[Freeciv-Dev] More on (un)happiness

["Mike Jing" <miky40@xxxxxxxxxxx>]

Looking through government.ruleset, I found another variable related to 
happiness and empire size: empire_size_inc.
; empire_size_inc  = if non-zero, reduce one content citizen for
;                    every empire_size_inc cities once #cities
;                    exceeds (cityfactor + empire_size_mod)

I guess someone had already took this effect into consideration.  However, 
it defaults to zero, so it doesn't have any effect yet.  I think it should 
be enabled.  Together with a smaller unhappysize, it will help to slow down 
the initial expansion.  I think we can all agree that expansion is way 
overly important in Freeciv.  There are many benefit to this, as I have 
mentioned in earlier posts.
Unfortunately, the AI doesn't deal with this very well.  I did some tests 
with unhappysize=1 and cityfactor=10, with empire_size_inc=1.  The problem 
is that the AI is inherently expansionist in nature at normal or hard skill 
level.  It builds its cities too close together and still does not develop 
them well enough.  The biggest problem is that it stops research all 
together because it has to raise luxury rate to 80-100% just to keep the 
citizens happy, due to excesive expansion, of course.  As we know, the AI 
always lags behind in science later in the game to begine with.  This only 
makes the problem worse.  The easy AI doesn't fare that much better either, 
because it just builds too FEW cities instead.
I don't see this as too much of a problem though, because even the hard AI 
is easily beatable to an experience player anyway.  It is far more 
interesting to play against human players.  By adjusting these variables, it 
will not only make the game more interesting, but also more manageable 
because you will have few cities to take care of.   If it can really fix the 
"smallpox" problem, it will be worth it for that reason alone.
Mike


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