Do you think ICS has been solved adequately?

[Vince278]

Originally posted by lajzar
Agreed. And not just wonders. Most improvements should have some kind of minimum population requirement.

And this is the biggie. It should definitely be implemented. Strangely enough, it isn't even a new idea - it was in Master of Magic.

Both are excellent ideas. The one was a favorite part of MoM, I had almost forgotten about that.

[lajzar]

Another thought...

Solar plants should take up a huge amount of area. Given that the sun gives 1.4 kw/m2 when giving direct light, if you assume a 45 degree latitude and account for day/night cycles, you are down to 1/4 of that. This means to get a 1000 MW solar plant at maximum theoretical efficiency, you'll need to gather from a field of 3 km2. Factor in current efficiency ratings, and you're easily looking at 20 km2.

Perhaps the solar plant should force you to use up a tile? I'd suggest that hydro plants and wind power plants also require a tile.

[Vince278]

When you get to that size you may as well make the solar plants orbital. I always thought space was largely ignored in Civ although I didn't entirely like how CtP handled it either.

[lajzar]

1000 MW is pretty large for a plant I admit. When it comes to advanced plants, I decided to flip through simcity and see what they had...

(asterisked ones are already in civ)

Numbers below are my guesstimate for production and pollution indices.

*Coal -- 1.5 -- 1.5
Gas -- 1.5 -- 1
*Nuclear -- 1.5 -- 2/3 (ie no pollution change)
Wind -- 1.5 -- 2/3
*Hydro -- 1.5 -- 2/3
*Fusion -- 2 -- 0.5
*Solar -- 1.5 -- 2/3
Microwave -- 2 -- 0.5
Antimatter -- 2.5 -- 0.4

Wind, hydro, and solar will require a tile. The tile is still useable, but the large area requirements of the improvement mean that normal tile improvements cannot be built there.


- Wind should require hills or mountain in the city radius.

- Solar should require that the city be close to the equator (max 45 degrees north/south)

- Hydro should requrie a river in city radius.

The microwave plant is basically an orbital solar collector and a huge antenna type receiver to receive the beamed energy. You don't want that energy beam to miss! Certain of these power sources should have a small chance of catastrophic failure.

[Kuciwalker]

The only real danger from microwave is really just that planes might fly into the beam and get fried.

[Vince278]

Originally posted by lajzar
- Wind should require hills or mountain in the city radius.

Some of the consistantly windiest places I've been to were quite flat over huge areas. When I was in Oklahoma it was so consistantly windy that I've seen many trees growing at a slant.

[lajzar]

Originally posted by Kucinich
The only real danger from microwave is really just that planes might fly into the beam and get fried.

I did note that you don't want that beam to go off-course. As long as it is running properly, it generates no pollution (no more than if it wasn't there in the first place anyway). But when it goes wrong, it will go wrong badly. Imagine that beam gets mis-aimed and does a runner through a residential zone. The only danger is from catastrophic failure situations, a danger that doesn't apply to most conventional power sources.

[Kuciwalker]

I did note that you don't want that beam to go off-course. As long as it is running properly, it generates no pollution (no more than if it wasn't there in the first place anyway). But when it goes wrong, it will go wrong badly. Imagine that beam gets mis-aimed and does a runner through a residential zone. The only danger is from catastrophic failure situations, a danger that doesn't apply to most conventional power sources.

Except the beam is a constant thing, it's always pointing at the receiving station. And even if it did sweep through a residential neighborhood, that would have no effect whatsoever on civ scales. So a few thousand people die, absolute max? Who gives?

[Dauphin]

How you can you be so sure the beam will always point the right way? The transmitter would constantly be re-aligning to the correct direction, mechanical or software error could mean its no longer pointing in the right direction. Anyway, I think a city that just had a 1,000 people killed by an errant satellite might just be unhappy about it.

[Kuciwalker]

So maybe you'd see 1 more unhappy face. Really, it's a completely minor thing on civ scale.

[Urban Ranger]

Originally posted by Dauphin
Just like Las Vegas in the middle of the Mojave and Quito at an altitude 9,000 ft?

Exactly. They are against population mechanics.

[Dauphin]

I thought you were a proponent of cities appearing without the control of the player.

[Drachasor]

Originally posted by Dauphin
How you can you be so sure the beam will always point the right way? The transmitter would constantly be re-aligning to the correct direction, mechanical or software error could mean its no longer pointing in the right direction. Anyway, I think a city that just had a 1,000 people killed by an errant satellite might just be unhappy about it.

That assumes there isn't extensive software testing to make sure it will work, which I suppose depends on the government. A reminder of how the US runs its nuclear power plants compared to how the USSR did is in order. (I trust I don't need to elaborate anymore than this).

It would be relatively easy to set things up so that you wouldn't hit anyone. GPS satellites already provide the necessary precision to avoid hitting anyone (just give the collector buffer-room), and there are already no-fly zone provisions in law systems. There's nothing to be afraid of.

It would probably be very expensive to implement though, given our current launching technologies.

-Drachasor

[Max Sinister]

Originally posted by Dominae
IMO, two things are needed to fix the ICS problem:

1. A few big cities needs to be better than many small cities.

Civ3 tried to achieve this with its Corruption system, but more or less failed (although it was a drastic improvement over its predecessors). The reason is that ICS and the "big cities" strategies reach economic parity far too late in the game: until the late Medieval or early Industrial, ICS-type city placement always beats out a sparser arrangement; only with the advent of Industrialization does it really make sense to have a small number of powerul cities.

I have to admit, it's realistic... until the industrial era, most cities (except a few capitals and other important ones) were very small. BTW, IMO industrialization should have a much greater impact. Factories are way to expensive if you consider that they give such a low production bonus.

Originally posted by Dominae
Many good such incentives have been proposed above. I would like to add:

a. Wonders can only built in cities of size >x.
b. Only cities of size >x generate Culture.
c. Cities of size x can only benefit from y Luxury resources.

Good ideas.

[Arrian]

In response to Dominae's 2nd idea:

I'm not sure I like the idea of having the city tile itself have much of an effect besides possibly happiness (which in turn could have an effect on other things). Building on a desert tile, IMO, should not directly effect production. But indirectly, because the people are pissed off you plunked them down in a desert, it wouldn't be as good as a city built on grassland next to a river.

Additionally, I think the happiness bonus/reduction should be calculated not only based on the city tile itself, but also based on the full radius of the city (this is where other cities nearby would come into play - other cities actually falling within the 21-tile radius should result in a nasty happiness hit, say -2). Two cities built on grassland next to rivers are not necessarily the same. Maybe one has some wheat and 2 wine tiles. That's gonna be a happy place (+3?). The other city may have no really good bonus tiles. It will still be nice (+1?), but isn't going to match up to the wine city in happiness.

...

Another thing I was pondering: Dominae correctly states that a big factor in the ICS issue is that fewer, bigger cities don't overtake an ICS layout until the mid-industrial age, once hospitals & factories and whatnot show up. Boiled down to its basic component, this is about the size12 cap.

How about this:

Cities with a Great Wonder or a certain level of culture can keep on growing. That won't have a huge effect, because there are only so many wonders of the world, and I was envisioning a high number for the culture limit.

But hows about adding in some sort of medieval version of a factory that can only be built in cities size 10 or larger? A guild hall or somesuch. Less powerful than a factory, or more expensive in upkeep, or both, but still good enough to be worth building. Available with Invention...

-Arrian