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

["Mike Jing" <miky40@xxxxxxxxxxx>]

On Wed, 6 Dec 2000, Marko Lindqvist wrote:

> 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?
Indeed, you do have to leave some squares unused, even if you are not on a 
small island.  I don't think this is a big deal; you just have to choose 
your city sites much more carefully.  Of course I know many would disagree.  
It just shows how prevalent the current expansionist mindset 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.
Of cource, a bigger foodbox will slow down the expansion significantly.

> 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.
The point of ICS or smallpox strategy is that it gives you so many cities 
that losing one, or even a dozen won't affect you much at all.  At the same 
time, because you are using so many more tiles than your perfectionist 
opponents, with no upkeep for improvements, your science research will be 
lightyears ahead of everyone else, and you can amass a huge army because all 
you build is settlers and military units.  I think it's ugly and pretty much 
ruins the game for everyone, so I am working on a patch that will make a 
city use only as many tiles as its size, i.e. no free city center anymore.  
Still have to wait and see how well it actually works.
> 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.
I am not at all surprised to see a lot of people opposed to this.  But if 
you think about it for a minute, you will see that it's the perfect way to 
balance a multiplayer game, because it puts a limit on expansion so that 
everyone will end up with more or less the same number of cities.  The 
problem with any civ type game is that exponential expansion will magnify 
any difference in initial conditions many times over after a couple of 
hundred turns, so without any mechanisms to limit the expansion, the person 
with the most land area will win most of the time (assuming players with 
similar skill levels).  Increased unhappiness due to empire size not only 
serves to level the playing filed, but also makes the game more chanlenging 
for experienced players and more interesting for everyone.  It will take 
some getting used to, but I am convinced that it will be worth it.
Mike


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