[Freeciv-Dev] Re: More on (un)happiness

["Mike Jing" <miky40@xxxxxxxxxxx>]

Hi again,

More comments below.

> Personally, I don't think that unhappiness is the key to encouraging
> players to have a smaller number of larger cities.
I beg to differ.  Please do give it a try and see what you end up with.  Use 
unhappysize=1 (very important because 2 won't slow down the expansion nearly 
as much) and cityfactor=10 (which gaives you around 10 cities to work with). 
 You also have to edit the government.ruleset to set empire_size_inc to 1 
for all forms of goverenment.  Let me know if the smallpox strategy still 
works (even against the not so smart AI).  Then build ssome big cities and 
see the difference.
> I think you have to give *incentive* to having larger cities.
>
> The problem at the moment is that the number of tiles used is biased
> towards having lots of small cities - 1 city of size 2 uses 3 tiles
> whereas 2 cities of size 1 use a total of 4 - so you're always going
> to want to split a size two city into two cities of size one even if
> you have to put some munits in them to keep them happy.
That's very true.  And that's why the empire_size_inc variable is so 
important.  Set to 1, it will severerly punish you once you go above 
cityfactor number of cities, so that if you don't develop your cities fully, 
you will be left in the dust.
> I think The
> way to get around the smallpox syndrome is to allow larger cities to
> use more tiles or get other benefits.  For example, a city of size 5
> gets an extra trade point per tile.  Another example, a city of size
> at least 5 gets to use 2 extra tiles free.
As always, I am against overly complex rules.  This seems too arbitrary and 
doesn't fit in the game very well, not to mention troublesome to implement.  
Besides, it's not clear if it'll be enough incentive if at all.
> Also the way that the food box increases in size discourages city
> growth - it's easier to fill a foodbox of a size-1 city than a
> size-7 city!
But that's what Republic/Democracy and luxury is for!  It allows you to grow 
your cities without waiting for the foodbox to be filled.  You just have to 
build marketplaces/banks/stockexchange to make your people happy.  You also 
have to build irrigation/road or harbors to make sure there is enough food 
and trade available.  All this favors bigger cities.
> Lots of issues, which are not solved at all by having lots of
> unhappiness.
Again, I strongly disagree.  Please try it and see for yourself.

Mike

_____________________________________________________________________________________
Get more from the Web.  FREE MSN Explorer download : http://explorer.msn.com