[Freeciv-Dev] Re: (PR#6170) Alternative city square utilizations

["Jason Short" <jdorje@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

John Wheeler wrote:
> (This expands on an idea presented in PR#4539.)  In Colonization, small
> cities can't access all the squares around them.  I suggest the
> following utilization pattern as a possible alternative:
> 
>  434
> 42124
> 31013
> 42124
>  434
> 
> 0: City center
> 1: Accessible to cities size 1-4
> 2: ... size 5-8
> 3: ... size 9-12
> 4: ... size 13+
> 
> Personally, I HATE the idea of not being able to utilize the city
> center, but I LOVE having units that can build new cities cost 2
> population (especially when the worker function is seperate).

I'd just like to point out that we're talking about circles of various 
radii here.  These things don't have to be hard-coded but could be 
present in the ruleset as the sq_distance of what's available.

Currently there is only one definition in Freeciv: CITY_MAP_SIZE is 5. 
That the corners of the "square" aren't available to the city is always 
hard-coded, mostly in city.[ch].  The whole geometry is also hard-coded 
by the drawing code, in gui-xxx/citydlg.c (the loops are fine, but the 
dimensions of the window are not).  These are the places you'd have to 
look first to make this part of the code more extensible.

I'd rather see things coded with a CITY_RADIUS_SQ value.  Nothing in 
city.[ch] would be hard-coded.  Fixing citydlg.[ch] to handle any 
geometry might be tricky, though.  And if CITY_RADIUS_SQ ends up being a 
variable (game.city_radius_sq) it will definitely slow down some parts 
of the code, which some people will oppose.

> I think an even better (historically) idea is having squares produce
> declining resources the longer they're used. (This is the way gold is
> handled in *nix empire and gold and iron are handled in Serf City.) 
> However, this would require a much more sophisticated resource model
> than is present in *civ.

And would also hurt gameplay, IMO.  Look at civ3 and its disappearing 
resources.  Anyway, while mineral output would decline food and trade 
output would generally increase over time.

jason