On Sat, Feb 03, 2001 at 12:43:32PM -0500, R. Miller wrote:
> Hello,
>
> ICS. I'm new to FreeCiv and have played a number of games over the past
month.
> I have noticed a lively discussion concerning ICS. It took me a while to
> find out
> what it is so, for the benefit of other "newbies" reading this, I will
> state here that
> ICS stands for Infinite City Sprawl (a.k.a. Smallpox) and is a strategy in
> which
> players attept to win by creating enormous numbers of small cities.
The basic issue: a new city is *by far* the best investment you can make,
almost always better than investing into city improvements. Two small
cities (built from one) are always more valuable than one city (built
up from the same situation).
> Maps. I just reinstalled Civ2 because I suspected that the maps generated
> by FreeCiv's
> generator 2 setting might be contributing to making ICS a viable strategy.
> I compared maps generated by Civ2 to those generated by FreeCiv.
>
> Resources. I estimate that FreeCiv's maps make possibly twice as many
resources
> available to cities than do Civ2's maps, especially whales and
combinations
> of whales
> and fish. It is not unusual for a city in FreeCiv to have 2 or 3 whales;
> this I found was
> rare in Civ2.
The number of special tiles can be set through the 'specials' server
variable. I agree this is one of the reasons small cities win out.
One option is to set specials to 0.
> Coastal cities. I suspect that this is why players seem to build more
> cities on the coasts;
> I'm sure there are also strategic reaons for this, but I'm sure the
lure of
> whale bonuses that
> allow the production of large quantities of settlers is irresistible to
> ICS-players.
Yes, this is an important reason. Whales have everything: growth,
production, and trade. But they are not the only reason for coastal
settlement. In 1.8.0, there were no whales, and cities only needed a
foodbox of 10 to grow to size 2, so most cities would concentrate on
production; but the capital and the immediate surroundings need to
generate trade (until you reach Republic) and therefore were best
settled at the coast (with a fish special).
Whales can be removed or modified in rulesets if you think they are
too powerful.
> Location. From memory, I recall that locating a city in Civ2 was a
> challenge; finding the right
> site with the right combination of resources to assure sustained growth
was
> difficult.
> In FreeCiv, I find that I can plop a settler almost anywhere, build a
city,
> and it will
> survive. This leads me to believe that ICS is favoured by FreeCiv's
> overly-bountiful maps.
Just play with the server variables ...
> Golf courses. One more thing. From memory, I recall that Civ2 produced
what
> we nicknamed
> "golf courses", relatively large grassy areas with few other resources; I
> have not seen this in
> FreeCiv's maps. FreeCiv appears to produced completely random
distributions
> of square types,
> with little or no concentrations of single types of squares - deserts,
> "golf courses", etc.
>
> Randomness. I expect that this randomness would also favour ICS;
> concentrations of land types
> would favour the growth of certain cities and hinder the growth of others
> - ergo, more variety in
> the city populations and production capacities.
I'm not sure: mountains, forest and desert seem to be grouped.
You must realise that map generation in Freeciv must attain a higher
standard of fairness than in Civ II: most *human* players find it very
important to start with equal opportunities. A lousy starting position
can spoil your whole game and the Freeciv generators are quite good at
avoiding this.
You can study the details at
http://www.freeciv.org/lxr/source/server/mapgen.c?v=cvs
Also, I don't think changing this would affect the balance between
small and large cities. The reason cities don't grow large is that
players *force* them to stay small, because having many small cities
is so advantageous. Cities must grow as fast as possible - but only
to size 2!
> Summary.
> My point is that ICS is not only a symptom of city proliferation, it is a
> symptom of
> randomness, which ensures that all cities can develop nearly equally, or
> just enough, and an over-
> abundance of resources, which makes it too easy to produce large
quantities
> of settlers.
I do not think 'randomness' affects ICS. Existing server variables can
affect it much more. Try them out, especially the 'specials' variable.
> Robaire
--
Reinier
