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

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To: caz@xxxxxxxxx
Cc: freeciv-dev@xxxxxxxxxxx
Subject: [Freeciv-Dev] Re: More on (un)happiness
From: "Mike Jing" <miky40@xxxxxxxxxxx>
Date: Mon, 18 Dec 2000 06:10:46 -0500
Reply-to: mike_jing@xxxxxxxxx

Marko Lindqvist <caz@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:

It seems that you are against all expansion, when I think expansion outwards is ok and actually requires skill. We seem to agree that cities should overlap less (few big cities instead of lots of small ones).

I am not sure if I said all expansion are bad. Expansion certainly is an important part of the game -- you can't expect to win without any expansion (unless you are playing OCC against the AI). The problem starts when expansion becomes the only game in town because there are no checks and balances in place to put other interesting aspects of the game into play. I think we can all agree that expansion is way too important with current default rules.

Umh, I just found out that my own rulesets use value 3 :)

I remembered that we were using value 2 and one more sounded a bit too big when there's a lot of coastline. (I have sometimes used value 4 with big landmass)

That's good to hear. It's encouraging to find out that there are people who are not only open to these ideas, but actually used them.

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.

My point was that no matter how many cities you have, there is constant added to it's value when you lose it. So, you don't lose just (1/number of cities) of your empire, but much more. Currently only such constant is fact that enemy gets one free (if conquercost=0) tech from you. I know; one tech is next to nothing with default rules.

My point was that ICS can make all these concerns irrelevant. That's how unbalnaced it really is.

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

But taking control of biggest land area shows skill by itself (gen1 is unfair, no matter what you do). If one can drive other players out of some area, he have earned right to build cities there. Also, number of cities grows when you conquer/buy enemy cities. I don't think that only smallpox players conquer enemy cities :)

So I still think that you should not punish players severely simply
because they have many cities. That said, I don't have anything against that we slow expansion down.

Here you seem to be saying that the game is intrinsicly unfair and there is nothing we can do about it, and I have to disagree. I think we can and should. The real issue here is not about fairness, but gameplay, as it always is. It seems unfair to "punish" a player simply because he/she is good at expansion, but that's missing the point. By limiting the effectiveness of expansion, you can encourage/force players to use other skills besides expansion and bring previously ignored elements of the game back into play, thus making the game both more challenging and enjoyable, at least IMHO.

Many people hate this idea because it means they will lose the edge they have gained through previous experience and effectively have to relearn the game. Others argue that it will lead to prolonged games because it is in effect a defensive advantage. I happen to think this will make the game more fun to play, for more reasons than one, and that we can find other ways to speed up the game if needed. But that's just me.

Mike





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