From your answer, it seems that rehoming food vans is part of the FCT ? But, if so (and if I'm right about the current rules), why allow FCT and not rehoming ?
A very insightful question!
First, I'll say for those that don't know:
merely rehoming a food caravan/freight is not (and never was) the FCT!
The FCT is when one city delivers multiple food freight, and
does not suffer a food penalty.
Rehoming can abuse the FCT even more: for instance, REHOMING multiple food freight allows one size one city to, in essence,
feed several hundred cities (if you rehome all food freight to one tiny city, before delivering it). This avoids any real "penalty" for gushing out all that food, and "insulate" the food givers from the original game balance that Brian Reynolds tried to implement (e.g., for one city to be gorged on food requires another to give it up).
Exactly
why rehoming of trade freight is not allowed in GOTMs anymore, I have not yet had time to read about.
There are 2 general schools of thought on trade rehoming:
There are 2 ways to rehome: with the normal menu, and with a shortcut key. One works, the other does not. Clearly, there is a game bug in one of the 2 methods of rehoming.
1. School #1: Rehoming trade is OK. The basis for this is Civ 2 units are allowed to rehome, the city menu allows trade rehoming, as normal rehoming of Civ 2 units, but the short-cut key, "h" is bugged. It has a pop-up window that says "You cannot change the home city of a trade unit." And if you do not use the short-cut key, you never even know about the shortcut-key bug.
2. School #2: Rehoming trade is not OK. This view takes the opposite approach. The normal game menu is the thing that is 'bugged,' and the shortcut key is the 'correct' action (preventing rehoming).
My view is the long-time
School #1. Civ 2 allows it, it makes sense to me, it is consistent in a gaming sense, and so I strongly think it is OK to rehome freight in Civ 2. Gamewise, it is good.
And (as if game abstractions are of paramount attention) it makes sense to me in "real life." The trade is produced in one location, must be transported (at great expense in some fashion, like RR, Airports, ships, roads...), and it takes TIME (except RR, wich is a gross abstraction in Civ 2 anyway). Especially in early game, the controlling city (the city that takes possession of a caravan) must wait for transport, and you are penalized by not having a delivered asset in the interium. The middle-man (the controlling city that homes the caravan) "contracted" the goods, and will then use his/her "supply chain" to resell at the best rate and reap the profits. In an extreme analogy, the goods might have been produced as "slave labor" then brought to the big city, added value, and then transported for delivery... at a good profit.
As a game device, and at every level, trade rehoming is OK in
my own book. But when Civ2 is played as a GOTM game, and the GOTM rules currently say no trade rehoming, then it is no trade rehoming in GOTMs (unless there is a valid strategic reason, like loss of the home city)
.
As for the
food rehoming, one philisophical reason I don't like it is that it can drive gameplay times up geometrically, and (despite what has been written in some places), can increase a GOTM score if done properly. The GOTM curve does mitagate it its use, and make it difficult for most players (not to mention very time consuming), however.
This brings us to
unnaturally large cities. Food trade is 100% OK and good in Civ 2; it is a good way, esp. in Fundamentalism, to grow. It is Fundy/commie's answer to Democracy's WLTP days.
However, like the practice of check-kiting (a felony crime in America where you write paper checks from one bank, and write another check from another bank, making it "seem" like you "have" money you do not have... an unnaturally large checking account, or asset total), food-kiting (imagine the ultimate case of 254 size 127 cities... being supported with kited -- or imaginary -- food trade) is silly.
In game
abstraction, I suppose it could be OK for Civ 2 though. But the limit on "natural" city sizes (the size a city could achieve with its own food workers, subject to its food routes, without engineer support) makes for a better monthly game, due to time constraints.
Without the time constraints, e.g., playing a HOF game for a year, I think its "OK" (I personally don't like it and so don't do it for HOF either). Shadowdale used to have a huge game with food trade, and enormous cities. It is not in the HOF anymore, so I'm not sure what the current Civ 2 community thinks in that regard.
I should note that
allowing the FCT in a GOTM does have
one great advantage: it simplifies things, in that you need not worry about using food freight incorrectly. Secondly, since you cannot rehome food trade, you cannot set up central (like a hub-and-spoke model) a food-kiting network, though you can still kite food between individual cities (a decentralized network).
Bottom line(s):
TRADE REHOMING:
1. I think trade rehoming is 100% OK, and should be allowed.
2. The GOTM rule is that trade rehoming is currently disallowed.
FCT:
1. I think FCT is uncool, and would bog GOTM games down even more.
2. The GOTM ruling is that FCT is allowed.
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