[Freeciv] Re: How to solve ICS - increasing settlercost

[Cameron Morland <cjmorlan@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

On Wed, 14 Aug 2002, Thomas Strub wrote:

> What is a large empire in your eyes?
> 
> My suggestion is to make the growth slower the more cities an empire
> gets. You want to make it more expensive to have many cities. For
> example a production penalty when the empire is getting bigger. Hmm ..
> perhaps we should multiply a term like (100-number of cities)/100 to
> the shieldoutput?

I was thinking that a realistic way to make large empires more difficult
would be to have outlying cities have a certain probability of revolting
in any given turn. This probability would be affected by things like
corruption, happiness, number of nearby revolting cities, etc. This would
simulate the problems often seen by large empires (eg after Alexander's
death).

For a few turns after revolting a city would be under some "provisional
government", but would eventually either form into a new player, or a
nearby player. Other unhappy cities nearby would have a greater
probability of revolting and joining the upstart.

This would mean that players would have to devote some attention to
keeping the empire together, instead of just growing as rapidly as
possible.