6. Both the behavior of paying ransom for multiple leaders (instead of considering them to defend each other) and the stack death escape feature were introduced in 3.0. http://www.freeciv.org/wiki/NEWS-3.0.0
Noted. I'll download 3.0.1 tonight and run a few test games over the next few days with barbarian hordes and see if I can provide some saved game data to help the developer(s) working on this make an informed decision.
After running a few test games, it does seem iikely that cazfi's concerns may be valid. While I have no way of knowing if a leader escaped, I did get paid 100 gold x number of barbarian leaders "killed" on a single tile (ie: a tile with 3 barbarian leaders paid 300 gold when defeated, a tile with 2 gave 200 gold) when only attacking with one unit (all units die with defender setting) which in older versions wasn't paid out (only if there was a single leader by itself would the ransom be paid).
Reply To (Anonymous)
While I have no way of knowing if a leader escaped
If it escaped, it's in the neighboring tile.
Paying ransom for multiple *caught* leaders is intentional change in freeciv-3.0. See https://www.freeciv.org/wiki/NEWS-3.0.0
Reply To cazfi
Reply To (Anonymous)
While I have no way of knowing if a leader escaped
If it escaped, it's in the neighboring tile.
I now realize that we now have two different concepts called "escape" (at least from the user's point of view). This ticket is about the new freeciv-3.0 feature of fast units in the stack escaping to the neighboring tile when the defender of the stack dies. The old "barbarian leader escaped" is actually implemented as unit retirerement internally, and they just vanish.
Reply To cazfi
Reply To (Anonymous)
While I have no way of knowing if a leader escaped
If it escaped, it's in the neighboring tile. Paying ransom for multiple *caught* leaders is intentional change in freeciv-3.0. See https://www.freeciv.org/wiki/NEWS-3.0.0
Perfect.
In the test games I ran, there were no cases of being paid a ransom and the leader managed to escape into a neighboring tile, though my sample size is about 10 encounters of multiple barbarian leaders on the same tile and a possible tile to escape to and 30 encounters of a single isolated barbarian leader
This is based on reading the source code, not yet tested in practice:
kill_unit() pays ransom of barbarian leaders as soon as it knows that the target tile has no other units defending them. If there's more than one of them ("defending" units) some of them may escape in the later handling, if the ruleset gives also CanEscape flag to them. Probably should not pay the ransom of those barbarian leaders that actually escape.