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

["Andy Smith" <andy@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

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

On Mon, Dec 08, 2003 at 03:29:06AM -0800, Horn Gábor wrote:
> 
> <URL: http://rt.freeciv.org/Ticket/Display.html?id=7021 >
> 
> <URL: http://rt.freeciv.org/Ticket/Display.html?id=7021 >
> 
> Hi!
> 
> I think not only the exponential growth is too strong w/ smallpox,
> another factor is the (un)happyness. For a 4x4 area i can put 1 city and
> let it became big or put 4 small cities. With the same government and
> tax rates in the second case i can maintain 4 times more military units
> outside the city w/o the cities starts to disorder.

Someone on IRC once mentioned an idea where closely-packed cities of
the same nation grow and compete for tiles they would merge into a
single larger city.  They also pointed out that ICS is a very
natural way to play at the beginning, so perhaps it should not be
discouraged but instead formally incorporated into the game mechanics.

So, how about that?  It is supported in reality by the idea that
small villages merge into towns which merge into large urban
conurbations (think: City of London).

Also, it should always be the larger city that is left behind.
Realism angle: few people wish to (or, under some economic
situations, are able to) live in tiny villages when the big city is
near sucking them in.

Instead of a spontaneous merging of two cities, it could maybe be
done as a gradual thing.  e.g. when two cities are close enough to
be competing over tiles, each turn there is a percentage chance that
one population point from the smaller city is moved to the larger
city.  The chances should become slimmer as the one city dwindles to
size 1, to represent the hard core of rural folk who refuse to move
to the city.

There will need to be some mechanism to prevent cities that need an
aqueduct from growing too big through sucking up population from
nearby villages.  A simple way could just be to say that this
population is lost immediately due to disease (London had problems
with cholera because of a lack of proper sewer system).  Or a more
complicated way may be to allow the city to grow but with increasing
chance of a disease breaking out until aqueduct/sewer system is
built, with the disease effects being terrible enough to discourage
just leaving it.

The point of all this is that regardless of what the player wants,
she will find her population naturally huddling together in cities,
which grow larger than she is able to control, forcing her to build
aqueducts and sewer systems to stop her empire becoming overrun with
disease.  She will need to provide amenities like temples and
entertainments for the inner city kids to stop the gangs running
wild.  She might not like it, but what can she do?  It's human
nature to live in cities[1].  That's civilization for you, right?

I have not thought this through deeply, but if I'm right in thinking
a smallpoxer might try placing cities in ICS something like this:

 1   1   1   1   1   1

   1   1   1   1   1

 1   1   1   1   1   1

then they would hope that after a while their cities would grow like
this:

 3   3   3   3   3   3

   3   3   3   3   3

 3   3   3   3   3   3

all held back at size 3 where they can be maintained without
improvements.  All those cities can have military units and all have
around about the same production rates.

However under the system I have outlined here, our smallpoxer would
have no means to stop yokels from the poor villages with no nearby
resources from moving in to her cities that happened to be placed
near better resources.  So after the same amount of time depending
on the specials that were present that made some of the cities grow
faster, you'd actually end up with something like:

 1   1   1   6   1   1

   8   6   7   1   2

 1   1   1   1   5   7

and then even later:

 1   1   1   3   1   1

  10   3   11  1   1

 1   1   1   1   3   11

as you can see, there are the same number of population points here,
but against the player's wishes, the citizens have conglomerated in
a couple of larger cities.  The tiny villages left behind have very
little production value and can't support many units.  The larger
cities will need improvements both to contain the population
(aqueduct) and to keep them civil (temple/colosseum).  And to pay
for those the player might finally find it worth putting
marketplaces there.

In fact it would be quite unlikely that the player could conserve
the same amount of population points compared to the current system;
they would have to plan carefully so that the larger cities had
aqueducts in preparation for yokels moving in.  A smallpoxer need
not worry about aqueducts because they can stop their cities growing
that large, but under this system the player must either spread her
cities out so they don't overlap or else she must build aqueducts in
the ones that are growing.

Some size 1 villages could even entirely disappear, especially if
the village has no improvements, no wonders, and nothing to make it
stand out.  "Remaining population of Village moves to nearby City"

Some problems I can think of:

- If the smallpoxer knows that founding cities close to each other
  just ends up with the majority of the resources merging into one
  place anyway, then she won't found cities close enough together
  for this to be a factor.  This then just becomes citymindist in a
  more complex guise, and ICS continues as if citymindist had been
  set.

- Growing cities needs more and more food for each point of
  population, but by stealing population from surrounding villages,
  the city is getting this cheaper.  On the other hand, those
  villages were founded with settlers from bigger cities in the
  first place so maybe that evens out.

- The core problem of smallpox+ICS as others have mentioned is that
  the game is still winnable without building any improvements, in
  fact it is *easier* to win that way.  This does nothing to change
  that, but if we accept that ICS is never going to go away then at
  least maybe this makes it look slightly more realistic.

Anything useful there?

-- 
Andy

[1] At least since we stopped being a nomadic culture and learnt
    things like irrigation.  Very near the start of the tech tree I
    guess, so probably not worth making a distinction even at 2000
    BC.