Re: death to smallpox, episode n+1

On Sat, Feb 18, 2006 at 07:31:05AM +0100, Christian Knoke wrote:
> Daniel Markstedt wrote on Feb 17, 18:16 (+0900):
> 
> > I agree that the _lack_ of infrastructure should more effectively hamper
> > progress.
> 
> Maybe other buildings the libraries and universities should moderately
> increase science production, too?

I doubt that would help; when was the last time you saw an AI with many
improvements, let alone a library.

> Maybe roads, railroads and wonders also should count for nation-wide
> science?

Also unlikely to do any good, because you already get roads and rails
for free inside a city.

IMHO, any solution to smallpox has to address the issue of how much
'free stuff' you get on the city square, or has to enact penalties for
a larger number of cities. Of course technology is just one way you
could limit that.

I do like the idea of slowing things besides troop movement down with
infrastructure, but I think you'd need to tie the number of cities into
that as well. Perhaps a log scale where each additional city contributes
less to science than the one before. This could be modified by the
amount of infrastructure you have so that cities that are connected via
rails are largely unpenalized.

Perhaps a much more effective method would be to severely penalize the
effectiveness of cities that are close to each other, probably
determined by the number of overlapping squares. This is probably quite
realistic as well; IRL if two cities are smack-dab next to each other
they're likely to expend substantial resources in political battles over
various things. One thing to keep in mind is that smallpox isn't
necessarily about the *number* of cities, but how you end up with them
all crammed together.
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