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

[Josh Cogliati <jjc@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

I am going to pretend that you said smallpox, not ICS, because 
I think that you are refering to smallpox specifically.
On Thu, Dec 18, 2003 at 06:55:25PM -0500, Hellen Claggett wrote:
> OK, I've been following the debates and discussions on reducing ICS in
> Freeciv and, as a ICS player myself, it seems to me that the proposed
> solutions are more complicated than the problem they are trying to fix.
> As far as I can tell, the basic problem is that founding a new city is
> far more profitable than improving an existing city. Therefore, if you
> really want to fix ICS, I suggest you reduce the profitability of
> building a new city.

The other possibility is to make it more profitable to improve a city. 
For example, make marketplace, library, and temple free upkeep.  
Make it harder to destroy city improvements by diplomats (but create 
some kind of ignore's city walls unit earlier in the game).
Make a worker unit that has no food upkeep, so it is easyier to 
improve the countryside.  All of these help big cities far more than 
they help small cities.  
 
Lastly, part of the problem with freeciv, is that there are the following 
game types:
civ1
civ2
default
history

civ1,civ2, and history are constrained to be the same as historical games
or history itself.  default states in the header files:
; Modifying this file:
; You should not modify this file except to make bugfixes or
; for other "maintenance".  

I propose that there should be a new directory in freeciv called 
experimental, which is basically exactly that.  It should have a far 
lower threshhold for making a change as compared to default.  
For example, the proposed worker unit should have gone into experimental
almost as soon as it was proposed, since it makes an interesting change.

If there is any interest in this, I can work up a experimental data directory
patch that takes the default data, combines in longturn's changes, a worker
unit, and other changes that I think I can at least justify as being 
interesting.
-- 
Josh Cogliati