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

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

At 01:08 AM 01/10/22 +0200, Reinier Post wrote:
>On Sun, Oct 21, 2001 at 02:09:30PM -0400, Ross W. Wetmore wrote:
>
>> 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.
>
>I think this is related to the fact that Freeciv was designed to be
>multiplayer.  With a timeout and other players breathing in your neck
>you just can't afford esoteric limitations of the kind "at 13 cities
>one of them becomes unhappy" - you don't have time to figure
>out the exact rules.  Or maybe it's just me being lazy.

The way it works is that the basic "free_unhappy" count drops after a
while in response to both local corruption effects and a global component.
Or alternatively "angry citizen" elements grow and take out one of these. 
At some point in global growth sprawl your cities are born with nothing 
but unhappy, or maybe even angry citizens. Without military police or 
Temple-like counters, cities are just as worthless to a despotic ICS as 
revolting cities can be.

I also checked, and Freeciv has not implemented "waste" which is the term
for corruption applied to production in Civ2. This was a major extension
from Civ (1).

Killing production in the fringes of a Civ really hits ICS expansion
pretty hard. It would be trivial to implement by reusing the current
corruption code, i.e. equivalent (or withing a scale factor) effects
on both trade and production controlled by a single ruleset element 
to allow Civ2 or current Civ 1 behaviour.

IMHO, there is nothing esoteric about following/implementing the basic 
elements of the game :-).

>> 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.
>
>Yes, if this effect is really proportional i.e. no sudden jumps in effects.

The numbers fed in are integers as are the outputs, i.e. production penalty
or waste, so you are only going to get as smooth a function as integers 
provide, loss of a production point or content citizen as the effects
accumulate :-).
 
>> 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.
>
>I don't think it is - but it's true that in Republic, distance to
>the capital is no longer a real factor, and that it's too easy to reach
>Republic. 

There is a hard cutoff in corruption (Trade penalty) at distance 36 from
the capital. Note Communism that is supposed to have a low flat penalty
has the ruleset value of dist always= 10 for this.

The dist value at which corruption would completely take over a Monarchy 
is 67, and Fundamentalism/Republic 80. The behaviour is also linear, and 
quadratic at least for more primitive governments is not unreasonable.

Also, Monarchy and Republic are equivalent in the rulesets in contradiction
to the CivII manuals.

>Most 'band-aids' I've seen applied take care to leave the default situation
>the way it was, and just add more parameters for tuning - this way they
>are purely optional.

The optional is not just good but absolutely essential :-).

One really should finish building the core elements of (Free)civ and 
maybe put less emphasis on bandaids to address such basic shortcomings!

IMHO, of course :-).

Cheers,
RossW
=====