[Freeciv-Dev] Re: Thoughts about corruption

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On Sun, Nov 25, 2001 at 05:00:56PM +0100, Gregor Zeitlinger wrote:

> Some ieas I had about corruption and trade - motivated from long
> micromanagement sesssions in Civ2.
> 
> 1) I think it's easier and more predictable to make it a function that
> depends on the total number of cities only. 
> 
> 2) Which city has how much corruption could still depend on the distance
> to the capital. Still easier would be to have the same amount of
> corruption in each city, as in Communism (civ2 at least). Order of
> founding could also be a possibility.

Don't 1 and 2 contradict each other?
 
> 3) How about making gold income and sience production a continuous
> function rather than a discrete one. This would eliminate the problem of a
> 10 and 1 city producing both 1 sciene because of 90% corruption.

It doesn't have to be a float; more precision, e.g. turning it into a
percentage, will be good enough.

> 4) A totally new idea would be to do the same as in 3) with luxury. There
> are two ideas I could come up with.
> 
> 4a) (luxury is continuous) Convert the excess luxury (after making
> everyone content) into science or gold.

Mmm, you explicitly set luxury to 30% and gold to 20% and
still get excess luxury turned to gold?

> 4b) Pool all luxury together and then distribute it among the cities to
> make all people content, or, if sufficient, happy.

That makes the game easier, but shouldn't there be a challange in finding
the right luxury rate?  (Not that I've ever taken up this challenge,
except in games where I really had time to burn.  Using entertainers
is much quicker.)

> The idea is to eliminate losses from roundings, which I hate, because I
> love efficiency :). Predictability is another point though.

I'm not sure what you mean.  Having an effective UI isn't the same as
making everything easy for the player.

> I also though about the function to calculate corruption. I think it plays
> a central role in determining the optimal number of cities. Is it a lineal
> one right now? Does anybody know, or know where to find?

   http://www.freeciv.org/lxr/source/common/city.c?v=cvs#L2046

> 5) I would suggest something like (1/n)*base_trade, where n is your nth
> city. (ln(n)/n)*base_trade is the equivalent function if it applies to all
> cities, which has the convinience that you dont have to worry about which
> city has with level of corruption.

But that makes Courthouses superfluous.  I also like countingthe distance
to the capital, because it is a factor in deciding where to place cities
and the capital.

> -- 
> Gregor Zeitlinger      
> gregor@xxxxxxxxxxxxx

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