[Freeciv-Dev] Re: for discussion: ics revisited

["Per I. Mathisen" <Per.Inge.Mathisen@xxxxxxxxxxx>]

On Mon, 18 Mar 2002, Jason Short wrote:
> Every Civ game has had science research increase by 50% under science
> buildings.  This includes all four SM ones (including CivIII, which does
> address ICS), Freeciv, and every clone I know of.
>
> In other words, its a very visible change.  All players will wonder why
> it has happened.

So?

(What you mention above also applies to your own suggestion, BTW.)

>  It's overkill.

To the contrary, I'm not sure if it is enough. ICS has such enormous
advantages that something drastic has to change to even given the strategy
a hiccup. This "something" had better not be anything that slows the game
down to a crawl or makes the user completely confused.

> Citymindist is less clean (though still pretty clean), because it's a
> fixed-distance effect.

That is exactly why it is clean. Easy to understand. No RTFM stuff.

>  The solution I outline (proposed by
> someone-or-other many months ago) has a proportionally greater effect
> depending on how close a player's cities are.

So just space the cities out over a larger area. Takes an ics player a few
extra turns per settler. And if the map is small, this just means the ics
player takes all the map real estate quicker.

> And, it is much less intrusive on the rulesets (than your solution).

It is less intrusive on the rules than your suggestion, since it is a mere
quantitative change of the values being used, while yours actually changes
the rules.

> But, why does forcing cities further apart not solve the problem?  You
> can still sprawl, but I don't see how that's ever going to stop...

I don't wish to "stop" ics. I only wish to force ics players to _also_
build some bigger cities and make use of buildings sometimes, and make it
_possible_ to follow a non-ics strategy and still prevail in net games.

> I also think civIII's solution was pretty good: "set pop_cost 2".

Horror. Made the beginning of the game such a crawl. And ics is still the
best strategy, especially since sewers come so late in the tech tree.

> Culture does help out in some ways, too (a city with no culture has
> problems), but hurts in others (ICS will be able to eventually get huge
> amounts of culture, though it'll cost).

First building I built was a temple. Then settlers ad infinitum.  Culture
was a good idea, but the implementation was mostly just annoying, I think.

Yours,
Per

"My mother never saw the irony in calling me a son-of-a-bitch."
 -- Jack Nicholson