Do you think ICS has been solved adequately?

[Dominae]

Originally posted by 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.

Just to clarify my idea: it's not the city's tile alone that would contribute toward the "quality" rating of that tile, but it and the 20 (21?) surrounding ones. So if you build on a Desert the city could very well be productive if the tiles surrounding it are really good (it would be better if that Desert tile were a Grassland, but not by much).

I'm not a big fan of directly relating terrain to happiness as you propose; it's a bit counter-intuitive (see MOO and GalCiv). It makes sense that terrain should directly affect production. Population problems should be kept seperate and be dealt with seperately. In other words, you've settled in a fertile/productive area, but unless you keep your populace happy, you'll lose control; the people are not going to be happy by default just because there are some great iron ore mines next to their homes.

[Maniac]

Would simply changing population growth so that growing from eg size 7 to size 8 requires the same number of food as growing from size 1 to size 2 (instead of 7->8 requiring 80 food and 1->2 20 food) solve ICS?

[Dauphin]

No.

Consider that each population growth requires the same amount of excess food - 20 food lets say - to grow. Also assume the excess food per tun is a fairly standard at 2 so that a city's pop will increases by one every ten turns. A size 1 will double population in ten turns. A size 10 will double in 100 turns. That is, even with a constant food box size 10 size 1's are 10 times more useful than a single size 10.

In order to eliminate food growth advantages the food box size would have to decrease as an inverse function of size. e.g 100/X where X is the city size. A size 1 has a food box of 100 to fill, a size 2 has a food box of 50 to fill, a size 4 has 25, a size 10 has a food box of 10 to fill.

I would welcome this ammendment to the classic model, but I think it will have its detractors due to its counter-intuitive feel of less food for more people.

[Arrian]

Dom,

Hmm, ok, I went too far with the happiness-based-on-terrain thing. However, now I'm a little confused as to what you're proposing.

This

In other words, you've settled in a fertile/productive area, but unless you keep your populace happy, you'll lose control; the people are not going to be happy by default just because there are some great iron ore mines next to their homes.

sounds like a description of how things are now (CivIII). How would the "quality rating" come into play here? A city built in the middle of a desert in CivIII is going to suck (unless you're agricultural) compared to a city on a river with cows and other juicy terrain. Would the rating just amplify that?

Manaic - I agree that the change in food box size (to the extent that food is still going to be the driving force in pop growth) could be removed to provide less reason for ICS.

But I'd rather have population growth be fundamentally changed (though I'm not exactly sure how), and have food simply be one component of it. It would be interesting to try and have really high pop growth be a problem. Anyway, that's going off-topic, and I haven't thought it through.

-Arrian

[Maniac]

I see what you mean, but:

Originally posted by Dauphin
Also assume the excess food per tun is a fairly standard at 2 so that a city's pop will increases by one every ten turns.

Is that assumption true? If there are tiles that produce more than 2 food, wouldn't it be better for fast population growth to have all those tiles being worked by one big city instead of by a few small cities? Just a wild guess though, as I haven't done the math.

[Dauphin]

The actually excess food doesn't matter, it could be 1 or 100. I chose two to keep the maths basic. If food box sizes are the same size for all cities then the amount of excess food doesn't impact on the relative growth rates.

[Maniac]

I don't understand why it wouldn't make a difference.
I mean the larger the city becomes, the larger the food surplus should become. Not simply eg increasing the food surplus of all cities, both large and small, equally.

Suppose:

Food box of 20 to fill.
Each tile produces 3 food. 2 food is used for population maintenance. 1 is surplus.

10 size 1 cities with 1 food surplus (suppose too there is no base tile worker producing food)
=> 20 turns to double all to size 2.

1 size 10 city with 10 food surplus
=> 20 turns to double to size 20. Or even less since after two turns the city has grown to size 11, the food surplus becomes 11 instead of 10.


Would this not more or less have the same result as you would seek by suggesting this:

In order to eliminate food growth advantages the food box size would have to decrease as an inverse function of size. e.g 100/X where X is the city size. A size 1 has a food box of 100 to fill, a size 2 has a food box of 50 to fill, a size 4 has 25, a size 10 has a food box of 10 to fill.

?

My suggestion wouldn't have a as you say counter-intuitive feel of the more people, the less food needed to grow. It would require most tiles producing more than two food though, so that about each produces a surplus.

[Dauphin]

Oh right, you are talking individual tiles, I was talking the city overall surplus. Your system would work aswell, in fact it would work better.

[Dauphin]

Yeah, increase the food box size, but increase the average food per tile (so that its greater than the amount of consumed food per labourer) and you get around the ICS problems related to growth bonuses a great deal. Because then growth is a function of city size and number of cities and not just of number of cities.

[Dominae]

Hmm, ok, I went too far with the happiness-based-on-terrain thing. However, now I'm a little confused as to what you're proposing. This... sounds like a description of how things are now (CivIII).

Yup, I'm quite happy with how Civ3 seperates production and happiness. It's you not me that brought happiness into this discussion in the first place.

A city built in the middle of a desert in CivIII is going to suck (unless you're agricultural) compared to a city on a river with cows and other juicy terrain. Would the rating just amplify that?

Yes, as I described it, the quality rating would amplify the economic benefits that a city already (in Civ3) gets for just exploiting good tiles. But my idea was not so much to make amazing cities better, but to penalize players for ICS-ing (more specifically, placing cities without consideration for their long-term growth). I was thinking that the penalties would be greater than the benefits with respect to the quality rating. This sounds complicated but it's not, so here's an example:

Bonuses:

Every Bonus Grassland: +1 quality
Every non-Food Bonus Resource: +1 quality
Every Food Bonus Resource: +2 quality
Every River-adjacent tile: +0.25 quality
Tile is fresh water adjacent (no Aqueduct needed): +2 quality

Penalties:

Every Marsh, Jungle or Tundra tile: -2 quality
Every Desert: -1 quality
Every Mountain: -0.5 quality
Every native city within 3 tiles: -5 quality
Every foreign city within 3 tiles: -7 quality
Every native city within 2 tiles: -7 quality
Every foreign city within 3 tiles: -10 quality

Modifiers:

City center tile: +100% of that tiles quality rating
Distance 1 from city center: +25%
Distance 2 from city center: 0%

What the game would then do is calculate the quality of every single tile in the game that a Settler could found a city on. Based on that tile's quality, the city would either have normal/standard production, a production penalty (say, in levels of 10% loss on everything), or in rare cases a production bonus (for those amazing city-sites).

Note that a similar calculation is done in Civ3 to make the AI decide where it wants its cities (sometimes you can guess where it's Settler is going to go...basically it maximizes access to good tiles, without too much overlap with other cities).

As I hope you can see, the idea here is to "encourage" the human player not to ICS by making it prohibitively expensive to do so. A nice side effect is that city placement becomes a lot more interesting, as you try to maximize the bonuses and minimize the penalties as briefly outlined above. What you would definitely not see in such a scheme, something I would be very happy about, is players placing cities in a set pattern (3-tile, etc.) just to use every tile within their borders. To a much greater extent than in Civ3, the lay of the land would dictate where you place your cities.

...but Firaxis is probably cooking up some better scheme, so I'll stop here.

[Dominae]

Originally posted by Dauphin
In order to eliminate food growth advantages the food box size would have to decrease as an inverse function of size. e.g 100/X where X is the city size. A size 1 has a food box of 100 to fill, a size 2 has a food box of 50 to fill, a size 4 has 25, a size 10 has a food box of 10 to fill.

I would welcome this ammendment to the classic model, but I think it will have its detractors due to its counter-intuitive feel of less food for more people.

I also think it would make for bad gameplay. Waiting forever for your first city to grow would simply not do for casual players. Furthermore, with such rapid growth rates at high cities sizes, the game would spiral out of control sometime in the mid-game; remember that as the game progresses, you get "more" stuff (that's the nature of Civ), so if stuff costs less as you progress you're going to end up with more stuff than you can handle attention-wise.

[Urban Ranger]

Originally posted by Dauphin
I thought you were a proponent of cities appearing without the control of the player.

Absolutely. Please note that both of your examples did not arise from people gathering in one area on their own accord.

[Urban Ranger]

Originally posted by Dauphin
Consider that each population growth requires the same amount of excess food - 20 food lets say - to grow. Also assume the excess food per tun is a fairly standard at 2 so that a city's pop will increases by one every ten turns. A size 1 will double population in ten turns. A size 10 will double in 100 turns.

That's a difference between a size 20 and a size 2 city.

Originally posted by Dauphin
That is, even with a constant food box size 10 size 1's are 10 times more useful than a single size 10.

You forgot one thing, even in the current rules, you need to build Settlers which decreases the population in a city.

Suppose you need 2 population points for a Settler, that means you have to wait 20 turns before building a Settler, which will in turn take, hmm, say 10 turns. That's 30 turns before you have a second city. Even if you do nothing but build Settlers for all your cities, it will take 4*30 = 120 turns before you have 16 cities.

[Urban Ranger]

Originally posted by Dominae
Yes, as I described it, the quality rating would amplify the economic benefits that a city already (in Civ3) gets for just exploiting good tiles.

But quality should involve more than just economic growth.

I am against adding huge number of ad-hoc modifications to the existing model to make it work. That only means the model is broken and a new one needs to be created.

[Drachasor]

Originally posted by Urban Ranger


Absolutely. Please note that both of your examples did not arise from people gathering in one area on their own accord.

But they HAPPENED, and they happened for good reasons.

Your system would remove the possibility of duplicating something that really happens, with no real benefit. Again, if you can't cause cities to form close together in your proposal then you are effectively increasing the minimum city distance. Of course, the easiest and most effective system is simply increasing the minimum distance between cities, but most people are against this for some reason.

I don't think it is a good idea to have potentially massive penalties for building a city on bad terrain (beyond the terrain itself). This would make somewhat bad starting locations even worse, and in general make it very difficult to balance starting locations.

If you want some sort of benefit/hindrance to building cities close together, then have a penalty only for overlapping squares. Perhaps each square a city has in its resource radius that overlaps another city, there would be a happiness or corruption/waste penalty. Or, better yet, perhaps there would be a growth penalty (which works best if growth is seperate from food production).

The penalty should be fairly small for a 1-2 square overlap, but get larger fairly quickly for much bigger ones.

Hmm, I suppose it would be nice to add an additional clause; that there is no penalty if the city is using every square in its radius (so you can have smaller, "filler" cities later on), but it isn't a big deal.

Anyhow, whatever the system is it should work to combat the ICS problem only, and curb other aspects of city selection and building as little as possible. You don't need more penalties for building a city in a bad location (poor growth, production, etc will cover that).

-Drachasor