death to smallpox, episode n+1

I read an insightful comment on smallpoxing on Apolyton by keimig:

http://apolyton.net/forums/showthread.php?postid=2853924#post2853924
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I started and played a game, against AI, using your suggestions, and had
success until the civserver started taking underflow errors. In any case
I was able to remain competative with AI players in the early stages.

I was in the lead but two tech behind another alliance. I had a 5 city
core that was completely build up, it had everything. The other 7 cities
I had were all captured and were invarious states of development.

My most powerful adversary has 17 smallish cities and absolutely no
improvements. I think the most serious component of smallpox is that it
is possible to acquire technolgy w/o building the necessary
ifrastructure.

How can a society with a literacy rate of 0 field soldiers capable of
operating and maintaining Tanks, Jets, etc.

How can a cociety without roads corral the resources necessary to
manufacture reactive armor.

Civ 3 and related rules are no help here because the cure for smallpox
was infinite and crippling corruption.

The problem, in part is the way research is handled, at a minimum
illiteracy needs to be a show stopper regards the development and
acquisition of technology. 

Also the research should be effected by communitations speed. With
horsback it takes 2 turns to move city to city, with roads 1 turn, with
rail 0 turns. At some level of technolgy, the combination of literacy
and communication speed is necessary to have meaningful coordination of
effort.
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I agree that the _lack_ of infrastructure should more effectively hamper
progress.

To what extent is this still relevant with today's Freeciv?

-Daniel