[Freeciv-Dev] Re: civ3's answer to smallpox

[Reinier Post <rp@xxxxxxxxxx>]

On Fri, Oct 19, 2001 at 08:45:18AM -0700, Arien Malec wrote:
> 
> --- Reinier Post <rp@xxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
> > > So CVS Freeciv allows a complete and total attack on ICS.
> > 
> > Good news ... is there any practical experience with this yet?
> 
> Well, I'm not a multiplayer player, but:
> 
> 1) The citymindist stuff is acknowledged by people who are to be an ICS killer

Yes, I played a few games with it when it was introduced as a ruleset
option, and it seems very effective.  The great thing is that it doesn't
really increase the maintenance overhead, the percentage of time you
have to spend on making sure that every city is still happy and doing
the right thing.  This is what makes larger cities so grossly unattractive,
in games where ICS is the winning strategy.  If you can just pump out
units, you get a lot more action per second - less popup clicking,
more movement -> more fun.

> 2) I get the impression that the trade penalties for small cities were
> playtested by the Italian user group
> 3) civ3 seems to be adopting the pop_cost approach
> 
> It would seem then, that none of these are particularly academic approaches to
> the problem.

Other suggestions in this category: experiment with the cost of units
and buildings, decrease the size of the map, decrease specials,
increase land mass, allow powerful units early on as in the Fantasy
modpack:

  ftp://ftp.freeciv.org/pub/freeciv/contrib/modpacks/fantasy/

-- 
Reinier