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Hello again, all. I don't know how many folks here played SMAC, but I'm fairly comfortable in saying it was a lot of us. And I'm also fairly sure those of us who have, remember Vel's discussion of city placement paradigms. He mentioned a model folks had tried based on the AI Yang player's spacing (known as the Yang Model, or the Infantry Defense Model). In short, each base/city was spaced three squares apart (i.e. 2 squares between). When connected with roads, defensive infantry could move from any one base to any other nearby base in a single turn, never having to stay outside a base where they would be vulnerable. Worse yet, with mag-tubes, it became nearly impossible to take and hold a base of that sort!
Now the model itself is a good idea, I think, even in Civ3. But there was something else I was curious about. I realized that, in order to produce culture, you gotta have cities. That's obvious. But you can only build one improvement in any single city... one temple, one cathedral, and so forth. I also recalled people saying it was nearly impossible to win a cultural victory the 100,000-total-points way. And it all clicked...
...why not use the close-spacing model EXPLICITLY to build as many culture-producing improvements as possible with the least amount of land? This is particularly true when you consider how quickly you maximize your territory - because there's so much overlap, nearly every square will be used before aqueducts, and afterwards, just about every city will be able to operate at capacity without hospitals. No hospitals means no excessive pre-Ecology pollution from population, although it would admittedly hurt the city defense-wise... but you can always migrate most of the workers from a couple close-by cities to the "major" one... all you really need to do in some of the cities is rush-build a temple, cathedral, library, maybe a university or something... and let them sit there generating culture. A size 1 city with the same improvements generates just as much culture as a size 32 city, after all.
If through this method you can eventually hit 1,000 culture a turn, you are certain to win the game as long as no one else does and/or kills you in somewhere under 100 turns (depending on when you 'hit' the 1k-a-turn mark, which will probably be fairly late). And THAT is where the Yang defense model helps a bunch - you can shuttle defenders about your empire quickly, thus guaranteeing that, if the enemy takes a city, they won't keep it - if your troops don't take it back, your clustered culture surely would.
I can see potential corruption issues, but perhaps with pop-rushing this method would afford a real chance of a 100,000 culture win in a standard-size game, or thereabouts.
Now the model itself is a good idea, I think, even in Civ3. But there was something else I was curious about. I realized that, in order to produce culture, you gotta have cities. That's obvious. But you can only build one improvement in any single city... one temple, one cathedral, and so forth. I also recalled people saying it was nearly impossible to win a cultural victory the 100,000-total-points way. And it all clicked...
...why not use the close-spacing model EXPLICITLY to build as many culture-producing improvements as possible with the least amount of land? This is particularly true when you consider how quickly you maximize your territory - because there's so much overlap, nearly every square will be used before aqueducts, and afterwards, just about every city will be able to operate at capacity without hospitals. No hospitals means no excessive pre-Ecology pollution from population, although it would admittedly hurt the city defense-wise... but you can always migrate most of the workers from a couple close-by cities to the "major" one... all you really need to do in some of the cities is rush-build a temple, cathedral, library, maybe a university or something... and let them sit there generating culture. A size 1 city with the same improvements generates just as much culture as a size 32 city, after all.
If through this method you can eventually hit 1,000 culture a turn, you are certain to win the game as long as no one else does and/or kills you in somewhere under 100 turns (depending on when you 'hit' the 1k-a-turn mark, which will probably be fairly late). And THAT is where the Yang defense model helps a bunch - you can shuttle defenders about your empire quickly, thus guaranteeing that, if the enemy takes a city, they won't keep it - if your troops don't take it back, your clustered culture surely would.
I can see potential corruption issues, but perhaps with pop-rushing this method would afford a real chance of a 100,000 culture win in a standard-size game, or thereabouts.
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