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

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

At 08:13 AM 01/10/20 -0700, Paul Zastoupil wrote:
>On Sat, Oct 20, 2001 at 10:39:00AM -0400, Ross W. Wetmore wrote:
[...]
>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.

This just means that no one has really figured out the more sophisticated
counter strategies while those using basic despotic sprawl have become 
very adept.

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

I don't dispute the empirical examples from the servers, but I think there
are checks and balances that will even things out if they are exploited
with as much sophistication for other strategies.

>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.

notradesize adn fulltradesize don't just hit ICS, they affect other play
strategies as well and so aren't particularly balanced. This really does
kill the speed at which the game develops.

Citymindist is good because it targets one of the weaknesses of ICS - 
resource limitation. It also slows it down by forcing longer moves before 
city founding.

>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.

The real CIV counter to ICS was the corruption and unhappiness factors
that arose with horizontal growth (number of cities) and were equivalent
to many of the ones that people claim hurt vertical growth (pop per city).
Freeciv has few of these basic controls, and a lot of esoteric hacks to
try and patch up the symptoms.

Reducing the pop size at which cities generate unhappiness proportional
to number of cities, or increasing corruption (loss of production) would
far more effectively control ICS than the initial trade penalties. It just
means implementing much of the basic code equivalently in both directions.

It is also quite possible that the basic corruption factors for primitive
govermnments are set far too low in Freeciv, and the effective radius at
which you can create useful cities from your capital is just way too large.

It might be better to really discuss "all those arguments" and figure out
where things are going wrong, than to dismiss the core principles of the 
game in favour of massive application of unbalancing bandaids :-).

>-- 
>Paul Zastoupil

Cheers,
RossW
=====