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

["Peter Schaefer" <peter.schaefer@xxxxxxxxx>]

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

Well, maybe cities just need a little nudge in the right direction to
get bigger.
Even size 8 cities as the optimal size to aim for would have a similar
effect as mincitydist 3, since a spacing of 2 would already be too
close.

Also, even a single building with a high maintenance(2,3,..) that is
still attractive to someone playing smallpox, because of low cost to
build, will cause the player to want to make this city grow even more.
Unfortunately, as one can see in my favorite analysis,
http://forum.freeciv.org/viewtopic.php?p=6448#6448, the library and
the marketplace cannot be effective at the same time, so a game
following the curve: 80% research, then 80% tax, makes it somewhat,
uhm, risky to build any building of that kind. Which kind of makes me
wonder what the effect of a higher multiplier when rushing production
would be.

This reasoning - low cost to build, high maintenance, speeds up the
game instead of slowing it down like other smallpox punishments - is
what lead me to design the smithy as:
Smithy  -maintenance: -3  bonus:50% cost to build: 20   
Of course people will juggle with this to make the city grow to some
size 6-8 and then stop, but hey, one can't have it all
Smithy might become available with bronze working or maybe iron
working(too late?), which would in turn increase a little the
defensive options available to a city against sails+horsemen

I really don't want to get rid of smallpox, I just want to bring the
larger pox style closer to smallpox to have a chance of success.

On 9/5/05, Jason Short <jdorje@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
> 
> <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.
> 
> -----
> 
> 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
> 
> 
> 
> 
>