[Freeciv-Dev] Re: suggestion/idea

[Greg Wooledge <wooledge@xxxxxxxxxxx>]

Jules Bean (jmlb2@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx) wrote:

> On Tue, 1 Feb 2000, Greg Wooledge wrote:
> 
> > (And the population decrease is *important* in CTP because you have
> > to disband most of the cities you capture so you don't go over the
> > magic limit.  Damn I hate that....)
> 
> Hmm. What's that about?

Warning: you've hit one of my Call To Power pet peeves.

In CTP, there are 12 forms of government, if you count Anarchy.
Switching government involves a revolution and Anarchy, as in Civ1/2.

Each of these forms of government has, among other factors, a city limit,
and an excess city coefficient.  For each city you control beyond the
city limit, you get a happiness penalty of (excess city coefficient)
in each city.

E.g., consider the CTP Republic:

  GOVERNMENT_CITY_STATE   {
  [...]
  TOO_MANY_CITIES_THRESHOLD       30
  TOO_MANY_CITIES_COEFFICIENT     1
  [...]
  }

If you have 40 cities under the Republic, then you will have a happiness
penalty of 10 in every single city.  That's equivalent to 10 unhappy
faces in Civ1/2.  In every single city.  And that's before overcrowding
unhappiness, capitol [sic] distance unhappiness, war discontent, pollution
unhappiness, and all the other unhappiness-causing factors I've omitted.

The most "advanced" government (Virtual Democracy) has a city limit of 120
(and coefficient of 1).  If you're playing on a "huge" or (god forbid)
"gigantic" map, it's extremely hard to win by global conquest because
your cities will be in continuous danger of revolting.  (Yes, if a city's
unhappiness drops far enough in CTP, it will secede from your empire.
And you get no warning at all -- there's no one-turn grace period as in
Civ2's rioting-plunges-Democracy-into-revolution effect.)

(The only government with a non-1 excess city coefficient is Theocracy
which has a coefficient of 0.5.  But a limit of 40.  So if you had over
200 cities the Theocracy would give you the least unhappiness -- but
realistically you *can't* have 200 cities -- the 80 points of unhappiness
would destroy you.)

But on the positive side, you can disband a city into a Settler
instantaneously at no cost (except of course that you lose the city).
But to do that, the city has to be population size 3 or less.

So the typical tactic is to bombard the hell out of enemy cities until
the population size drops to 4 or less, and then walk in.  Capturing a
city in CTP reduces population size by 1 or 2 (randomly) even if there
is no defender.  Now that the city is size 3 or less, you can disband it.
The resulting Settler (assuming you didn't have 9 units in the city) can
be marched back to one of your cities to be disbanded for the production
bonus, or disbanded on the spot, or just ignored.

(For those of you who didn't know: Settlers in CTP don't build tile
improvements.  They only build cities.  Tile improvements are done
directly on the map through production points which have been diverted
into a "public works" pool.  E.g., building a farm costs 200 PW points;
an advanced farm costs 500 PW; and a hydroponic farm costs something
like 1400 PW (I forget the exact amount).  A Settler costs about 540
production points, or about the same as an advanced farm.  By the time
you're conquering the world, the 270 or so production points you'd get
for disbanding the Settler in a city are barely worth the effort.)

-- 
Greg Wooledge                    | "Truth belongs to everybody."
wooledge@xxxxxxxxxxx             |   Red Hot Chili Peppers
http://www.kellnet.com/wooledge/ |

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