[Freeciv] [ICS] ruleset modifications to disfavor ICS

[Konan Lemee <klemee@xxxxxxxx>]

Nice to meet you -  everybody

This is my first inscription to these discussions.

I read the archives about the all-winning (boring) 
strategy ICS, ie. found cities as fast as possible. I 
saw interesting propositions, including the "more cities 
lower default content citizens of cities". I have others 
to propose, later in this message.

I recognize that a size 1 city work two tiles, while a 
size n only works n+1 tiles, so this is a great 
advantage. This might be hard to change into the code, 
and changing it might prevent poor cities to be built in 
harsh environment, so I don't advise it.

I will discuss building and settlers.

-- Buildings

However, some buildings in the rules are clearly set to 
disfavor big cities :
- cities have to produce, then maintain, buildings 
(temple, cathedral, coliseum) that are only useful to 
prevent unhappiness when city grows bigger than default 
content number.
- cities have to produce, then maintain, buildings 
(aqueduc, sewer system) that give no advantage, but only 
allow to cross a limit.

If someone wants to counterbalance ICS, it is possible 
to modify these buildings. Depending upon your taste, 
you could modify some of these buildings as follow :
- lower their production cost (dividing by two will 
change the rules !)
- lower their upkeep (maintenance) cost (dividing by 
two, rounding down, will change the rules !)
- the extreme possibility is to get completely rid of 
one building (unhapiness ones can be replaced by 
highering the default content citizen, cross limit ones 
can be replaced by removing the limit). This possibility 
might require some code modification, but I got around 
this by keeping the building but at ridiculous costs (1 
shield for building, 0 upkeep).

-- Settlers

As a second part, let us consider settlers (and 
engineers alike). They are essential to ICS, because you 
depend upon them to create your new cities. In the 
general game, settlers build improvements on tiles, and 
sometimes found new cities. In ICS, settlers only build 
road when needed, and found new cities aggressively. 

As founding a city destroys your settler, ICS strategy 
is very concerned about the production cost of settlers, 
while regular game is also concerned about the upkeep 
cost(food especially, but shield also). To disfavor ICS, 
it is easy to increase the production cost of settlers.
Doubling the cost to 80 shields already will be a big 
slow to the ICS, but it better than anyone choose the 
value that fits his tastes.

-- Conclusion

I believe that this kind of modifications, while 
costless and not requiring any code change (already 
supported in FreeCiv), have enough potential to make ICS 
as it is a laughable strategy if you want to go to that 
extreme, or can simply balance the game and allow 
several strategies.

Please feel free to comment (only quoting relevant 
material, sorry for writing so long) on the list or to 
my email.

Konan
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