Disable wonder gamesetup option

[elexis]

Motivation: The Wonder has a technology to increase the population limit by 50 population. Researching that gives a great advantage to the player who has researched it (as both military and economy has much greater capacity). So unless there is an agreement to outlaw the building, every player will build it and research the technology.

However our engine doesn't support too many units. Until the new pathfinder in alpha 19, it had been roughly 8 * 100 units. Since then it is 8 * 150 units.

Since years people outlaw wonders, so that they can play with 150 population limit without increasing the lag.

But often someone didn't understand or accept the agreement and having to communicate and re-emphasize it to begin with seems needless if there could just be a switch to disable it.

Implementation: Notice that this is quite similar to the Disable Spies checkbox in the gamesetup.

The implementation of this will be quite easy, see gamesetup.js (yes, I'm surprised to use these two words in the same sentence).

Only a new setting has to be added to g_Checkboxes that adds the wonder templates to DisabledTemplates or DisabledTechnologies in launchGame.

Alternative Implementation: (Another possibility to implement the feature without tying it to the wonder would be to disable any population bonus, i.e. if some boolean is set, not call ApplyValueModificationsToEntity in GetMaxPopulation or Player.js. But that would falsify the tooltips of technologies and should be advertized correctly ingame. So better add one line of hardcoded templates in gamesetup.js that can be changed easily by mods and future devs).

[elexis]

As long as we don't improve the performance by a factor of 5-10, this issue won't go away. Hosts can still control the population limit, but often they want to play without wonder.

Games can take 15 minutes longer until players reach the 150 population limit with a wonder upgrade when starting with 100 pop. So players are often forced to play with this "no wonder rule".

There is the problem that wonder victory makes no sense if the wonder template is disabled. So that victory condition should be disabled then. (It doesn't strictly need atlas changes since it doesn't influence map generation. Technically scenario map editors may want to set all settings of a match in atlas however, but meh.)

[FeXoR]

I'm not directly opposed to a setting but IMO it's not really needed. (And I'm not so into how the settings in multiplayer are handled in the first place since a person entering a game can't be sure about what settings the game later will start with)

An absolute bonus (50) interfering with a build in limit chosen in the gamesetup (2 to 6 times 50 or so) is not the way to go in the first place IMO. Instead I'd propose the wonder's technology to increase the maximum population by a fraction of the limit chosen in gamesetup e.g. 20% (notable but not over the top) - independent of our pathfinder being able to support any number of units on an average system.

And while I agree we should try to balance the game - PPL commanding other players e.g. "No wonders!" is neither something we should support nor put to much thought into (If they manage to agree on additional rules and have fun, good. If they don't it's hardly our fault).

I mentioned several times now that absolute bonuses and caps should be at least used very careful and - if possible - use relative bonuses like in armor and damage etc..

[Imarok]

Move tickets to Game Setup as UI & Simulation got some sub components.