[Freeciv-Dev] Re: [SPAM] Re: (PR#7021) fighting ICS (was: allies give all their techs for nothing)

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

<URL: http://rt.freeciv.org/Ticket/Display.html?id=7021 >

On Mon, 8 Dec 2003, Raimar Falke wrote:
> I really like Thomas's suggestion because we came up with it at the
> FUADEC. Yes know it is unrealistic. But this is the solution to the
> math problem. There is exponential grow. When one player somehow got a
> small advantage at the start (hut with a city or even whales for the
> first 3 cities) this advantage will grow quite large very quickly.
>
> One solution is to remove the exponential grow. Increased settler
> costs do this. Except for some overhead (because you can't pool all
> shield stocks across your cities) every player can build the some
> number of settlers and so cities at a given time. Linear growth.

Except that you still want to expand to get more whales and other
resources. Adding workers to an existing city will (nearly) always be
inferior to making a new city in range of a whale.

However, I don't think ICS or smallpox actually is the biggest problem.
The biggest problem as I see it is that building city improvements
_lowers_ your chance of winning games against good players. They are
pretty much useless, almost all of them.

I don't like the increasing settlercost solution because you add
additional rules that seem to be very artificial in a sort of
we-ran-out-of-ideas-here-is-a-kludge way. I still think we can solve ICS,
smallpox and city-improvements-are-worthless using the tools we have today
and general effects.

> This isn't the ONE solution. There are other solutions:

My prefered solution is (again) to make city improvements necessary.
Increase research cost, gold upkeep and other costs, and then
significantly increase the benefits of city improvements. This way you
will not be able to afford to run rampant smallpox. ICS can be balanced by
more aggressive use of corruption and waste from number of cities. (Note
that our civ2 ruleset has more aggressive corruption and waste than
default.)

If the above is not enough, we can use the new unit-requires-building
feature. This is used in many RTS games (Starcraft, Red Alert, C&C
Generals, etc) to balance their equivalent of smallpox. In these games,
more bases (cities) is always better, but the benefit of building new
bases is balanced by the need to spend the same resources on advanced
buildings and upgrades (city improvements) and units to attack & defend.
If advanced units in Freeciv required advanced city improvements, players
would just have to build up their cities.

  - Per