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

[Marco Colombo <marco@xxxxxx>]

On Thu, 11 Oct 2001, [iso-8859-1] Gregory Berkolaiko wrote:

> General comment:
> All smallpox combating strategies I have seen so far introduce
> restrictions or penalties i.e. try to punish small cities
> How about trying to encourage large cities instead?  For example have
> some population-based trade bonus?

You're just shifting values on an absolute scale. Punishing small cities
or favouring big ones it's the same thing, don't you think so?

We have a population-based trade penalty. The nice thing with it is that
as soon as your city reaches fulltrade_citysize (as in Raimar's variant)
it behaves "as usual".

Despite that, I do believe small cities produce too much trade with
standard settings. 14-sized city can compete, thanks to many improvements
that increase trade itself or its effectiveness by means of science, gold
and luxury. A 8-sized city just can't compete with a few smaller cities.
The same goes with shields production (by the time you have a few 12-14
sized cities you have factories as well). The trade penalty corrects
that - and only that.

My suggestion is just to play it with the settings proposed by Lino.
A couple of games will show you how you need to modify your usual
strategy to cope with the lack of science in the initial phase. It's
a lot of fun alter you learn how to play a 'science war' against your
opponents (but I suspect AI's don't reach to well to the patch).

> Comment on patch:
> The model is a little bit complicated but I prefer one variable to
> Raimar's two.  How about providing smooth transition from size 1 to
> fulltradesize by removing *3/2 altogether?

Now that I think of it, I like Raimar's way most. No hardcoded values
is a Good Thing (TM).

> But don't let my questions stand in the way of commiting the patch.
>
> Best,
> G.
>

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