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

[Reinier Post <rp@xxxxxxxxxx>]

On Thu, Oct 18, 2001 at 07:51:58PM -0400, Ross W. Wetmore wrote:
> 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.

What do you mean by "the smallpox-supporting argumnt"?
There is no argument.
 
> Rapture is the ultimate growth strategy, smallpox is a weak cousin.

In standard Freeciv games, the smallpox strategy is accomplished
and the game decided by the time rapture becomes *possible*.

> 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

In the smallpox stage, a few settlers == as many cities.  We're talking
exponential, later quadratic, expansion here.  You're referring to a
stage of the game that is only reached after smallpox has played its
role.  The first problem with smallpox is that this stage is rarely
reached before the game is decided.  The second is, if the game does
survive into that stage and strategy other than smallpox becomes an
interesting aspect of the game, you have so many cities and units to
attend to that you can easily get overburdened with just managing them.
This is in itself a penalty on smallpox,  It is the whale strategy,
really: become so big that nobody can possibly destroy you.

> After Aqueduct size this really kicks in.

Cities rarely reach size 8 in games with smallpox-inducing settings.

> Factories 
> are useless to smallpox Civs. But critical to get production levels up 
> to that needed for advanced units and the Space Race.

Multiplayer games are more commonly decided by ironclad raids.

> 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

You can't.  Expand or die.  If someone attacks you, bad luck.
Of course you can go out and attack others early on, and have an
enjoyable game that way, but among players of equal strength, this
will hardly ever lead to final victory.

> 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.

It doesn't happen.  Whoever expands fastest grabs all the bonuses that
allow countermeasures.

> In summary, if your three point exposition were a little more balanced, 
> then it might be more believable.

Please play or analyse a few games on civserver.freeciv,org.

> 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.

Well, citymindist and friends do a better job of that.

> 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.

Te problem is that with default settings, smallpox is the only way to
reach that stage soon enough, and it gives you so many cities that managing
them is a chore.

> 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 :-).

Are you sure you're not confusing alternative viable strategies with
the many tricks you can devise to play with an already beaten victim?

> Cheers,
> RossW
> =====

-- 
Reinier
> 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
> 
> 
> 
>