CityMinDist, city working area and its influence on strategies

[Corbeau]

Let me try to explain why I think a way smaller CMD than the traditional LT setting would be good.

For starters, the way I understand it, larger value has been introduced in order to prevent abuse of building a city on turn change too close to an enemy city and use it as a base for attack. Also, smallpoxing.

I believe smallpoxing is solved by a settler using 2 population to be built. About the abuse, it can be solved by preventing fort(ress) from changing ownership.However, as Wieder told me, this creates a problem for people under Democratic governments who want to wage war. Well, guess what: Democracies (and Republics) are supposed to have more problems when waging war. It is both realistic and is a feature of the original Civilization. (For the record, I find the former argument crucial.) In reality, if a Democracy wants to wage war abroad, then it will simply have to put more into luxuries (propaganda) to keep their citizens content.

(And, for future reference, when I say Democracy, I also mean Republic, although to a bit lesser extent.)

However, what it seems happennned in LT is that all governemnts ended up with the equal base corruption+waste percentage and fortress/tile ownership was introduced to help the Democracy at war. I'm not sure which of those came first, but they ar linked: one helps Democracy at war and the other reduces Democracy's advantage at peace. So now a Democracy is just another government with a different set of numbers, but no different concept that would require a drastically different game strategy. I believe I don't have to emphasize that I consider this bad.

So, to return to the CMD issue. A big CMD value, along with drastically reducing freedom with city placement, has one large consequence when it comes to combat: every city is important as hell. With large distances and large city working areas, all war is waged for the big cities and there is less action between them. If you conquer a city you have made a great victory and, in the long run, have gained a huge advantage.

Also, because of a large CMD, all your cities are basically megalopolis...es. There are no big and small cities and there are no "villages". And if anyone knows anything about wars, he will be aware that wars are usually waged across small towns and villages. They change hands, some are destroyed, but only if a large city falls, it means something.

Furthermore, a very low CMD would enable some new strategies. With large city working area and CMD=1 you could designate one city to be a city centre and concentrate production/science/money there, but then also have "suburbs" to do some smaller stuff and reduce size-induced unhappiness in the big city. Also, with dense population centres, when combat approaches them, there would be an element of "street fighting", conquering block after block with great losses and destruction.

The one problem I see here is that a lot of traditional LT players disdain too much civilian management and favour war, so handling all this would be a nightmare for them.

[wieder]

There is actually one more reason for going with really low citymindist. Something like 3 With LT 3 is considered really low but maybe not ultra low

If the map has poles, some players might be located next to those and there may not be that much land to settle. There it might make sense to allow a smaller citymindist. However this would also require that game to have something like LT40 style limit for the number of the cities.

However it remains to be seen how well LT40 works with the limit for the number of the cities.

[Corbeau]

There is actually one more reason for going with really low citymindist. Something like 3 With LT 3 is considered really low but maybe not ultra low

So... what reason is that?

[wieder]

Very bad starting location.

[Corbeau]

Oh, I misread... I thought you said "a reason to NOT go with low CMD"... Right.

But the thing is, I do prefer poles and also plan to increase city radius gradually and get it around sqr(25) eventually. Realism. Besides, if someone is placed near the pole, it means he has less space, but also less neighbours and is more likely to have peace. Someone in the centre is more likely to end up in a war sooner or later.

[Caedo]

If we're talking about realism (also the previous stuff about suburbs etc.), we might want to not increase granary sizes with city size. Traditionally, cities grow more quickly the bigger they get. Now, of course, in Freeciv, bigger city sizes represent more "population", but that's honestly a useless statistic – you still only get the same number of settlers out of a certain number of city sizes, whether each of them is worth a population of 20k or 500k. So I'd suggest testing how constant-sized granaries work in a future game.

[Corbeau]

In LT granary is almost constant most of the time. Check civ2civ3 ruleset. Or was it Bardo's modification of civ2civ3 ruleset?

Edit: basically, granary is made that way to compensate for lack of rapture in Democracy and effectively amounts to same, only you don't need Democracy for it.

[Caedo]

to compensate for lack of rapture in Democracy and effectively amounts to same, only you don't need Democracy for it.

Which basically takes away some of democracy's uniqueness and makes all governments more similar and thus more boring.

[Corbeau]

Technically, yes, but I'm still not sure if rapture is a good thing. Most of the people here think it isn't, I'm not so sure, but I do have my doubts.

[wieder]

The flat corruption+waste level for all the govs comes from civ2civ3 ruleset. In LT40 there are gov specific units so that they no longer are the same. Some wonders like Mausoleum of Mausolos were also removed. That one made the governments too similar by removing the ability to incite cities.

With the rapture there are lots of problems with making some govs too powerful. If you don't go republic early, you will lose. There is almost no way around it. The new granary sizes in LT games replace the rapture by making it possible to grow relatively fast. Not every turn but every second anyway. Also growing fast has a heavy penalty for production. You usually need to use grassland.