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

["Jason Short" <jdorje@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

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

In my opinion smallpox is a good strategy for 2 reasons:

S1.  In the early game, the best thing to build is settlers, and 
smallpox is the fastest way to make use of them.  Smallpox is best here 
because you get the settler to the city site the fastest.

S2.  In the middle game, smallpox allows you to maximize use of tiles. 
Each city has access to 21 tiles but until you have cities close to size 
21 this means the extra tiles are wasted.  Thus it is better to have 5 
size 4 cities in a 21-tile area than it would be to have 1 size 6 city.

S3.  Because cities are indefensible, smallpox makes sense because you 
can easily recover from the loss of one city.

S4.  Because of the N-free-per-city effects of some governments (like 
monarchy, 3-free-upkeeps-per-city) smallpox gets more free upkeep. 
Another example is the 4-free-content-citizens advantage.

Against this we have the advantage of largepox which only comes into 
play in the late game.

L1.  Largepox can take advantage of buildings better.  Because city 
sizes are larger the cost to produce and upkeep the buildings is 
proportionally lower.

L2.  Largepox makes it worthwhile to defend your cities.  Because you 
can support more units/city it makes it possible to have more defenders. 
  However this isn't an issue in the current rules because defense is 
basically impossible, particularly against larger civs which will have 
superior technology.

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Changing pop_cost to 2 might "fix" S1 because you no longer get a free 
worker for each new city, but this may not be sufficient since smaller 
cities still grow faster (2 size 1 cities will grow to 2 size 2 cities 
faster than 1 size 2 city will grow to 1 size 3 city).

Several solutions have been proposed to tone down S2. 
notradesize/fulltradesize was supposed to do this I think but it fails 
rather sadly.  You can also use mincitydist here.  Another solution is 
one I suggested years ago: make the unhappiness for a city be based not 
on that city's size but on the number of workers operating within the 
city's radius - thus if you have a size-4 city with 15 workers within 
its radius you will have a rather insane amount of unhappiness.

Other suggestions have been to make L1 into an even bigger advantage. 
Currently it's only an advantage in lategame because the powerful 
buildings (factory) only come into player later on (also because it 
takes that long for the S2 advantage to fade out).

Nobody's really suggested a way to make L2 into a worthwhile advantage 
(aka cancel S3) in the early-mid game.  In the largepox games I've 
played I find that if you restrict yourself to building cities on hills 
(particularly hills+river) you can make your cities pretty defensible 
even against quite superior units.  However this won't actually allow 
you to win the game because your opponent just keeps pulling further 
ahead and usually (in pubserver games) there is an /endgame command or 
nukes are used before the L1 advantage will let you catch up.  So I've 
never actually managed to win with a largepox strategy.

As for S4, the advantage of upkeep probably isn't that big a deal 
(everyone uses republic anyway).  But the advantage of content citizens 
is a big problem.

-jason