[Freeciv-Dev] ICS: double empire in 10 turns

["James Canete" <use_less@xxxxxxxxxxx>]

I decided to do a quick back-of-the-envelope calculation of how fast a
"pure" ICS player would grow, given "ideal" conditions.  For the purposes
of this thought experiment, every city has access to wheat, whales, and 
one forest, and each new settler takes five turns to get out of 
mincitydist range.

Turn    action                  city stats      foodbox shields
0       builds city on wheat,   6/3/4 - 2/0/0    0/20   0       
        new citizen on whale
5       city grows,             7/5/4 - 4/0/0    0/30   15      
        new citizen on forest
10      completes settler       6/3/4 - 4/0/0   15/20   0
13      city grows,             7/5/4 - 6/0/0    1/30   6
        new citizen on forest
15      settler builds new      7/5/4 - 4/0/0    3/30   16
        city, loop repeats
20      completes settler       6/3/4 - 4/0/0   18/20   0
21      city grows,             7/5/4 - 6/0/0    0/30   3
        new citizen on forest
25      settler builds new      7/5/4 - 4/0/0    4/20   23
        city, loop repeats
29      completes settler       6/3/4 - 4/0/0   16/20   0

(sorry if the formatting is screwed up)

Since an ICS'er has most of her cities at size 1, she can do the exact
same strategy at every city, leading to exponential growth, until she 
runs into a natural barrier (water/other civ).  Then she shifts over to
a scientific/military agenda until such barrier is negated, then revert.

How do we combat this? I have a few ideas.

1.  Obvious answer.  Make vertical growth exponential.  What makes
vertical growth non-exponential?  Pretty much everything in the game.
The game seems designed against growing big cities, with exponentially
growing foodboxes, hard limits at aqueduct and sewer system, automatic
unhappiness at a certain size, etcetcetc.  But removing these things
remove a lot of "fun" in the game, so perhaps they should be given other
benefits.  Or this idea rejected out of hand.  :)

2.  I think Mike Jing had a good idea with unhappysize=1, cityfactor=12 
and empire_size_inc=2.  His fault of "just turn every size 1 city into
an elvis-only city" can be remedied by either a) making angry citizens
unable to become specialists, which possibly makes the existence of
"slacker" citizens (citizens who were previously angry and cannot take a
job as worker or specialist since they were made content by luxury), or 
b) simply make it impossible to make entertainers until size 2, after 
all who is a lone entertainer in a size 1 city going to entertain?

3.  Make it exceedingly difficult to make a new settlement.  Instead of
the early settler rush, make a lot of bonus huts, and make perhaps 90%
of them friendly cities.  Or, instead of friendly cities, make them
settlers so they can be placed in new positions.  This is the RTS
solution, where a new base takes quite a lot of resources to prepare and
create, as opposed to a military unit.  I think this reflects actual
history better as well, as the first civilizations were generally one 
large city surrounded by smaller cities that were eventually absorbed 
into the "culture" of the larger.  I'm probably lacking a bit in my
knowledge of history tho; when did people first start large-scale
colonization?

Anyhoo, how do those sound?  Completely ludicrous or no?  I apologize in
advance if I'm just yelling out things people have already pointed out.

-James Canete
-- 
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