[Freeciv-Dev] Re: comments on ics solutions

[Martin Olveyra <molv@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

On Wed, 28 Feb 2001, Mike Jing wrote:

> >... 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?

actually, each 2 points of trade surplus gives 1 science (sorry, the choice of
the term "unit" was a bad idea, I was refering to "unit" as a "unit of measure")

> >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 thing that must happen: The speed of investigation is very fast, as in the
actual play system, but without the ics.

> >...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...

In this model, the flux depends on the relative size between cities and its
travel distance. Even you can define regions (group of cities) that determines
a closed system in this aspect, for example, simply by enclosing a group of
tiles by a goto like poliline in the map. If the cities of a region are all the
same size, there won't be flux between them. But always in a moment a city
begins to grow faster than others...and here we obtain the assimetry. If you
need, for same reason, that a city develop without the interference of a big
near city, simply define a closed region, so to assign to the former a group of
small cities.

> >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.

mmm...very simply (sorry of my arrogance ;-) ). I have this point 65%
completed. Theese have been productive holidays...hehe.

 And it 
> is far from clear what exactly the effect would be.  IMHO, this is clearly 
> against the KISS principle.

What its the KISS principle??

> Besides, the realism argument behind it is 
> still questionable.

Well, perhaps this is the key point: all social and economical models are
questionable. If not, one of the major problems of Humanity had been solved a
lot of time ago... May be we (all who are discussing the ics) never will agree
in all the points. Perhaps, the solution is to implement a system in which each
player could choice between models as he does with type of government...
So, if one player wants to use the actual model, he apply it, and his cities
will work in a different way as the cities of another player, which use the
mike jing's model, or the jussi asp one, or the Kiermaier one, or even my
model, if someone likes it.
Just a thought...