[Freeciv-Dev] Re: comments on ics solutions

[Martin Olveyra <molv@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Well, as you have noted, my point of view was always and is to see the realistic
side of the problem.

Think about the roles of both small and big cities:
The bigs cities are the economical, scientific, trading, political,
industrial and development centers of a nation.
The small ones are the productive centers, those who are near the sources of
production: small cities are basically those who extract raw material,
transform them in a basic way (low level industry) and export them to big
cities for a further transformation (because of high industrial capacity of
big cities) or for a further exportation to other nations (because of the high
trading capacity of big cities). Another role of small cities is, for example,
to maintain and watch a position.

The variability in the balance depends mainly on the
geographical situation of cities (including the availability of certain kind
of resources an scarcity of others) and its social characteristics.

If we take all this in account, and bring them to the high abstraction
level of freeciv, I think that the balance between building new cities and
developing those who already exists, are reached in a natural way, without
thinking in artificial ones who, at the long term, always leads to a loss of
balance when somebody finds the way.

So, my suggestions are:

There must be a bigger gap between the science bringed by small and big
cities than in the actual rules. Because in freeciv the science depends on the
trade, who, at the same time, depends on the tiles inside the city ratio, the
relation between both variables should be less than the actual one (for
example, 3 or 4 trade unit per science unit) , and extra bonus trades for each
tile might be won for each worker in the city. This is not an exageration,
because you won't have lots of big cities, unless you have a very developed
nation.

- The number of specials in the map can be the same as
usual, or little less, but I think they could be distributed in small clusters,
so, there would be less places in the map to build a city, but this places
would be very strategic instead. Or, as an alternative, reduce considerably the
number of specials, but increase its value.

At this point, I suggest an idea that might not be accepted by the
conservative wing of freeciv players: instead of each city extracts shield and
food for itself, there would be a net flux from smallest cities to biggest
ones; this is very realistic, and gives importance both to big cities and small
ones, both of them having its role. So, bringing the reality to the context of
freeciv abstraction, we have the following results:

1 - reality: the people tends to gather in few big cities.
      freeciv abstraction: the food flows to the big cities making them grows
      quickly and the small ones slowly.
2 - reality: The raw matter or low level manufactured production goes from
      small cities to the bigger ones, which really make the highly manufactured
      goods.
      freeciv abs.: the big cities builds the units, very quickly, and in a
      centralized way, and all kind of expensive improvements and
      wonders that only has to do with them; small cities will build only some
      cheap improvements, those which are justified for a small city.
3 - reality: The new cities are founded basically by people who leave the big
      cities.
      freeciv: The big cities are practically the only ones that can build
      settlers, in order to exploit newly discovered or conquered sources of
      shields. This has the advantage that the shield surplus of the nation
      would be increased, but the science and gold surplus will be reduced.
      Here is where the sought balance can be seen better. 
      In this context, each settler can take one worker from the city, as now,
      but I agree with split it in two classes of units: one which builds
      cities, and one which builds road, farmland, mines, etc. Also the
fortresses gain importance, because, in order to watch a position in the map, it
is more convenient to build a fortress instead of waste a settler to build a
city where there are not specials to exploit.



Well, as a consecuence of all this, you can observe that the playability of
the game is increased, because you dont have to pay attention to the small
cities, but instead to the big ones only. The production of units is
centralized. The player losses the need to watch the small cities constantly.

All this with little change in the code. Only changing some parameters (except
the case of the flux from small to big cities).