[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 >

Antoine Bouchard wrote:
> <URL: http://bugs.freeciv.org/Ticket/Display.html?id=13845 >
> 
> Take two civs: A has half the population of B but twice the number of 
> cities.
> 
> A will always out-trade and out-produce B. and that's because of the extra 
> square and because the workforce available to each city has no impact 
> whatsoever on the city (that is apart from using up more squares which stops 
> at 21)

I seriously doubt that's true.  If A has 4 size 4 cities but B has 8 
size 1 cities A will still have (slightly) more output.  And if A has 4 
size 16 cities while B has 8 size 4 cities A will be way way ahead.

The problem is that a civ with twice the number of cities will grow (at 
least) twice as fast so it won't have half the population for long.

But note that if B has to spend twice as much on production and upkeep 
of new buildings then these buildings will still favor A even if B has 
somewhat more output.  B may have more output but the output *per city* 
is lower.  The problem now is buildings take too long to build (or, 
production is too low in the early game) so buildings aren't worthwhile 
for A either.

> My idea was just to get cities more and more effecient at using the 
> ressources and generating trade as they get larger and that for the only 
> reason that there is more people. Hence the idea of giving a bonus based 
> only on size. Then comes the buildings.
> 
> So what about 5% production and trade bonus per pop, starting at size 2 
> (let's forget about food). Size 1 gets nothing, size 2 gets 5% and will 
> never notice it. size 5 gets 20% bonus. If you think about this, the effect 
> of that is equivalent to giving a free worker to a size 5 city, thereby 
> offsetting the initial free square that the size 1 city got.  At size 9 you 
> get 40%, size 21, 100%, etc.

What you're talking about is basically equivalent to 
fulltradesize/notradesize (which used a penalty rather than a bonus). 
And this didn't work very well.

-jason