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

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

I missed Arien's earlier post so will piggyback on Renier.

Again ICS doesn't work and Arien's "faster" analysis is wrong because ...

Assume you start with a size 1 city with food +2, prod +4 which *really*
weights things in favour of ICS (double average production).

You will generate a new settler every 10 turns, and if your 2nd city is
as productive and not that far away it will take 30 turns or so to get
4 cities plus some noise (up to 10 more turns) to get them all to size 2.
During this period you are totally defenceless :-).

It takes 10+15 turns to let the original city grow to size 3, and 5 more
to rapture it to size 8. During this period the city can produce military
defence and/or unhappiness improvements like temples, or productivity
enhancements like marketplaces.

And at this point vertical growth is moving at 1 per turn, while horizontal
growth still takes 10 turns per city. Moreover, vertical growth can add
1.5 equivalent trade/production per turn with somthing like marketplace, 
2 equivalents per turn with marketplace and bank, etc.

If you rearrange your workers to produce food +4 and prod +2, you can
cut the 25 turns in half for the vertical growth.

In advanced stages of the game, you can produce 1 settler per turn in a
large city. 3 such cities can produce a new city that starts growing at 
one per turn, every turn. I'll leave you to figure out the multiplicative
factor in the exponential growth this has over despotic ICS :-).

So, ICS is only a useful strategy in the early stages of the game where
tech has not progressed enough to take advantage of other growth means.
If your game never moves beyond a despotic bloodbath, it may be the only
winning strategy, but that is up to the players to decide :-).

ICS may be exponential, but it is an inefficient or low base rate that it
starts from.

Cheers,
RossW
=====

At 10:49 AM 01/10/19 +0200, Reinier Post wrote:
>On Thu, Oct 18, 2001 at 03:40:06PM -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.
[...]
>-- 
>Reinier