[Freeciv-Dev] Why does ICS work?

[Arien Malec <arien_malec@xxxxxxxxx>]

--- Jason Short <jshort@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
> Do you really think doubling the cost [of settlers]
> will slow down ICS?  I'm not quite claiming it doesn't,
> but I'd like to see a mathematical explanation to support
> this claim.

Good point: to fix ICS, we should proceed from an explaination of why
ICS is a good strategy. Ideally, we'd have a good game-theoritic model,
and could test fixes against that model, but I can't contribute there
:-). I'll start with a plain text explaination....

Smallpox works as a strategy because of three factors:

1) A city of size one can work 2 squares, and it only costs 1 worker to
create a settler. A city of size=2 has 3 workers: if the city creates a
settler who founds another city, there are now 4 workers

2) Growth through creation of cities is exponential (1->2->4->8...).
(It's really more of an S-curve, since there are limits to exponential
growth: total land, presence of enemies)

3) There are upkeep costs (happiness, cost of buildings, support of
settlers to create infrastructure) associated with vertical growth that
there aren't with horizontal growth

It is 1+2 that is really deadly.

(1) is very fixable: Michael Kiermaier and I wrote a patch that allows
settlers to have a pop cost of 2: so a city of size 3 with 4 workers
becomes a city size 1, with 2 workers + a settler, who founds another
city of size 1 with 2 workers, and you're back to 4 workers total.
Status quo. If you really want to put the breaks on sprawl, you could
make the pop cost of a settler 3, so that you lose workers when you
create cities. (There are probably Real World arguments why this should
hold....)

(2) is inherent in the game. You can try to slow it down (increasing
the min distance between cities, increasing the production cost of
settlers, etc.), but you can't stop it.

(3) may be fixable. Increasing the support costs (e.g., by increasing
unhappiness) for small cities levels things between horizontal and
vertical growth somewhat. But I believe that fixing 1&2 would do more
to balance the game than fixing 3.

The problem is not so much to stop horizontal growth, but balance
things to make vertical growth a viable strategy. If we solve problem
(1), and we can't make problem (2) go away, we need to create
expontential benefits to vertical growth to balance those for
horizontal growth.

Currently, 4 cities of size 1 produce as much trade as one city of size
8 (all other things being equal, and ignoring corruption). Given that
it is significantly easier to get to 4 cities of size 1 than 1 of size
8, it would help if the size 8 city had some sort of trade bonus...
Something also S-curve shaped, peaking between 6-14, and trailing off
afterwards.

Arien

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