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

[Paul Zastoupil <paulz@xxxxxxxxxxxx>]

On Sat, Oct 20, 2001 at 10:39:00AM -0400, Ross W. Wetmore wrote:
> 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.

We have been through all these arguments before.  But I have to reiterate
what Reinier has said.  It wont work.  The player who wins on a server
without any anti-smallpox variable is always going to be the one with the
most cities.

If you don't believe us, try it.  Find a high ranked player on
civserver.freeciv.org and watch how they play.  ICS.

However, all of this is rather unimportant now as we have the notradesize
and fulltradesize variables.  As well as the ability to make settlers cost
2 population, which I guess we should try on civserver.freeciv.org.  Also
the citymindist seems to be helpful as well because it causes the players
to run out of ICS room quicker, which then makes vertical growth that much
more important.

What we should really be talking about is this:  Do all these anti-smallpox
solutions slow down the game too much?  I would suggest with notradesize
that the players start out with more than 2 settlers.

-- 
Paul Zastoupil