[Freeciv-Dev] Re: Open patches? (PR#720)

[Lino Mastrodomenico <mastro@xxxxxxxxxx>]

Raimar Falke wrote:
> Are there any patches which aren't committed and I didn't responded to
> in the last two days?

What about patch PR#720?

A short summary about this patch: it introduces a new server option, 
"fulltradesize", for decreasing the power of the smallpox strategy.

There is a trade penalty in all cities smaller than this value: the penalty 
is 100% (no trade at all) for sizes up to fulltradesize/3, and decreases 
gradually to 0% (no penalty except the normal corruption) for 
size=fulltradesize.

I suggest setting it to 6, so you get:
  size 0,1,2:   0 trade
  size 3:       25% trade
  size 4:       50% trade
  size 5:       75% trade
  size 6+:      full trade (no penalty but "normal" corruption)

We (a group of Italian players) have tested this patch in a lots of games, 
both versus AIs and multiplayer: playing a classic smallpox game is almost 
impossible, since you'll get no trade (thus science) at all. You need at 
least a few large cities for science and gold (that's why in Italy we usually 
refer to this patch as "Cities of Science"; if someone is interested there's 
a nice page from Enrico Bini about this patch and other settings at: 
<http://www.freeciv.it/itStyle/>).

A good strategy is to build some small cities for producing settlers which 
can be used for building new cities and, more important, for adding to help 
in growing your "main" cities.

There is no effect at all when corruption_level is 0 (under democracy) and 
please note that the default value is 1, so the patch is completely backward 
compatible (fulltradesize=1 means that there is _no_ trade penalty for cities 
of any size).

I have attached an updated patch.

Changes from previous version:
  * updated to current cvs;
  * renamed the server variable from "corruptsize" to "fulltradesize", which 
    is probably more understandable (this is the minimum city size to get 
    full trade).

The patch is very small and simple (the core is a single line in 
common/city.c), and it simply add a new possibility without changing the 
default behaviour.
So it's ready for cvs inclusion, IMHO.

As always, comments are welcome.

ciao

P.S.: I'm sorry for resending again this patch, but I have had only a 
      (positive) comment from Marco Colombo and Paul Zastoupil
      (<http://arch.freeciv.org/freeciv-dev-200106/msg00114.html>) and I hope 
      this is lack of time from the maintainers and not a problem in my      
      patch. ;-)

P.P.S.: however, just for the records, Paulz has still write access to cvs?

-- 
Lino Mastrodomenico
E-mail: mastro@xxxxxxxxxx

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