[Freeciv-Dev] thoughts on settling cities II

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

There is another shortcoming in the new settler code that I also do not
intend to address at this time.

At the moment it uses a crowding indicator to keep cities distance and
provide room for growth. More often than not, it is not needed, since the
AI's settlers run after valuable resources like whales, that are usually
at some distance between each other. Sometimes they are not, however.
That's the the crowdedness indicator (positive values in the citymap)
plays in, and it is increased by one for each city that can use a tile.

This is not optimal. A city that has a large _growth potential_ should
increase this indicator by a lot more than a city which has none. Growth
potential is the availability of food, in city center, in best other tile
and elsewhere in the city radius. This way we would give cities that grow
huge fast space to exploit their full potential. Also for maps where food
is plentiful, we would make cities further apart to exploit the rapid
availability of new workers, whereas in maps where food is limited, we
would make cities closer to exploit the free city center to use more
tiles.

However, there are some problems with this. First, it will require some
rewriting of the citymap code, since we need to remember this growth
potential for reserved city spots that settlers are heading to. Second, we
have at present no way of knowing if this city will actually be growing,
or churning out an endless stream of settlers, and therefore remain a
small city. Third, it may decide not to use the food tiles available to
it, but instead use trade/shield rich, food poor tiles.

  - Per