[Freeciv] Re: "city grows to <same size>"

["Moz (Chris Moseley)" <moz@xxxxxxxxxxx>]

From: michael <michael.hasselmann@xxxxxx>
> Wouldn't that be too easy? Settlers and the decision to build them, to
> found new cities and to develop your kingdom or to let your city grow is
> one of the major strategic decisions in FreeCiv. And they have to be
> expensive in *all* (production, growth and supply) ways, otherwise
> *everybody* could build armys of settlers ;-)

This is one of the holes in Alpha Centauri. After a while you can build
"clean" engineer units that have no maintenance at all. So "spare"
production goes into making those, and I can end up with 100+ of those
units. It's a bit silly, because it means the ideal world for that
strategy is mostly sea (you can build sea cities, but they suck), because
if you build "the Weather Paradigm" your settlers work twice as fast,
so you can uplift your own continent while the AI players are still
wondering why there is no land... That stategy is a Gaianian one, or
perhaps Zakharov (science dude).

For FreeCiv, I think it might work if you had an engineer unit that
was twice as expensive as a settler and could not form cities, but
did not use food or population. But it would need to be late game not
early game, and perhaps at the same time allow a "citybuilder" unit
that creates a city with pop 3 and (say) 40 production already there,
but costs a fortune (3 pop from building city plus 150 or so production)
That makes game sense, because real cities like Canberra are designed 
and built in the 20th century and start out at population 100k+.

Moz

-- 
Moz
random recumbent rider
http://homepages.ihug.com.au/~moz1