[Freeciv-Dev] (PR#13845) Increasing the appeal of very large cities

["Antoine Bouchard" <osyluth@xxxxxxxxxxx>]

<URL: http://bugs.freeciv.org/Ticket/Display.html?id=13845 >

This is a very small patch that is set to increase the appeal (and 
usefullness) of very large cities.

Why:
It occured to me that all the patches and fixes that are out there to 
balance out the smallpox vs largepox issue have all been dealing with 
dumbing down smallpox and render it useless. This has taken the form of 
rather weird (and not terribly usefull) rules such has minimum distance 
between cities and so forth. The problem with this approach is that it 
assumes that smallpox is overpowerfull while largepox is just ok. That is 
where i disagree, smallpox is not overpowerful, it is largepox that needs 
fixing.

How:
It is actually quite simple. To increase the appeal of very large cities 
there should only be a point where the city size activelly contributes to 
the food, production and trade of that city.
The patch that i have submitted does only this: It adds the size of the city 
-16 (minimum of 0) to food, production and trade.

So for a city of size 16 there is no bonus
a city of size 17 receives +1/+1/+1
size 21  +5/+5/+5
size 26   +10/+10/+10
etc.

Effects and side effects:
For production and trade, these are straight bonuses. For food it is a bit 
insidious. Since each population level consumes 2 food per turn, adding a 
bonus of one makes it that each pop level beyond 16 actually consumes only 
1. It will makes rapture growing cities larger than what they were (and in 
the same time withdraw the oscillating effect from having an odd food 
production, ie. growing by 1 one turn, then decreasing by 1 the next). 
Because of the bonus in trade, rapture growing cities will tend to stay 
longer in rapture.

It will also make research go faster at the end stages of the game but that 
can be dealt with by varying the research cost. And anyway, you will have to 
set a non-0% luxury rate at some point to get these large cities.

Those cities would be nothing short of monstrous production and trading 
centers. A city with only grassland around it would still produces a lot of 
shield.

Variations:
If you think that the cities do not get a large enough bonus with this 
patch, there is also the possibility of having it kick in at size 12.

What next:
There should maybe be a 3rd city improvment that would be required to get 
passed size 16 (like the aqueduct and sewer system). After building that 
improvment, the city becomes a metropolis (which makes me think that it 
could be called metropolitain management centre or simply metropolitain 
centre, or something less geeky). I could also make a server setting for 
this... (if there is interest)

What to do against such a city:
Want to conquer that city? Easy. Starve it to death. As soon as an enemy 
units comes near it, it will start loosing population (and slowly loose its 
bonuses)... Unless it has reserves. That could also be finetuned by making 
the population unhappy if the city starves. (Dangerous in a democracy). 
Anyway, that again only if there is interest.

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