[Freeciv-Dev] Re: Fixing ICS (simply)

["Brandon J. Van Every" <vanevery@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Ilkka Lehtoranta wrote:
>
> In the ancient ages cities were built near water for obvious reasons.
>
> So, what about halving food production if the city is not in
> the river
> square or next to river/lake/sea square? You simply could not
> build city
> middle of nowhere without water source and I still think
> there arent many cities in Sahara.
>
> Players could avoid this penalty with irrigations only.

I'm not entirely sure of the historical analysis.  The Greek isles, for
instance, were agriculturally poor and they relied heavily on trade to
get what they need.  But that's probably a question of relative, not
absolute, degrees of water.

As a game design idea, it's worth trying.  And this sort of idea is why
I'd want to see Freeciv moved to a game engine basis.

Meanwhile, consider that experimentally, you could get a similar (but
not identical) effect by iterating over a map and reducing the food
value of all squares that aren't next to water.  Your world would look
"rather dry."  I don't know if your mod tools are up to doing this task
easily, but if they are, try it out!  In an ideal modding universe, this
would be 10 lines of Python code....

It is also worth noting that historically, all of the first "pristine"
civilizations emerged in regions of hydraulic distress.  Either too
little water or too much water.  Irrigation methods were necessary to
produce the food, and this created huge state bureaucracies, and there
was plenty of resource scarcity to make war over.  The pristine
civilizations were: Egypt, Sumeria, India, China, Mesoamerica, and the
Andes.

Modeling that historical principle would take quite a reversal of the
Civ imperatives.  Civ players look for "the good land."  That's not how
it historically emerged.  Rather, Mankind learned to dominate and kill
on inadequate land.  There wasn't quite such a need for it in Neolithic
farming villages that had decent land.

Of course by the time you get to the Greeks, trade had taken over as the
engine of cultural advance.  Western civilization focused in Greece
because it was a nexus of cultural ideas.  I will not say it
*originated* in Greece.  That doesn't give enough credit to the
surrounding civilizations that provided the basic ingredients for Greek
thought.  But, the Greeks in their environment took some things a few
steps further.  Like nominal Democracy (if you were a man and owned
land).


Cheers,                         www.indiegamedesign.com
Brandon Van Every               Seattle, WA

"Desperation is the motherfucker of Invention." - Robert Prestridge