[Freeciv-Dev] Re: comments on ics solutions

["Mike Jing" <miky40@xxxxxxxxxxx>]

Marco Colombo <marco@xxxxxx> wrote:
>
[Lots of great analysis snipped]
> To me, it's just "why not?". Even in RL, nowadays, you have both big and 
> small cities, with very different combinations depending on both economical 
> and historical reasons. Since big cities don't rule in RL, why should they 
> do in FreeCiv?
[snip]

As I mentioned before, my intepretation of the city model in Freeciv is that 
it doesn't really represent a single city, but a rather large area around a 
metropolis, including surrounding smaller cities and towns, plus the rural 
population as well.  They are meant to cover all 21 tiles, or at least most 
of them.  As a result, the realism argument used by many doesn't really 
apply here.  To the contrary, "moster" cities _are_ realistic, while ICS is 
not.
The reason why I feel horizontal expansion has to be limited somehow is 
that, under normal circumstances, building more cities is always desirable.  
Even if trade is cut at the beginning, you still get production out of it, 
and eventually it will grow big enough to be productive.  The result is "big 
gets bigger", and the smaller players usually do not have much of a chance 
to catch up.  This may be "natural" or "realistic", but IMHO it's bad for 
the game.
Therefore, the happiness penalty based on the number of cities is the 
perfect way of balancing this.  Of course, it should be less limiting as it 
is now.  For example, the penalty could only apply to cities that are above 
the threshold.  This way, building new cities won't cause revolt in all your 
cites, but the new cities will be very hard to maintain.  Likewise, you can 
still conquer cities without worrying about causing troubles back home, but 
the newly acqired cities will almost certainly be in revolt.  I don't care 
whether this is "natural" or not.  It's a game balancing feature, realism be 
damned.
If you think this is unnecessary, then unhappiness doesn't really have much 
use in the game.  You can simply remove all features related to unhappiness, 
and vertical expansion would actually be much easier.  But of course, I 
think that would be a hige mistake.
Mike




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