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

[Raahul Kumar <raahul_da_man@xxxxxxxxx>]

--- "Per I. Mathisen" <Per.Inge.Mathisen@xxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
> 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.
> 

You have not addressed the production advantages of ICS. The ICSer can still
churn out far more military units free of maintenance costs. This is due to
the incredibly stupid per city free unit.

ICS will still be a killer strategy.
 
> > 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.
>

You haven't addressed the wonder problem though. ICS combined with a single
happiness wonder makes happiness problems a thing of the past. This is a huge
advantage that should be removed. No more 1 person per city made happy. It
should be 10% of city citizens made happy .
 
> >  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.
> 

This does disadvantage the ICSer. He has to spend more time building settlers,
while your cities can be busy building improvements.

> > 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".
> 

And low cost workers. The beauty of Civ III's approach is that building
irrigation/mines/rail/roads is more cost efficient than waiting for a size 3
city to build a settler and moving the settler to the city location.

I prefer implementing the Civ III approach. It makes it easier for the future
Civ III modpack to be added.It also needs no explanation as a huge number of
freeciv players are already familiar with Civ III(everyone on the list it
seems).
 
> Horror. Made the beginning of the game such a crawl. 

Just start with more settlers.

>And ics is still the
> best strategy, especially since sewers come so late in the tech tree.
> 

See what I said about building improvements/improving tiles is now a better
investment than settlers.

> > 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).
>

How? The ICS player will be spending a lot of money, which he cannot recoup
with caravans or coinage. Don't forget, he has to sell improvements if he runs
out of cash.
 
> 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.
>

If you have a better idea, let us know.
 
> Yours,
> Per
> 
> "My mother never saw the irony in calling me a son-of-a-bitch."
>  -- Jack Nicholson
> 
> 


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