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

[Miguel Farah <miguel@xxxxx>]

 Thomas Strub [14/08/2002 17:53] dijo/said:
>
>On Wed, Aug 14, 2002 at 08:31:34PM +0000, Per I. Mathisen wrote:
>> 
>> On Wed, 14 Aug 2002, Thomas Strub wrote:
>> > many people are complaining about ICS or smallpox. Me not, i like to
>> > build cities like measles. But if want to prevent me from doing that
>> > perhaps the following suggestion will help.
>> >
>> > 1. Increase the number of shields a settler costs with every settler is
>> > build. There are some nuances but they can be discused later.
>> 
>> I don't like this. It undue penalized big maps and players who like
>> playing big empires. Instead, I would increase the cost of ownership for
>> multiple cities. This is the civ way, IMHO.
>
>Thats all a problem of balancing the game. Why 1-10 starting settlers, 
>techcost 5-40 and so on? 
>
>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? 

Some time ago I suggested a statistic for measuring how much of ICS a
player is doing.

I'll repost the relevant part now:

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Date: Fri, 2 Mar 2001 18:58:49 -0300
From: "Miguel Farah F." <miguel@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
To: Mike Kaufman <mkaufman@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
Cc: freeciv-dev@xxxxxxxxxxx
Subject: [Freeciv-Dev] Re: As if we needed another ics solution...

 Mike Kaufman [01/03/2001 19:00] dijo/said:
>
>I haven't looked through the code to see how feasible this is, but...
>
>perhaps adding (as a server option of course) a production penalty might
>be a solution. 
>Ex.: up to a certain number of cities, a chariot, for example, costs X.
>If I would build Y% more cities, then a chariot would cost X+Y to build
>(or whatever algorithm you choose, you could also make it discrete
>increments)

I disagree on this proposal (as it is): it's not the same to have 50
cites, all size 1-2, than having 50 cities, most of them bigger than,
say, size 8.

Most proposals to eliminate ICS, IMHO, forget to pay attention to this
factor.

What I propose is to have first some sort of measure of ICS (an
"ICSmeter") to determine wether penalties of any kind sould be applied.

What I propose is this: we know that a city uses up 21 squares
(including the free city center). An ideal nation that has NO
overlapping cities of any kind, will control exactly 21*N squares
(N=number of cities).

ICSmeter will defined as this: 

            squares occupied by a nation
   I := 1 - ----------------------------
            21 x number of cities owned

(a square is considered occupied by a nation even if its owned by an
enemy - that can't be counted against the player)

Now, and ideal nation will have I=0%.

A nation that places 25 cities all in a square grid, all at distance 1
will have I=1-(165/(21x25))=68,6% and commits HEAVY ICS.


Considering the defects of the terrain, and conquered cities, an I=0%
will be unattainable, and therefore an index of, say, up to 15% should
be acceptable.

Nations with a bigger index should then begin suffering penalties.

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