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

[Andrew McGuinness <andrew_mcguinness@xxxxxxxxxxx>]

On Thu, Dec 21, 2000 at 01:06:56AM +0100, Reinier Post wrote:
> 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.
> 
Good point.  This is a reasonable thing in itself, though

> > 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.
>  
...
> 
> 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.
> 
The foodbox variable doesn't affect the way that small cities grow
faster than large ones.  All through the code, the calculation of
food needed to grow is 

((pcity->size+1) * game.foodbox)

If this could be changed to 

(game.firstfood + ((pcity->size)*game.foodscale)) * game.foodbox

we could try other styles.  The current hardwired setting would be
equivalent to game.firstfood = 1, game.foodscale = 1.  If this
changed to game.firstfood = 4, game.foodscale = 0.25, for instance,
it would take much longer to grow to size 2, and be able to produce
a settler, than it is now, but a city of size 5 or so would be in
the same position as one in the game as it stands.

-- 
Andrew McGuinness     Luton, UK        andrew_mcguinness@xxxxxxxxxxxxx