Does CTP2 plan to control ICS?

[Nazgul]

Salutation,

From what i could understand : ICS seems to relate to the overcontroled spamming of cities without much penalities therefore giving the player an unfair advantage over the AI (correct me if i'm wrong)

SMAC had a quick and dirty solution for that kind of problem but it still allowed too much ICS from my point of view.

So does CTP2 have a better solution or will rely on the same principle of SMAC?

My personnal idea of a solution was to have to build a main capital (city improvement) that would allow the construction of more smaller capitals (province) that would permit a much larger and uniform control over the empire.

Mind you, main and smaller capitals would cost money to build and to maintain (drawing much ressources) buraucraty being such as it is. So that player or AI would not over do it too much.

*I am kind of new to all that civilisation stuff (SMAC being my first civ game) so forgive me if that question was already answered somewhere before or if i'm way off of topic here*

Nazgul

[Big Dave]

The other part of the problem is that one settler creates one city with 2 population. so by costing a different city one pop (losing one tile worked) you get 2 tiles worked at a new location. This is one reason the AI always packs it's cities so close together: Moving a settler is wasting production time on the new tiles.

I believe that the way CTP2 is handling this is that tiles are worked on a "first come, first served" basis. Unlike the old system all the tiles in the city radius are worked. Let's assume that the two astisterisk (*) and the number sign (#) in the diagram below are cities and each number is a tile. If # is a size 2 city it will control tiles 5 and 4. If * is a size 5 city it will control tiles 3, 2, and 1. When # expands to size 5 it will not get control of tile 3, even if it puts a military unit on it.

#54321*

This is my understanding of the new system. All city names, tile numbers, and city sizes and radii are fictional and are used soley to express the concept as I understand it. I could be way off base here.

Anyone from Actvision want to set us straight in here? Puh-leeze?

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Big Dave

If a pig looses it's voice is it disgruntled?

[TheLimey]

I believe from what i've read that there isn't any such thing as the placement of workers any more... I thought that it was all being handled on an average production of the total usable squares times the city size... then again, I could be wrong too.

This might suck for ICS, since it doesn't penalize close cities, unless they've figured in some form of penalty for close cities.

[Big Dave]

No, it does stink for close cities. Only the first city to include a tile in it's city radius will ever have control of that tile. The only thing I'm not certain about is whether or not that applies to the "free" worker that is on the city tile itself. If city 1 (founded 1st) builds up to a radius of 2 (the normal Civ/CTP tile coverage) and a new city is build 1 tile away the new city will only get "credit" for working the tiles that city 1 isn't working. So city 2 doesn't have as much land to work.

But now I think I see what you're saying. From what I've read elsewhere the city radius expands when all the tiles are being worked at 100% capacity. So the city radius for city 2 should expand faster than that of city 1, until one of them is entirely hemmed in by the city radius of the other. Activision, please tell me you've already thought about this?

Oy, my head is starting to hurt....


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Big Dave

If a pig looses it's voice is it disgruntled?
[This message has been edited by Big Dave (edited August 20, 2000).]

[TheLimey]

Its unclear at this stage, exactly how city growth is going to be formulated. What we do know, is that there won't be 'farmers farming squares', but a uniform farming instead. Dependent on how much control we have of growth, that may to some degree prohibit ICS in its current form.

However, all ICS really is, is a player using growth advantages of small cities pumping out settlers as fast as possible, which is especially useful, since small cities grow faster.

I don't want small cities to stop growing faster; otherwise, its pointless to build later on, but there has to be either a limiting factor or a cost limiting the growth at the ICS extremes, that ranges from difficult to impossible.

There is already an effective method in CtP1, that just needs to be toned up, and set for the map size, to prevent ICS already. You can set empire size limits and capital distance penalties. These both affect happiness, in the case of the empire size limit, all cities, and in the case of capital distance, each individual city having its own modifier.

They are set by government, so early government forms can't expand rampantly, without extreme happiness penalties causing production loss and ultimately rioting, which makes the cities an albatross rather than an asset, add to this captured cities adding to the total, and you can make your empire unstable with too rapid growth.

We have had discussion of this in this forum; by one of my posts More roots of evil and their solutions which was a follow on from a Civ3Suggestion topic. I do believe that the Wonders o' the world... the root of all evil? thread also ties into this interwoven balance problem.

Ultimately, we need to somehow balance the playing field, for the human and AI, to have a challenging, and hence stimulating and fun game. This isn't a problem for those content to beat up on the AI, and people at the other spectrum can set there own arbitrary rules, like the OCC challenge, which is fine in and of itself, but seems a ludicrous limitation to me.
[This message has been edited by TheLimey (edited August 20, 2000).]

[Big Dave]

Activision? Is there a chance we can get a pre-release answer to this question? Please?

[Gedrin]

You know I'd love to see this:

Tiles are worked by empires, not cities.

In otherwords:
National borders are (I presume) based on city placement and populations. ALL tiles within that border are worked from 0 to 100%.

Here's how.
Sum up all food/prod/gold produced by ALL tiles in your borders. Place into 3 pools:
food * (# of Tiles)/(# of Workers) - (Max 100%)
prod * (# of Tiles)/(# of Workers) - (Max 100%)
gold * (# of Tiles)/(# of Workers) - (Max 100%)
Give each city
food * (# of Workers)/(Total # of workers)
prod * (# of Workers)/(Total # of workers)
gold doesn't matter. Even in CtpI gold is global.

They're already moving to where you can send food to other cities why not include production and just make it part of the whole.
Now some would say, yeah but there are some useless tiles and I have control over enough tiles to not work them at all. Ok says I... then just order the tiles and pluck tiles equal to the total # of workers off the top to be worked.

This would also make individual city placement FAR less important while not dimishing overall terrain importance. By this I mean a size 1 city could be placed in the middle of a huge ice field and grow as well as another size 1 city in your empire but it is still not contributing anything because the tiles that it adds to your national boundries suck! In addition a city placed entirely within a larger city's influence adds nothing but it's population to the pools and might at well be part of the larger city.

This seems a lot better IMO than a first come first served basis for worker placement and not to mention I believe it is more generic = less complex = less prone to exploitable bugs.

Gedrin

[hexagonian]

The only problem that I see with this is that it will take the challange out of maintaining your cities. If you have control over a good area, then none of your cities will lack for anything. Personally, I like the fact that I have to struggle to get certain cities to grow/produce.

City placement should be based on terrain - especially in the early game. This is historically accurate.

Having said that, I can see this concept being placed into effect in the later game (as per crawlers in SMAC) as long as there there are some losses imposed (spoilage) based on distance.

[Gedrin]

Well it certainly takes the micro-management out of it.

And yes it is true that if you have control over a good area then none of your cities will lack for anything. But an individual city might not contribute much to the overall economy and if more than half of your cities are operating at a deficit then you will have a serious problem.

However in the early game you have fewer cities and fewer workers hence fewer tiles that you can work and therefore you want the average of those tiles to be the best you can (in the first method that is). Therefore city placement becomes less important as you get control over more and more terrain.


In the second method you effectively have all the workers at a city location that sucks able to work tiles that are in another city's sphere. Which no, I don't think is good.

Another method is to first include in the sample set of tiles to be averaged, for each city, one tile per worker in the city (process smallest cities first of course to preclude deadlocks from small cities entirely contained in a larger city's sphere). Then give each city a proportional amount based on their population.

Hehehe... as for spoilage based on distance.
IIRC from my university days (big if on that one, it's been a while) I believe that is the minimum routing cost spanning tree problem, a very hard problem perhaps even NP-hard (which means no algorithm exists to solve in polynomial time) I can't recall exactly. Meaning the only way to prove that you have found an optimal solution is to compare with all the other possible solutions. The part that makes it really hard is that either you *cannot* prove algorithmicly that you have all the solutions or you *can* prove there are an infinite number of solutions.

Our wonderful human brains are able to interject a dose of common sense and prune all but a small set of solutions to come up with a solution in blink of eye, relatively speaking. So all we need to do is program common sense.

There are estimation algorithms for such things however.

Gedrin