Natural city model

[Brizey]

The empire-wide resource thing is just an unrealistic as the city based system. Both are extreme-reality is somewhere in between. The city-based system creates a more interesting mathematical scheme. Everyhting is built from groups of low integer count resources from discrete cities. Thus, a human can out micromanage a mediocre AI .

A more fluid, more natural system would make it much harder on the human player. Integer optimization is a harder problem than floating point optimization. The human player can use more readily adaptable heuristics to solve these problems, and thus can beat a canned AI. If the system was pure floating point, a decently coded AI would cream us.

In other words, the unnatural system is what makes civ civ.

[Trifna]

Just in case I wasn't understood, I'm not talking about not having cities. There stil are cities, but their capacities and all is changing. As same as New York is stil a city even if there's not even a physicaly distinction from Washington DC for exemple. What does change is the production of each city and stuff like that.

[Brizey]

Let me clarify what I was saying...

The two extremes of civilization-wide sharing are a purely discrete model and a purely distributed model.

In the purely discrete model, all cities are completely economically and industrially isolated. This means that the cities only cooperate on a strategic level. This is NOT the civ3 model. The commercial production is shared, but the industrial production is not (at least not directly or efficiently).

In a purely distributed model, you really don't have cities, other than as strategic points of reference and outlets of production. This is also not the civ model.

Reality is of course, between these too extremes.


As for the discret integer thingybob, what this does is make it easy for humans to do estimations of outcomes in their heads. We can think things like: in two turns, pigopolis will grow one population point, so I better add another worker to finish that mine on that turn so I can maximize my new citizen's production. All of this fine tuning is tractable because it is based on simple integers and arithmetic. We can exactly predict the outcome of our decisions.

If the system were more complicated, such as distributed production, these types of decisions would be too difficult and we would have to rely more on intuition and guesswork.

[TacticalGrace]

the current game system is already too difficult for the AI. intuition and guesswork are beyond any AI possible in the foreseeable future

[sabrewolf]

ghengis farb actually made the urban city sprawl. check out the creation forum or CFC

[Trifna]

I guess the AI could get something simplified in some way?... I know nothing about technical side of AI but I'd guess that it could be put in a some model and this model could be used as much as the present one. It's only a few new factors to me...