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

["Brendon" <yautja@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

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

Jason Short wrote:
> 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.
> 

I think Monarchy/Communism should get a free shield upkeep per every 2 
population, just like despotism gets a 1 for 1 deal. This way smallpox 
cities would get only 1 or 2 per city and a size 12 city would get 6 free.

The 4 free contents is kinda worthless if it only ever gets reduced to 3 
content citizens no matter how many times you go over the government 
limit. Most largepoxers delay going over 13 cities because of it, where 
as smallpoxers have already gone over 3 times this limit before any of 
their cities reach size 4.

It could be based on population of all your cities, ie 30 sized 3 cities 
are worth the same as 10 sized 9. This way it could keep making unhappy 
citizens, controlling rampant growth while not totally crippling smallpox.

Or perhaps introduce it more gently, for each city over the limit you 
get another single unhappy citizen in a single city (either chosen by 
city size or build order). So all your cities don't magically go into 
revolt just because you built/captured one city over the limit.

The 1 free military unrest every Republic city gets is also an big 
advantage to smallpox. They can can maintain a huge fleet off shore, 
stopping you getting anywhere near their weakly defended island.

Perhaps base this on 1 free per N city population as well, every 3/4 
population points for Republic.

  > 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.
>

Instead of a free fortify bonus, maybe units in cities could get +N0% 
defense, where N = the size of the city. Urban warfare sucks just as 
much as jungle.

> 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.

Wouldn't hurt if the island generator made more rivers, about a 75% 
chance to get a river on your island on default wetness, size, 6 
players. Even then it's only about 1-3 tiles long :(, and if there is 
more than one they tend to be close together and merge.

Does the river generator only make the lake, or is it a total map % of 
river tiles ?