[Freeciv-Dev] Re: (PR#7021) fighting ICS

["Arnstein Lindgard" <a-l@xxxxxxx>]

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

On Mon, 8 Dec 2003 05:09:08 -0800 raven@xxxxxxxxx wrote:

> I've thought for a while that it might be very interesting if 
> corruption/waste was mesured by movement points to the capital instead 
> of number of tiles.  In other words, distance would still matter, but a 
> good road network would do wonders towards improving productivity, etc.  

Sure a useful tool is the idea is reduced to a boolean; city is
connected to capital, or not. Connection can be with road, rails,
harbors (plus the tech Navigation), or airports. That's Civ3. It'll
require code and runtime calculations. Civ3 is slow already.

Besides encouraging road construction, it will have tremendous
benefits:

A marauding enemy (which traditionally is the smallpox warmonger) may
seriously muck up a large part of your empire by occupying one
strategic position. That's realism! Consequences are:

1) You will have to keep yourself with a larger standing army for
homeland security. Republics cannot afford that and will be more
vulnerable to such sabotage, and so Monarchy enters the arena by
incentive. Sending a lone saboteur is easy.

2) The skills required to become a good player expand (isn't that how
you create a better game?): you must now balance your designated
defense forces vs. conquering forces. You may want to build
fortresses and learn how to best use the terrain. The current
problem, whatever you name the sub-problems, is that all your cities
are viewed as equally expendable, so you might as well just throw
everything into the attack. If coupled with the increasing-
corruption-above-a-number-of-cities idea, you must realize that your
core cities, and their connections to the capital, must be defended
properly before you can go on a rampage. Considering that Freeciv
currently is only about petty tactics, this will be a quantum leap.

3) We will need to port one of the last remaining Civ2 features: A
diplomacy clause to demand that units be withdrawn, or else declare
war. The player who declares war loose reputation, and you may kill
the offending unit. That way we get a use for the new "borders" patch
as well.


Arnstein