[Freeciv-Dev] (PR#6268) RFC: Clustering in Civil War

["Cameron Morland" <cameron@xxxxxxxxxx>]

Hi,

This is a request-for-comment on the attached patch.

Currently when a civil war occurs, each city chooses randomly whether or
not it will join the rebels. This causes a highly fractured
civilisation, and usually forces the human to give up. My patch causes
the nation to split into two clusters of cities (using the K-means
algorithm, incidentally.). What I'd like to discuss:

* What features should be used to determine membership in the cluster? I
currently use only Euclidean distance, but other things might be
important: continent number, courthouses, wonders, happiness, etc.

* Should the rebel nation be 1/2 of the whole nation? It seems to me
that cities will usually prefer the status quo, ie to stay loyal, so the
rebels should be smaller. (This is easy.)

* Would we prefer to have, eg, two small rebel nations instead of one
fairly large one? (This is easy.)

One example screenshot of this can be found at
<http://www.cns.bu.edu/~cjmorlan/freeciv/revoltmap1.png>. The Catalan
(red & yellow stripes) nation is my group of rebels, and the Australians
are loyalists. The matching savegame is 
<http://www.cns.bu.edu/~cjmorlan/freeciv/revoltsoon.sav.gz>; connect as
cjmorlan.

kmeans.diff
Description: kmeans.diff