[Freeciv-Dev] Re: comments on ics solutions

[Mathias Broxvall <matbr@xxxxxxxxxx>]

Just a small comment about ICS I haven't seen yet: Expanding vertically costs
quadrically (with respect to food produced/size of city) while giving only  a
linear increase in production power, expanding horizontally costs a linear
amount of food and gives a linear increase in production power. What I mean is
that the food cost of raising a city of size 'n' is: n*X + Y*n*(n-1)/2 where X
is the inital foodbox size and Y the increase (per population unit) of the
foodbox.

So consider X=10, Y=10 and two players which both have produced 1000 food.
Assuming that A expands horizontally and B vertically a (slightly extreme)
situation would be that A would have 100 size 1-cities (producing ~200
shields) while player B would only have one size 14 city (producing ~30
shields). A little extreme reasoning perhaps but a damn good argument for an
(almost) constant foodbox size...

Considering how this favours small cities it is not a surprise that ICS is such
a successfull strategy. If I could transfer food freely between my cities I
would always send the food to my smallest cities cause that's where I get most
workers (= increased production) for the lowest cost. The only advantage with
vertical growth seems to be the use of city improvements which have constant
cost although they give a linear increase in production power (with respect to
city size)... that's why I would recomend only an almost constant foodbox...
(perhaps X=20, Y=1)

so... anyone for a game with constant sized foodbox?

/ mathias broxvall