Re: How to solve ICS - increasing settlercost

On Thu, 15 Aug 2002, Per I. Mathisen wrote:

> There should be a clear reason why a player should build city
> improvements, and I think that should be to get tax, science, luxury and
> access to advanced units. Unfortunately, it is currently possible get all
> four without any improvements at all. This is the problem.
> 
> If we want to make buildings not irrelevant, we should make them better. I
> have already suggested doubling science bonuses of all buildings and
> doubling research cost. If this is not sufficient, this can be combined
> with giving most units gold upkeep and doubling buildings' tax bonuses. If
> _that_ is not sufficent, we can require that very advanced units like
> tanks, mech inf etc are built in cities with adequate mass production
> facilities (ie factory), that diplomats require Courthouse, or ...
> something, you get the idea.

I have always thought it strange that lightbulbs accumulated researching 
one tech can suddenly be deemed to have been working toward a different 
tect entirely. Thus I already had reason to think it might be good to 
throw away old lightbulbs any time that you change your research goal.

If one is prepared to do that, then it ought not be too hard to make 
research of certain techs require certain buildings. For example, any tech 
that has University among its ancestors in the tech-tree could require 
lightbulbs from cities that have a University. If you choose to research 
such a tech, suddenly your lightbulb production is effectively limited to 
only those cities that have Universities.

This would open to question "what happened to all the other potential 
research". So a more general solution would be to allow research on a 
per-city basis instead of on a per-civilisation basis.

I noticed someone suggested ideas such as without a harbour it might be 
hard to research improvements in sea-related tech or units. With per-city 
research that would maybe become more reasonable too.

The per-city research goals idea is however quite a major change, so an 
alternative suggestion as to what happens to all the "potential" research 
would be that it is in effect "hobbies". It is people "playing" at stuff 
that their civilisation has not chosen to regard as "progress" and to 
embrace, thus it is for game purposes a form of "luxuries". So maybe give 
each city that lacks the crucial building one "luxuries" point for every 
two (or three, or whatever) "wasted lightbulbs".

The idea of allowing unit production to be able to depend upon buildings 
is also good. If you truly think that a city of 10,000 population is 
really meant to be a mere "village" as some people's use of words seems to 
imply, then maybe even a smithy could be a notable enough establishment to 
be counted as a city improvement and be required for bronze working 
(Phalanxes) or at least for iron working (Legions).

Would starting without a Palace have much effect upon smallpox? Maybe 
making them at least want to build a capital city?

Another idea would be to make research of tech as an attribute of a 
civilisation - a transmittable thing communicable throughout a population 
- require a "school" building, so that no city that lacks a "school" can 
produce any lightbulbs at all. Schools would require some tech such as 
"culture" or "language" or both that Civ and FreeCiv seem to already 
assume all civilisations, and in particular all units capable of founding 
cities, possess. Personally I think that assumption causes the game to 
start a little late; one of the scenarios I had been working on and want 
to work on again is a "Quest for Fire" scenario that will explicitly put 
some combination of language, domestication, culture and fire into the 
tech tree and have some combination of them be prerequisites to the 
city-founding capability.

-MarkM-

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