[Freeciv-Dev] 3 suggestions

["Luke Lindsay" <lindsal49@xxxxxxxxxxx>]

Here are three suggestions.  Although a long-time civ player, I'm fairly new
to freeciv -my apologies if these ideas have come up before (or already been
implemented!)

Although they are all simply ideas, I think they could have a deep effect on
the game, and, in my opinion, make it more interesting to play.

(1) Cities should take several turns to build (varying with terrain type) .
It seems inconsistent and unrealistic that settlers take several turns to
build roads, irrigate etc but can build a city instantly.  It affects game
play by giving players with lots of small cities (IMHO) an unfair advantage
over those with a few large ones.  E.g. it would cost the player with large
cities several turns to build a bridge whereas the other player gets it for
free by building a city on the river.

(2) Cities should have an upkeep cost (except under despotism).  As things
are, when cities don't have improvements, smaller cities have higher
productivity per worker than larger cities because of the extra worker on
the city square.  Again, this is (IMHO) unrealistic and unfair.  Surely, one
of the main reasons why people in the real world live in cities is that
there are economies of scale.  Sure, at some stage diseconomies of scale
should kick in, but this point should be when the cities have grown too big
(building improvements should push this point further out), it should not be
when cities are size two!  The upkeep cost would mean that a player would
need several large cities to support  newly founded cities until they grow
large enough to become self-sufficient.  It would mean players would have to
strike a balance between expansion and growing larger cities.

I have suggested that it wouldn't apply under despotism to stop it slowing
down the early game and to give players an escape route if they suddenly
find they cannot afford the upkeep cost.

(3) The city square should only produce food (i.e. not trade and resources
as well).  The food from the city square is clearly needed: without it most
cities would never grow.  But just because there is a strong case for the
city square providing food, it does not mean it should generate trade and
resources as well.  If it didn't generate trade, it would make building
cities near rivers or the coast in the early game more important since
players could no longer rely on the trade form the city squares to fund
research.  This is realistic: many old cities were founded on rivers or the
coast.  Furthermore, it would make the early game more interesting: with
players expanding along the coast more, they would meet earlier, and the
incentive to fight for the best placed cities (rather than expanding inland)
would be greater.  Another effect is that it would reduce somewhat the
diseconomies of scale penalty suffered by size two cities (mentioned above).
Finally, it is realistic, in the real world there is a trade off between
using land for building and other uses.

The common theme of these suggestions is making flat-out expansion less
likely to be the optimal strategy.  I my view, changing the optimum strategy
from an extreme to an medium between extremes makes for better game play: it
requires judging where the optimum is and then applying the strategy rather
than knowing the optimum beforehand and simply applying the strategy.  I
think what I have suggested above is a good way of doing this.  First
because it is simply; it does not invent new elements that would make the
game more complicated.  Second, there are no arbitrary  penalties, e.g. if
you have more than X cities, then you suffer an unhappiness penalty.

I hope that at the least, it gives you something to think about.  If my C
programming skills were better, I would have submitted patch.  I should
imagine that for someone familiar with the freeciv code, it would be
relatively easy implement and see if works in practice.

Regards,

Luke