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

[Marko Lindqvist <caz@xxxxxxxxx>]

On Tue, 5 Dec 2000, Mike Jing wrote:

> It turns out the minimum distance between cities can already be adjusted in
> game.ruleset.  I tried a value of 4 (the current default is 2, meaning 1
> tile between cities) together with the "maximun unhappiness" settings
> (unhappysize=1, cityfactor=10, empire_size_inc=1), and some of the AI's
> actually built some big cities -- up to size 20.  I don't know how often
> this happens under normal settings, but I suspect it will be rare because
> the AI tends to build cities a bit closer.  So this could still be a quick
> and easy way to cure smallpox.
>

 Have you tried it with small islands? When min_dist_bw_cities have value
greater than 3, you might are forced to leave some squares totally unused
near coastline (place for next city center is at sea). How big problem
this is?

 I usually play very slow games (researchspeed and foodbox set high).
Techs are really valuable (It usually takes more than 10 turns to research
each and at the time winner is obvious each tech costs about 6000 gold to
research). So you really don't want to give them easily away. More cities
you have, more places opponents have to steal technologies from. Also, you
can not afford opponents to conquer any cities from your empire and get
techs this way. So you need to have strong defense in your every city.

 I'm  not suggesting that we change default researchspeed and foodbox. I
just hope that this gives some new ideas to you. One way to fight smallpox
syndrome is to make losing a city to hurt deeply no matter how many other
cities one has.

 I don't like ideas about making unhappiness to grow really dramatically
when number of cities grow. Even when someone has lots of big cities, it
should be possible to get even stronger by founding new cities.



 Caz

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