[Freeciv-Dev] Re: comments on ics solutions

[Marco Colombo <marco@xxxxxx>]

On Fri, 2 Mar 2001, Mike Jing wrote:

> 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.

I see. But mine was not a blind argument based on realism. It was a
gameplay issue. The game would be more interesting if you don't know
from the beginning that you have to grow a dozen huge cities.

> 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.

Sure, but "big gets bigger" holds also for vertical espansion.
That's a symptom of the fact there's only one clearly better way to play.
The more variables you put into the game (number of cities being one
of them, average size another one), the more choices (among equally viable
possibilities) you force a player to make, the less likely is that a
player can play "the perfect game". Even if you manage to get some
advantage at some time, you still have to be careful at the choices you
make, as they can be sub-optimal, and give the other players a chance
to catch up. But if there are few or no choices, once you lead you'll be
leading for the rest of the game. And you need to *increase* the number
of variables in the game to give players more choices to make.

> 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.

Exactly. So you don't think that the number of cities, their 
average size, even the distribution of their sizes are worth to be
variables that belong to the game?  And that the more you can "play"
with these variables (in a balanced way, of course), the more
enjoyable the game is?

> 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.

Ok, I'm saying it's not "perfect" (as YOU say). I've never said it's
"unnecessary". Happiness is *one* af the features of the game that
ICS manages to avoid. Corruption is another one. *I* proposed to 
introduce an happiness penalty for cities that are placed too close.
And also I think that playing with trade production also affects happiness.
I'm saying  that using *just* happiness to balance the game against ICS
leads to other kind of unbalance problems. I'd prefer a bunch of small
changes to the game, all in the same direction (against ICS), instead
of a big one that addresses part of the problem. I'm 100% with you
when you say that happiness should play a bigger role, believe me.
But I also thing the role you gave to it it's just too big. It reduces
the number of variables. Which IMHO is bad overall for the game.

As for realism, I believe that RL is "balanced" in a way, otherwise
we'll be all speaking the same language now. It's so balanced that
there no clear economic, political model that is the best.
So it's a good thing try and learn from RL. Not for the sake of realism
itself. But to implement some of the lessons already learned.

.TM.
-- 
      ____/  ____/   /
     /      /       /                   Marco Colombo
    ___/  ___  /   /                  Technical Manager
   /          /   /                      ESI s.r.l.
 _____/ _____/  _/                     Colombo@xxxxxx