[Freeciv] Re: the struggle against city smallpox (was: Some questions)

[Reinier Post <rp@xxxxxxxxxx>]

On Wed, Dec 20, 2000 at 03:54:01PM +0000, Andrew McGuinness wrote:
 
> The central underlying dynamic of ICS seems to be that even if you
> keep food production steady in terms of surplus food points per turn,
> you can generate workers in new cities much faster than in old cities,
> because of the "scaling" in the foodbox.

Another factor is specials!  The first tiles chosen around a city are obviously
the special ones, which brings a disproportionate advantage to small cities.

> What is the justification
> for it taking so much more food surplus to produce the 10th worker
> than to produce the 2nd?

I think the idea is to make scale with available resources: to keep
the number of turns required to grow approximately equal.
>
> What would happen if the size of the foodbox was independent of city
> size?  Massive city growth would still be difficult because of 
> unhappiness and hygiene, but the advantage in deliberately keeping
> cities small by producing settlers all the time would go away.

I like this idea.  There's already a related setting (foodbox)
that is sometimes used on civserver.freeciv.org, but I have
no experience with it.
 
> What you might see would be long periods of fairly small cities,
> followed by explosive city growth when it becomes possible.  That
> would be realistic.

This is pretty much what happens: cities grow to optimal size,
and stay at that size untile the circumstances change.  A government
change or eg. the advent of Engineers often allows larger cities.

> Note:  While I say I am in favour of realism, I do not mean at the
> expense of playability and balance.  I am trying to find a solution
> that gives a good game *and* a realistic one.

Well, one approach that would help on both sides is to increase the
convenience and value of diplomacy.  Scientific research for instance
benefits immensely from contacts with other nations, and Freeciv could
be made to reflect this more.  Exchanging techs with diplomacy rarely
pays off, it takes too much effort especially with timeout.

> It might be that my suggestion would take the game too far the other
> way, in which case it would then be appropriate to put disadvantages
> on large cities or fast city growth using disease and plagues, etc.

Making cities grow faster isn;'t enough to combat city smallpox, if
it is still to the player's best advantage to build nothing but settlers
and do notthing but explore and found cities during most of the game.
Your suggestion is easy to implement but it can already be approached
closely with the existing 'foodbox' variable.

-- 
Reinier