[Freeciv-Dev] Re: (PR#17772) Rapture growth balancing

["Curtis Warren" <cwarren89@xxxxxxxxx>]

<URL: http://bugs.freeciv.org/Ticket/Display.html?id=17772 >

> On Fri, 9 Jun 2006, Curtis Warren wrote:
> > Why do you think disabling rapture will help anything?
>
> It will help make other strategies that the currently dominant one viable.
>
> See eg http://www.mo1.dk/blog/freeciv.html
What other strategies? The way I see it, disabling rapturing would
just produce a different dominant strategy to replace the current one.

> > Sure, rapturing is powerful, but this goes along with the entire premise
> > of the game--growth is power. Even if you remove rapture, you're still
> > going to have the growth show down, just in slow motion.
>
> Of course.
>
> But that is like arguing against making the invincible Superman unit less
> good, because that just goes along with the entire premise of the game --
> you need military units to win, and you are still going to have military
> units, just more of them ...
If lessening the superman unit doesn't do anything other than make the
game longer, what good is it?

> > I actually think civ handled this quite nicely; rapture was kept in
> > check through happiness, in that it was virtually impossible to go
> > strait to republic and rapture. This happened to have the side effect
> > that monarchy was actually used quite a bit.
>
> The happiness settings varied depending on the difficulty setting.
>
> If you think the default happiness settings are bad, please tell us why
> and how it should be.
Strategies in civ2 are somewhat hard to base much off of
gameplay-wise, unfortunately. It's hard to tell if the
smallpox->monarchy->grow/rapture method was a result of game settings
or simple lack of knowledge of a better strategy. Unfortunately, it's
hard for me to suggest anything because of this, but I can say the
best way to play test something is to release it, as that's really the
only time hidden strategies come out.