[Freeciv] Re: Wonders

["Martin Horsch (horsch@xxxxxxxxxx)" <horsch@xxxxxxxxxx>]

> I am confused with this thought.  Communism as a political system
> causes unhappiness, not happiness.  Communism fails where ever it is
> tried.  That is why it fails in the game.  People die trying to leave
> communist states, not get into them.

I don't agree if this means that you include communism only to show
how it fails. A system without advantages should then not be integrated
into the game at all.
I believe communism should increase shield values because centrally
guided production is more efficient than decentral concurrence. It
should increase happiness because its major goal is the total content
of the citizens.
However, for communists, there are economical disadvantages (there
might be a negative effect on the trade values) and the historical
experience shows there is a bad administration of territories situated
far from the capital (because the administration is very centralized
usually).
So there could be a negative effect on happiness increasing together
with the distance from the capital.

In my opinion this would reflect the real experiences, since communist
movements have more success in poor nation, where there are discontent
working classes. In such countries, the negative effect on trade
would not be large enough to prevent communism from being an efficient
government. This effect would be enforced by the distance effect
mentioned
above, because the poor nations are the smaller ones in most cases.

>  In the game, I think a communist state should have success
> until it encounters capitalism.  Then it would develop problems.  This I
> think would hold true to reality.

Capitalism does always exist BEFORE communism, in reality. The collapse
of the soviet union started with the independence of the peripheral
republics, which would be reflected by the distance effect.

Martin