Apolyton CS: Civilization III: The List v1: City Improvments (page 2)

CITY / CITY IMPROVEMENTS
-Summarized by Thread Master: CyberShy-
rplomp@bart.nl

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6. NEW PURPOSES/NAMES FOR IMPROVEMENTS TOP

6.1) Change the graphics for the granary at higher technologies. [HarryKattz]

6.2) City walls should limit city size to 6 or something [Depp]

6.3) Addition: increase maintenance costs for city walls by 1 gold for every three population over 12. This would represent the drag on distribution caused by bottleneck gates and the expense of letting out the seams as the city grows. [HarryKattz]

6.4) I would like to see the deemphasis of city walls as the game progresses.

6.5) Look a round you ... how many cities have city walls anymore? Once the modern age came around, walls were no longer used. [NotLikeTea]

6.6) Airports should be able to handle more than one airlift per turn. Either a flat rate of three or five airlifts per turn, or the number of airlifts depends on the population of the city.

6.7) Build an improvement called Runway. You can have one or many in a city - each one of them allowing one Airlift per turn. When they are not used for airlifting they are used as Caravans a la C:CtP. Each Runway cost one shield a turn, representing the demand of fuel and spare parts for the aircraft.

6.8) You can also have a Dock improvement, allowing "sealifts" and a Railway Station improvement, allowing "rail-lifts". This would certainly reduce micromanagement.

7. OTHER TOP

I have taken the liberty of adding an important issue to this summary that was not submitted to us but which caught my attention several weeks ago on the CtP forum. I have asked Metamorph, from whom I stole the explanation, if I could cut and paste his comments in our list. Although skeptical that anybody would listen, he agreed. (Yin)

7.1) ICS stands for "Infinite City Sleaze." It's a term I seem to have made popular, though the strategy has long since existed before my time under many names, including way back in Civ1. My standard example of ICS goes like this: Imagine you have a city of size 5, and I have five cities of size 1. We have an equal number of 'population points'. Now as we all know, whenever you make a brand new city in CtP (or any of the civlike games for that matter), you produce on 2 tiles. You produce on the tile that the city occupies; and you produce on 1 tile for each allocated worker, which is 1 in the case of a new city. Basically the formula is, you work on P+1 tiles, where P is the current city population. So your city of size 5, impressive as it looks, produces on 6 tiles. My five cities of size 1, on the other hand, produce on 10. So by default I'm getting more production, nation-wide. But wait, there's more: Since I can place these cities wherever I want, I can take advantage of all sorts of natural resource bonuses: river; beaver; that sort of thing. Each city also has its own production bonus in CtP, multiplied in my nation by 5. - My nation will gain population much faster, since my food-produced-to-food-eaten ratio is significantly lower than yours, due largely to the two aforementioned factors.

ICS is the strategy that focuses on exploiting this economic imbalance. Simply build cities nonstop. Flood the world with them. City after city after city. Build them even 2 squares apart; overlap is meaningless, since these cities will always be very small. Build to make use of every single river square you can find. Open as many huts as possible to get more settlers to make more cities. Etc, etc, etc. The resulting growth rate is exponential. As noted in other threads (and I'll apparently word this very carefully now), I once achieved a 700 BC space launch in Civ2 on a large-map Prince game. I've gotten a 1400 BC space launch with similar settings in Civ1. I have yet to bother to build aliens in CtP; I end up so far ahead of the AIs that I just quit. Purposeless micromanagement gets boring...

The 'cure' for ICS is not as simple as one might think. House rules for ICS can only go so far; when exactly am I sleazing, after all? It's very difficult to define. The government limitations in CtP, supposedly designed to stop ICS, don't. Lowering the limits does stop ICS, but at the sacrifice of the capacity to take over the world, which is silly.

Various other economic proposals have been made to slow down or halt ICS. But I personally feel the crux of the matter is the very issue that ICS abuses: the mere fact that simply by creating a city, you magically harvest from two tiles with only 1 population.

7.2) Works of Art: Build works of art that could be pillaged or stolen on the capture of a city and which could survive from ancient times to the present.

7.3) Unit Prerequisites: Some unit chassis and weapons require improvements to be built before the unit itself can be done. In this case, extra city improvements will be needed in order to produce units - about 15 - 20 new structures need to be designed (spanning the whole of history). [Shining1]

7.4) Obsolescence: City improvements must become inactive when technology gets better. (like wonders don't work forever) and be replaced with others. [CyberShy]

7.5) Reduce The Number of Improvements: Civilization I had a reasonable number of improvements, and it was still a management nightmare to "max out" a city. In Civilization II, I rarely even bother any more because there's just a never-ending list of gotta-haves. [Mark_Everson]

7.6) The Private Sector: As a city grows, the player may get messages like "A private enterprise applies to build a Factory in London." You cannot take use of privately owned buildings' production, but they will give you tax income. [Ecce Homo]

7.7) More ancient improvements: How about public bathes like in Ancient Greece and Rome? Burial grounds, which become modern day cemeteries? In feudal times you had Keeps, which watched over the surrounding area, these could be similar to a Headquarters, but not quite as powerful. [Travathian]

7.8) Better population growth models: Population growth is affected not only by available food, but also by birth rates and death rates. Thus, there should be improvements that reflect this. At the least, things such as the Aqueduct, Drug Store/Pharmacy, and Hospital in C:CtP should have a large effect on maximum city size, an effect that could be generated by having them result in increased food. [wheathin]

7.9) Better modeling of sanitation/health as affecting city growth. [don Don]

7.10) Upgrades: Allow upgrades, with the existing improvement counting for 50% of the cost of the new improvement. [Wheathin]

7.11) Decreasing costs for improvements: As the game progresses, while established cities have much higher production levels, newly founded cities take forever to get up to speed. If the costs dropped each era, (maybe with a multiplier, and each imp has an "era" variable) it'd be easier for your cities founded in the 1800's (like most of America) to be worthwhile before 2100.

7.12) Rollover on the build queue: Production that's leftover is applied to the next item built. Important with:

7.11a) Allow multiple builds in one turn so these cheap but needed imps can be finished quickly: "Packages" of cheap imps for later in the game, all built one after another. (In effect, readymade queues of items). Thus, by the modern era, an "ancient package" might include Granary, Marketplace, Church, Courthouse, Coliseum, Aqueduct, Sewer, Library, Public School, and Barracks. By selecting this single "package item" in the build queue, a newly founded city could build all the ancient imps in 2-4 short turns, thus saving a player lots of needless clicks and micromanagement. [Wheathin]

7.13) I would like to see more governance type improvements, and less general type [NotLikeTea].

7.14) Clearer distinctions between the epochs.

7.15) Better modeling of industrial revolution via when improvements become available (earlier!) and what effect they have (cumulative doubling!).

7.16) More improvements that effect trade directly (that's what drives city development in the real world).

7.17) "Improvement potential points." When you get enough for "Industry," the industrialist build a factory, more points, a Power Plant etc. If a city is too small, it can't support the improvement [wheathin].

7.18) Who's going to pay for these improvements? Building improvements needs to compete somehow with building units or cities or keeping people happy or researching technologies:

7.17a) Option 1: You accumulate "Potential" points in addition to tax revenues. (Abstraction: the economy can only expand so fast based on the available resources, so the choice to build one item prevents building of others.) These points could be a global pool, like Public Works, or purely local or a mixture of both (might change Per government as well) There can be an 'build' or 'allowed to build' list for denied petitions. So the player can chose later to build it. The timing and appearance of the demands can depend on: Population of city, Current technology level, Government type, Economic base of city, Industrial capacity and resources

7.17b) Option 2: Building might cause problems as well, in example:

7.17b1) Building the university might anger the religious types.
7.17b2) Factories (without the appropriate regulatory/courthouse improvements - which the government would build directly) would upset the citizens by exploiting them, and might also cause pollution.
7.17b3) Building lots of churches and cathedrals and mosques would give too much power the religious elements at the expense of the crown (but being a democracy could reduce this effect with Freedom of Religion). [wheathin]

7.19) How about prisons/gulags/concentration camps/penal colonies/slave labor facilities. These things were important to the development of many if not all. Some of these "improvements" could be linked to particular forms of government with rewards and penalties for building them. For example, nasty ones such as gulags could be built under nasty forms of government such as communism. They could give some benefits in terms of population control but have a high maintenance cost (and even made a "must build" so you have to bear the cost because its hard to have totalitarianism without them). Under democracy, gulags are automatically disbanded and you get cash back like with barracks currently [Alexander's Horse]

7.20) Improvements that could only be built in one city but that would affect the whole civilization. Sort of mini-wonders that a civilization only needs one of, but which are possible to build by every civilization

7.19a) Hoover / Aswan / Three Gorges Dam
7.19b) Space Program bits (launch centers, etc...)
7.19c) National Defense Command center (a la NORAD)
7.19d) Super Particle Accelerator
7.19e) Royal Court (may or may not be built in the Capital - Versailles is outside Paris)
7.19f) Regional Weather Control station (futuristic, helps with crops and food production)
7.19g) National Museums and Galleries (modern happiness improvements)
7.19h) Olympic Stadium (there must be 15 or 20 of these around the world!)
7.19i) SDI / BMD
7.19j) Stock Exchanges or other major financial improvements

7.21) There should be more negative effects on improvements. This could make for more variety in cities, rather than identical super infrastructure burgs.

7.22) Improvements act different under different governments, in example:

7.21a) Re-education camps: Built under a Fascist government they would decrease the city population by one, but would turn three unhappy people into happy (brain washing). Under any other form of government these centers would be a terrible reminder of a darker past and would create 2 unhappiness in each city they occupy. They would need to be destroyed.

7.21b) Cathedral: Under a Monarchy, Feudal, Tribal and City-State government they would make two unhappy people neutral. In a Republic and Democracy they would do this to only one pop, due to the government no longer favoring one religion. Under a Fascism and Communism, these governments disapprove of religion would lead people to look upon Cathedrals as a relic from the past, and would create two unhappiness due to loss of support for the government to religions. [Cartagia the Great]

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