[Freeciv-Dev] Re: Beserk autosettlers, connectors that don't

[Greg Wooledge <wooledge@xxxxxxxxxxx>]

Tomasz Wegrzanowski (maniek@xxxxxxxx) wrote:

> Shield is very week, it's +1 prod, and void when inside city, while all:
> Pheasant (+2 food), Silk (+3 trade), Coal (+2 prod) and Wine (+4 trade)
> are quite strong.
> Won't players (ai?) convert grassland+shield to another terain ?
> (new tactics to win the game ?)

It's not a new tactic if you've been playing Freeciv long enough. :-)
Among veteran players I'd guess that it's a standard tactic.  Particularly
since even the lowly Settler can transform the grassland into a forest,
to get either silk (1/2/3, becoming 1/3/3 with railroad) or pheasant
(3/2/0, becoming 3/3/0 with railroad).  And that's without the Republic &
Democracy (or Monarchy & Communism celebration) trade bonus.

> They don't already, because they get used to mpciv[12], where this
> wasn't possible (and shield on grassland occured much more often IIRC).

In fact, as someone else pointed out on this mailing list last year,
the grassland shields in Civ2 are not random at all.  They follow a
very deterministic pattern:

   - - O O - - O O
   O O - - O O - -
   - - O O - - O O

where "-" is a normal grassland and "O" is a grassland with shield.
(Rotate this 45 degrees to match the isometric view of Civ2.)

This can be exploited in Civ2.  If you are about to transform a swamp or
jungle tile, you have a choice between forest and grassland.  By looking
at other grassland tiles in the vicinity you can know in advance whether
the tile will have a shield on it if you make it a grassland; so you
might choose to make it a forest instead of a shieldless grassland.
Then you can make that *other* swamp a grassland because you know it
will have a shield.  This gives you more production than if you simply
guess randomly.

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

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