[Freeciv-Dev] Re: Embrace the Dark Side: Be ICS

[Greg Wooledge <greg@xxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Raahul Kumar (raahul_da_man@xxxxxxxxx) wrote:

> 1 Your cities are your only way to control/use tiles -> Therefore to control
> more tiles you need more cities. 

(SMAC has resource crawlers that can harvest resources from tiles outside
the city radius, but Freeciv does not.)

> 2 The only way to generate income is through your city (Again, more is better)

Incorrect.  You can also get gold by conquering enemy cities, or from
"goody huts".  Or by "diplomacy" (e.g., "Pay me 100 gold right now or I
raze Minneapolis!").

Of course, you don't actually need money to win the game; you only
need enough gold to maintain your city improvements, if you have any.
In theory you could conquer the world with a Trireme and a Horseman. ;-)

> 3 Units are produced at ... Can you guess? Yes, your cities. (More is better)

Also found in goody huts, but yeah, you're basically correct.

> 4 Research into tech advances are conducted in your cities.  (More cities =
> more tech)

Again: conquest, goody huts and diplomacy.  In addition, you can use
Diplomat units (or Spies, later) to acquire knowledge from your neighbors.

> 5 Each city is your army support mechanism.
> The more cities you have, the more units you can support without cost in the
> field.

SMAC has the ability to build "clean" units (they cost more to build,
but have no support payment), and Civ:CTP uses empire-wide military
support, with all cities contributing shields/minerals.

Also, CTP's units have a variable cost depending on their power level.
A CTP Warrior costs 4.05 shields to support, whereas a Machine Gunner
costs 24 and Space Marines cost 135.  (Don't ask me why it's 4.05 instead
of 4; I didn't write the silly thing.)

> 6 Each city can only make ONE unit/improvement, so greater shields go to 
> waste.

Only in Civ2 and CTP.  In Freeciv leftover shields carry over; in SMAC,
up to 10 will carry over.

> 7. Even the wonders are ICS. Michaelangelo, and all the other happiness
> wonders, along with Hoover Dam are perfect for ICS. And wonders can only be
> built at ... cities.

No argument. :)  All the Civ games have at least a handful of Wonders
that give all of your cities something, which greatly favors ICS.

It might be worthwhile to add (or change) a few more Wonders that
affect single cities.  Most (or all?) of the Civ games have at least one
Wonder that doubles (or otherwise multiplies) the science output of a
single city.  CTP has one that quadruples gold output later in the game.
Civ2/Freeciv have King Richard's Crusade that gives +1 shield per square,
and SMAC has the Merchant Exchange that gives +1 energy (trade arrow)
per square.  (Bear in mind that the SMAC Merchant Exchange bonus applies
to energy harvested by Crawlers, also; it can be *very* powerful for a
builder-type player.)

> 8. Sheer annoyance factor. It is a very tedious thing to attempt to beat an 
> ICS
> player in a conquer the world strategy.

I'm not very familiar with multiplayer Freeciv, but I'd imagine that
most games end before the final city is taken; when one player has an
obviously crushing superiority, and the outcome is inevitable, further
play is pointless.

Warfare is simply more tedious than peacetime building, because you have
to move all those units around.  There's really nothing more to it than
that, and ICS doesn't change this.

> 1. Allow ways to increase a city radius(villages) like in Civ 3

CTP2 has that, literally.  Civ3's "radius" that you see in the screenshots
isn't the radius from which workers can harvest goods -- rather, it's
the "cultural" influence, and allows the collection of trade resources
inside the cultural radius without roads and "colonies".  It also has
some sort of effect on your empire's influence, and the possibility of
having enemy cities spontaneously join your empire.

We won't really know the full impact of the Civ3 culture system until
the game hits the shelves.

> 2. A city should be able to have far more than 4 trade routes(dependent on
> improvs, a city with an airport has 6, with an airport and port 8,
> superhighways 10 etc). Increase the amount of money gained through trade
> generally. (If an ICS player is building caravans, he is not building
> settlers).

Every Civ game seems to have a different trade system -- it seems that
nobody's happy with the Civ2/Freeciv implementation. ;-)

SMAC doesn't have Caravans and trade routes; rather, any faction with
whom you have a treaty or a pact automatically engages in trade with
you.  Your cities (and their cities) are sorted in decreasing order
by raw energy (trade arrow) income (before Crawlers and specialists).
Your #1 city engages in trade with the other faction's #1 city; and
your #2 with the other faction's #2; etc.  The amount of "commerce"
income you get depends on the raw energy of both cities, your level of
technology, whether you're the Planetary Governor, and whether you're
the Morganite faction.

CTP has trade goods scattered around the map (instead of tile specials
like Wheat or Fish).  Each is worth 10 gold (which is worth about 2
trade arrows in Civ2/Freeciv).  A Caravan can be built; doing so adds
one to the number of Caravans you have available (a unit is not
created).  You can use Caravans to create trade routes between two of
your cities; a trade good is sent from one to the other.  Here's the
catch: the *second* of any particular good that a city has is worth 20
gold; and the third is worth 30; and so on.  Cities may have up to 4
trade routes (incoming or outgoing or a combination).  A city that has
a single trade good and 4 matching incoming trade goods earns
10+20+30+40+50 = 150 gold (about 30 trade arrows in Civ2/Freeciv).  This
is called a "monopoly" even though it has no resemblance to what we
call a monopoly in real life.  (And yes, you could in theory have 2 or
more of the same trade good inside your city radius, so the 6th instance
of that good would give you +60 gold, for 210; but this is rare.)

Also, CTP lets you "pirate" (destroy) an enemy trade route (they appear
on the map as blue lines between cities).  This destroys the trade
route (and hence the Caravan you spent on it), and also gives the
pirating nation a small amount of gold (20 or 30 gold, which is worth
about 4-6 gold in the Civ2/Freeciv scale).

You can also build CTP trade routes to other nations; if you're selling
goods, you can demand a certain amount of gold in return (typically 20
or 30), and vice versa.  All trade routes with nation B are cancelled
if you go to war with them.

From what we know of Civ3, it appears that there's a resource-based
system; but I don't know the details.

> 3.Two build queues. One for building units, the other for building improvs. 

This is brought up occasionally.  The standard response is that splitting
your city's production between two or more targets means you finish each
one much more slowly than if you built them one at a time.  This costs
you the use of one of those targets for the period of time you would
have had it, had you simply done one at a time.

For example: you schedule a marketplace, and then a ship.  Suppose each
takes 10 turns to build.  If you build one at a time, you get to use the
marketplace while the ship is being built.  If you schedule them both
"in parallel", then both finish after 20 turns, and you lose 10 turns'
worth of marketplace income enhancement.

However, if you allow a city to continue processing the build queue
after it's completed one item, then it could potentially build multiple
targets in the same turn, assuming you have the shields for it.  That
could be useful in the late game for builder-types.  I've seen this
proposal on the freeciv-dev list before, but I don't know what came of
it.

> 4. Big cities should have much higher tech earlier on, even a size 5 city
> should be producing more science than 5 size ones.

This will generally be true if you have a library in the city, and if
you don't have to worry about unhappiness.  The problem is that you
probably *don't* have a library, and at least one of your workers is
really an Elvis.

I think this point is the one that REALLY demonstrates the strength
of ICS.  It seems natural and right that a single size-5 city should
produce more science and gold than 5 size-1 cities -- unless you've
actually played the game, where the reverse is true! :-/

I'd actually like it if ICS gave a higher aggregate shield output (which
it currently does), while a large-city strategy gave better aggregate
gold and science, without such an extraordinary investment in city
improvements.  That would seem like a good balance to me.  (Of course,
any change that affects game balance needs lots of careful playtesting;
it's easy to overshoot.)

> 5 Remove costfree units for all govs. Or alternatively have it depend on city
> size.

The SMAC "clean" units are another alternative to this, but they come
in the mid-game (perhaps 100 to 120 turns if you focus on growth and
research instead of warfare).  It's also worth mentioning that SMAC lets
you upgrade combat units of the same chassis type from any configuration
to any other (same-or-better armor and weapon) configuration.  So you
can convert all of your 1-1-1 units into, say, 1-<4>-1*2 Clean/AAA units
by spending energy credits (gold).

(A word on clean units: their higher cost means that you have to keep
them alive for a while in order to realize a profit on your investment.
So it's probably not worthwhile to build clean aircraft, if they're
going to fight for 1-5 turns before being killed.  But a clean garrison
unit that simply sits in your central base for 200 turns and never gets
attacked is a good investment. ;-) )

If the number of units you can support depends on city size, then you
still have an advantage for having more cities, since your population
is going to depend on the number of cities you have (hence the amount
of land/food you control) in the long run (see points 1 and 2 above).
Suppose you get a free unit in a size-4 city; all you need to do is make
30 cities; let them grow to size 4; and then you have 30 free units.
Unless you were planning to let a size-12 city support 10 units, the
vertical-growth player isn't going to be able to match that.

> 7 Change wonders to affect by a %, Mike makes 10% of people happy. With the
> angry citizen patch, An ICS barely gains anything from a happy wonder. The 
> code
> to this
> is in the Alpha Centauri patches.

Not sure how that would work out in practice.

-- 
Greg Wooledge                  |   "Truth belongs to everybody."
greg@xxxxxxxxxxxx              |    - The Red Hot Chili Peppers
http://wooledge.org/~greg/     |

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