[Freeciv-Dev] Re: comments on ics solutions

["Mike Jing" <miky40@xxxxxxxxxxx>]

Martin Olveyra <molv@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
> 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.
That is all well and good, but I am not sure if the Freeciv city model is 
capable of this level of detail in terms of realism.
[snip]
> 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),
What exactly do you mean by that?  What is a trade unit, and what is a 
science unit?
> and extra bonus trades for each tile might be won for each worker in the 
> city.
Huh?

> This is not an exageration, because you won't have lots of big cities, 
> unless you have a very developed nation.
So what happens when your nation eventually gets very developed?

> 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.
I don't think this is such a good idea.  Making specials more clustered or 
more valuable will really make the game even less fair for different playes.
> 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,
But how exactly will this be implemented?  How big should a city be before 
it is considered "big"?  What if all my cities are of similar size, which is 
generally true at the beginning of the game?  How much of the food and 
production should go from the small cities to the big ones?  This list could 
go on and on...
> 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:
[snip]
> All this with little change in the code. Only changing some parameters 
> (except the case of the flux from small to big cities).
That's a big "execpt".  I just don't see how that should be coded.  And it 
is far from clear what exactly the effect would be.  IMHO, this is clearly 
against the KISS principle.  Besides, the realism argument behind it is 
still questionable.
For my view on the realism of the city model, see:

http://arch.freeciv.org/freeciv-200102/msg00016.html

BTW, that's also why I think ICS has no place in Freeciv.

And remember, playability is always more important than realism.

Mike

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