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

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

Note, the AIs ICS tendencies aren't from some wonderful insight it
has into the theoretical advantages of despotic sprawl.

It is pretty much programmed to make cities in preference to much else
that settlers do, and to stick cities into the cracks between existing
ones because those are the most productive areas when you can't leapfrog
outside of your current civ boundaries to new territory. Both the limit
on how far a city can look to send its settler, and the amortized cost
of the move to do this location make the nearby cracks much more 
attractive.

If you block this, it doesn't really know what else to do. And if you 
eradicate its meager ability to do science or trade related activities
because it went too far down this path, you will make it even less of
a challenge.

Changing the city search distance from 11 to 13 allows it to leapfrog
adjacent cities.

Adding a square_iterate loop of distance 4 or 5 at the new city location
that biases the cost when it finds any friendly cities that would overlap
by some amount proportional to the overlap will stop the worst abuse
while not completely blocking it from doing this.

A settler, might decide to irrigate a few (nearby) city tiles until it
reaches the periphery of the Civ, then happily go plant itself under these
conditions. But most of the time they get picked off en route by roaming
attackers looking for something to kill.

This fix is 5-10 lines of code update in settlers.c.

Cheers,
RossW
=====

At 11:50 AM 01/10/19 -0500, Tony Stuckey wrote:
>On Fri, Oct 19, 2001 at 09:40:33AM -0700, Paul Zastoupil wrote:
>> I have been testing the notradesize and fulltradesize in single player
>> mode.  I really like it.  It seems to be a real ICS killer.  However, the
>> AI really struggles with it.  So there isn't much challenge.
>
>       Interesting.  Historically, the AI has been so production-oriented
>that trade got shafted anyway.  There may be a disconnect between the
>amount of raw trade points being generated and the effect that those points
>have on actually producing science/gold.
>-- 
>Anthony J. Stuckey                              stuckey@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
>"And they said work hard, and die suddenly, because it's fun."
>       -Robyn Hitchcock.