Longturn Forum

wieder wrote:To illustrate the difference we could have cities working on 4 tiles away with citymindist 6 and with 3x moves or cities working on 2 tiles away with citymindist 3 and with 2x moves. The current cities on LT40 can work on more tiles than the cities on LT38.

Such drastic CityMinDist creates unrealistic and very annoying problems. In LT38 CMD was 5 and city radius was 3. I didn't realise this at first and later it turned out I have a few strips of unused land that I couldn't use because there were cities on both sides 4 tiles away. Ok, you can say that I am stupid and that players should check the rules, but this thing will happen a lot. And no, repeating stuff in the chat will only help a little. You are simply avoiding the fact that the sole concept of minimum distance between cities is unnatural and unrealistic. If you must, make it at most one tile more than city radius. But it's the wrong thing to do in general.

The happiness issues are there to make the game something else than just war simulator. What else than powerful enough city limits could prevent too probable conquest victory?

You can't have conquest victory with +5/1 unhappiness step. If the base limit is 25, this means that your problem increase gradually, and not steeply, but they do increase.

The actual limits for the land has not been set but the idea is to have enough land for everyone to have - on average - about 70% of the max cities. With 10 cities it could be set to 7 cities and with 30 cities to 21 cities. Now with about 25 cities there could be space for something like 19-20 cities. This could also be 60% or more or less.

So, this basically means that you can't have more than 150% of the average. Ever. Maybe a few more, but simply, with one additional city under those circumstances the cost outweights the benefits. It's a no-brainer, the players don't have to make a decision, the admin made it for them.

In normal games the happiness limits are barely hit. In lots of cases they are never hit.

Yes, and because of this you want to hit the other extreme? What happened to the "golden mean"?

With this kind of setup you could do pretty much anything as you would do in a regular game, except becoming so big you could eat everyone.

The +5/1 also prevents you from eating everyone.

And you could even do that but with very very a heavy price.

No, you couldn't. 10 cities above the limit means 10 more unhappy citizens in every city. Forget it.

I see all these problems as a consequence of the rescaling you started a while ago. You wanted to increase citymindist so you increased city range. With increased city range, the dynamics of the city have also changed so now, in a size-30 city, five more unhappy citizens maybe don't mean so much. But in a size-20 city that would be a real show stopper, not to speak of smaller sizes. Also, I understand that there are people more interested in military than in civilian aspect. Big cities are a charm to them: not much hassle with management and swarms of units to go around and smash things. However, there are people who prefer the other way round. Civilization is supposed to be halfway between Farmville and Warcraft and you keep pushing it toward the latter, even when it doesn't seem like it. You removed the original Granary system, why? So that cities can grow more quickly, so that you can have more stuff sooner. You removed rapture to prevent that way of growing cities, why? Because then Democracy is "too powerful", and if everybody has Democracy, then there is less war, so you move to make "other governments more competitive". In order to make war easier. Well, that is not Civilization. In Civilization you have war, but as means of growing your nation. What you have made it is a game where you grow your nation in order to have war.

Rant over.

One reason for the citymindist is that in real world the town or cities may merge into one at one point of time. If two towns are very close to each other they may eventually grow and merge into one. In Freeciv this is not possible and it's one reason for having pre-defined distances for cities. The two additional reasons are pretty much technical ones.

Without citymindist it wouldn't be really possible to define how many cities the players can fit on a map.

There is also defining the pace of the game. Cities close to each other will allow one turn collapse of empires leading to bad gaming experience. You can say it's about choice. The players should be allowed to make stupid decisions. It's kind of same as forcing the players to have military units inside cities when you are playing with communism or monarchy. Some govs actually encourage you to defend your cities by giving a nice bonus for having military units in cities. Too small citymindist will also render restrictinfra pointless.

It's also nice that the aggressive players will have challenges when conquering enemies. A nation without defensive units and without real restrictinfra would be a nice target but for gameplay almost as bad as an idler. Even while unrealistic and bit unfair there is point in avoiding situations where someone might get idler level boost from conquering someone.

It should become harder to maintain happiness with more cities. Not impossible. With 50 cities you would have 25 additional unhappy and with shakespeare's you would need 9 more citizens to keep the people content. On a city with size 20 and with happiness improvements this would total with about 12 citizens keeping the city happy. With communism you could make this 6 citizens and there it already becomes sustainable. Probably very very hard with democracy, yes.

With 5/+1 you would have only very few unhappy for your cities.

10 more unhappy is not that hard to manage. The entertainers are a really powerful tool if used well.

Removing granary system? Removing rapture? The last game with rapture on LT was LT30. The fast growing cities, if they grow with food, feels much more natural compared to rapture where you basically need +1 food and all the happiness improvements you can get.

In late game Democracy is one of the best govs for war. It's really good for war once you can use entertainers.

One way to allow the growth becoming harder and harder but not that hard from certain limit, would be adding few happiness wonders to help growing from 25 -> 30

wieder wrote:One reason for the citymindist is that in real world the town or cities may merge into one at one point of time. If two towns are very close to each other they may eventually grow and merge into one. In Freeciv this is not possible and it's one reason for having pre-defined distances for cities.

Of course it is possible. Disband one into migrants and settlers and use them elsewhere. That's what I do in some games.

Without citymindist it wouldn't be really possible to define how many cities the players can fit on a map.

You can define how many cities is *optimal* on the map. You will never define how many cities a player will place on the map, limitation or no limitation. This depends on persona style and strategy.

There is also defining the pace of the game. Cities close to each other will allow one turn collapse of empires leading to bad gaming experience.

Experience leads to knowledge, knowledge leads to improving oneself. Who are you to prevent people from this natural path? I thought this is why people play such complex games: to have a learning curve, improve and become masters. Yes, there is a bit of primary satisfaction looking at all the bright colours and moving pieces, but I'd like to believe what most people find most satisfying is controlling a complex system and making it do what they want it to do.

You can say it's about choice. The players should be allowed to make stupid decisions. It's kind of same as forcing the players to have military units inside cities when you are playing with communism or monarchy.

Nobody is forced to do anything. They can keep their cities small or rush to more advanced types of government or put more into luxury or entertainers. Lotsa choices.

Some govs actually encourage you to defend your cities by giving a nice bonus for having military units in cities. Too small citymindist will also render restrictinfra pointless.

This is not "encouragement to defend your cities". This is "historical accuracy". Civilization wasn't made to tweak graphs and numbers so that everything is perfectly balanced and that every strategy has its place. There are good strategies and bad strategies, but what you see as "bonuses", I see as a result of trying to make a historical simulation for people who want to play historical games. Balancing and game-testing came after it was decided what the creators wanted the game to be. You seem to be playing with math without deeper understanding what this game is about. You guys keep playing chess while I want to lead a nation.

(Yes, this may tell something about my personal issues, but hell, even Freud said: show me a normal person and I'll cure him)

It's also nice that the aggressive players will have challenges when conquering enemies. A nation without defensive units and without real restrictinfra would be a nice target but for gameplay almost as bad as an idler. Even while unrealistic and bit unfair there is point in avoiding situations where someone might get idler level boost from conquering someone.

Sorry, which topic are you discussing here?

It should become harder to maintain happiness with more cities. Not impossible. With 50 cities you would have 25 additional unhappy and with shakespeare's you would need 9 more citizens to keep the people content. On a city with size 20 and with happiness improvements this would total with about 12 citizens keeping the city happy. With communism you could make this 6 citizens and there it already becomes sustainable. Probably very very hard with democracy, yes.

Ok, this is something I can understand. However, Shakespeare is another example of what I was saying earlier: you keep changing rules to make things bigger, bigger and bigger, so you have to adjust everything else to get bigger and more powerful, including luxuries and entertainers. How about this idea: remove Shakespeare completely! Or just make it just one more (small) wonder that decreases unhappiness by 1 or 3 citiezns. So you have to spend resources, but it gives you an amount bonus, not a percentage that then grows exponentially.

With 5/+1 you would have only very few unhappy for your cities.

10 more unhappy is not that hard to manage. The entertainers are a really powerful tool if used well.

See above. Maybe entertainers are too powerful.

Removing granary system? Removing rapture? The last game with rapture on LT was LT30. The fast growing cities, if they grow with food, feels much more natural compared to rapture where you basically need +1 food and all the happiness improvements you can get.

Yes, but with liberal granaries this growth continues more and more, while you need to sustain rapture, and this sustaining has a cost. It's another matter that you've made this sustaining too easy with Shakespeare and other bonuses.

Let me put it in a different way: you play Civilization for a while, play hundreds of games, and then someone comes along and says "hey, how about giving a bit more production to something for something". And the first human instinct is, sure, that's good! Because you've played hundreds of games and you were often in a situation where this little bit of production was exactly what you needed, and it is in human nature to want to get more and grow bigger. But then this one thing disbalances some other things that have been finely tuned in the beginning. And I have a feeling that this is what you guys have been doing with the LT series, a number of little tweaks that started innocently, but some tweaks required a patch, and then another patch, and then more patches, and in the end you have a mathematically coherent game, but with suck illogical...ities such as CityMinDistance and the need for such a drastic cutoff needed to prevent someone from conquering the world.

In late game Democracy is one of the best govs for war. It's really good for war once you can use entertainers.

Which is quite the opposite from what it is supposed to be.

We could try to figure out a better way for locating cities on the map, but for LT40 the idea is to have "zoomed in" map with effectively 2x moves and effectively with citymindist smaller than on traditional LT game. It's really the same as having actual 2x moves, smaller working are and smaller citymindist. The actual difference is that the cities now have more options to choose the working tiles.

- with stardard civ2civ2 1x moves (citymindist 2) the cities would have about 21 working tiles and a warrior can travel from city to city in 2 moves
- with regular 2x moves (citymindist 3) the cities would have about 21 working tiles and a warrior can travel from city to city in 1 moves
- with regular 3x moves (citymindist 4) about 45 working tiles and a warrior can travel from city to city in 1,33 moves
- with "zoomed in" pseudo 2x moves (citymindist 6) about 75 working tiles and a warrior can travel from city to city in 2 moves

Shakespeare's is not something that was added just for LT games but it's a standard feature. It's kind of similar to supermarkets, better harbors, rapture growth or something else making your cities easier to manage or grow. We could remove that but it would be a really big change.

The granaries have been adjusted for LT40:

granary_food_ini = 16, 18, 20, 22, 24, 30, 40, 50

Mathematically coherent game? The standard rulesets have some real issues with multiplayer games. Even the multiplayer ruleset has plenty of exploits we have been trying to iron out. Partisans, howizers, nukes with too big range, too few really good govs...

Ideally the game should be balanced enough and logical. Lots of rules we have for the games are logical but there are also lots of stuff having limits just because of balancing the game. For example, there is no really need to obsolete warriors ever. Obsoleting them at some specific is kind of artificial limitation but it works for the game. You could keep building 10 shield units until the end of the game but it would allow your allies to train units with a very low cost. There are lots of stuff like that. With a low citymindist you could build cities on enemy territory with the help of a pre-fort, fort, some military units and workers. Might not be easy but doable and also very unrealistic.

Having the units to disappear when the home city is lost is also kind of unrealistic but it adds to the game and makes it more interesting.

I've been trying to figure out how to make democracy less suitable for war but even removing Shakespeare's wouldn't really do that.