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

["Ross W. Wetmore" <rwetmore@xxxxxxxxxxxx>]

The smallpox supporting argument is always so one-sided. It really does
ignore the advantages to vertical as opposed to horizontal growth in
order to make its point.

Rapture is the ultimate growth strategy, smallpox is a weak cousin.

Vertical growth is "significantly" faster when you consider that a single
productive improvement can add 50-100% to the total city size at a cost
of a few settlers. After Aqueduct size this really kicks in. Factories 
are useless to smallpox Civs. But critical to get production levels up 
to that needed for advanced units and the Space Race.

Vertical growth is also much easier to defend, either with a few units or
improvements like city walls. The "waste" of providing each of these to 
size one cities is a lot more than the happiness waste that vertical
growth generates. Also, in real civ, horizontal growth also produces
unhappiness waste when new cities are "born" unhappy and this is almost
always ignored as a worse limitation to large smallpox Civs.

In summary, if your three point exposition were a little more balanced, 
then it might be more believable. But as it stands it merely says there 
is no real understanding of Civ strategy or the checks and balances for
anything much more than a despotic approach. Your final small comment
that says you can do better with other strategies is not really enough
to offset the sheep mentality that such postings tend to bring out in 
people.

It is true that until you reach critical mass or more advanced technologies
the strategy of despotic sprawl does have an advantage, but once other 
options in the game become available, it is a loser. There isn't half as 
much need to add new checks and balances as it is always claimed, just
for players to become a little more experienced :-).

Cheers,
RossW
=====

At 03:40 PM 01/10/18 -0700, Arien Malec wrote:
>Again, ICS works because:
>
>1) You get a free unit of population when you create a settler and found a
unit
>2) City creation is an exponential process (if each city grinds out settlers)
>3) Growing cities beyond a certain (server & ruleset controlled limit)
requires
>waste due to the need to create happiness and build aquaducts/sewers
>
>It is therefore much faster and more efficient to create 4 cities of size 2
>than one city of size 8 & 20 cities of size 2 than 5 cities of size 8.
>
>Settler pop = 2 solves the first problem, but not the second or third.
>min dist helps the second problem (takes longer, and you run up against
island
>boundardies/other civs faster) but not the first & second
>The new tech penalties for small cities help favor large cities enough to
>compensate for the support infrastructure.
>
>So CVS Freeciv allows a complete and total attack on ICS.
>
>OTOH, in games against AI, I've worked out strategies with Rapture, etc.
to get
>to Autobile by 400AD, which I was never able to do using ICS, so things
are not
>totally unbalanced as they currently stand.
>
>And we still need to unify rulesets & server commands :-)
>
>Arien