Freeciv

Andrew McGuinness wrote:

Changing it doesn't have any obvious effect I can see, but it's probably at least a small optimisation. The comparison has been this way for 13 years so I doubt it is doing much harm.

One cannot change activity_target of their own unit without also the activity going through ACTIVITY_IDLE, so this has no effect on own units, or any human controlled units really. For other player's units the only relevant thing within that conditional code block is setting repaint_unit. On standard rulesets, Pillage is the only activity where multiple activity_targets can be legal simultaneously so that one can change between them.

So: If an AI unit (likely barbarian) pillaging one extra on a tile starts pillaging some other extra on the same tile instead, and extra specific pillage icons are used, opponent's client may fail to redraw the unit with the updated icon.