Whats wrong
Well, I dont know about other players of Civilization 1,2,3, but the thing that I disliked the most was that last part of the game when u have tons of cities producing even more units, so controlling them was hell. Each turn was taking so long to play that in the next turn I would forget what I was trying to do in the previous one. Especially annoying was the AI who capitalized by building lots of cities, since he has no problem of managing them.
Fixes that dont work
I guess that the game developers understood the problem, so they tried to counter it with 2 mechanisms. The first was corruption, which decreased production as the cities were farther from capitol. Although this is a good mechanism that, in my opinion, enhanches the gameplay and makes it more realistic, it did not fix the original problem. It was still profitable to build many,many cities (say 30) near the capitol, no matter what the terain was.
The second mechanism is governors. First, this mehanism fails becouse it only manages cities, not the units, which remained the problem. Also, I dont like the governors. If I am letting the computer to manage my cities, then I am not playing the game. Whats the joy in programming AI to play the whole game instead of player? Then player is not a player anymore. Also, you can never create a governor that would manage a city exactly as player wishes.
In short, no AI can replace the thinking of a player.
The solution
The simplest solution that I can think of is to create another form of corruption (working along the 'traditional' corruption). This form of corruption would increase as the number of cities increase. A good formulae would be
corruption = 1 - (1 - b)^n
where
corruption - the corruption that wuld be applied to every city
b - constant, the basic corruption per city factor
n - number of cities
for example, lets sat tht we choose b=10%. Then the coruption depends only on number of cities:
number of cities ______ corruption
1 __________________ 10%
2 __________________ 19%
3 __________________ 27%
4 __________________ 34%
5 __________________ 41%
6 __________________ 47%
This corruption is applied to every city. Obviously, if this mechanism is employed, then there is some number of cities after which it is not profitable to build more cities. That number, and the above table depends on factor b, which should be choosen by developers.
I personally like to play with only a few cities, so b=10% suits me fine. Howewer, there may be people who like to play with huge civilizations. So, I got even better idea. The b factor should be chosen on start of the game, on the same way that the size of the map an the number of competing civs are choosen. The choices could be:
Small civilizations (b=10%)
Medium civilizations (b=6%)
Large civilizations (b=2%)
Also, b factor should affect your final score.
The number of units will be directly affected by number of cities. If it is required to even further decrease the number of units, this could be done with stronger, more expensive units (or some concept like armies).
Well, I hope at least someone will like my idea.
Well, I dont know about other players of Civilization 1,2,3, but the thing that I disliked the most was that last part of the game when u have tons of cities producing even more units, so controlling them was hell. Each turn was taking so long to play that in the next turn I would forget what I was trying to do in the previous one. Especially annoying was the AI who capitalized by building lots of cities, since he has no problem of managing them.
Fixes that dont work
I guess that the game developers understood the problem, so they tried to counter it with 2 mechanisms. The first was corruption, which decreased production as the cities were farther from capitol. Although this is a good mechanism that, in my opinion, enhanches the gameplay and makes it more realistic, it did not fix the original problem. It was still profitable to build many,many cities (say 30) near the capitol, no matter what the terain was.
The second mechanism is governors. First, this mehanism fails becouse it only manages cities, not the units, which remained the problem. Also, I dont like the governors. If I am letting the computer to manage my cities, then I am not playing the game. Whats the joy in programming AI to play the whole game instead of player? Then player is not a player anymore. Also, you can never create a governor that would manage a city exactly as player wishes.
In short, no AI can replace the thinking of a player.
The solution
The simplest solution that I can think of is to create another form of corruption (working along the 'traditional' corruption). This form of corruption would increase as the number of cities increase. A good formulae would be
corruption = 1 - (1 - b)^n
where
corruption - the corruption that wuld be applied to every city
b - constant, the basic corruption per city factor
n - number of cities
for example, lets sat tht we choose b=10%. Then the coruption depends only on number of cities:
number of cities ______ corruption
1 __________________ 10%
2 __________________ 19%
3 __________________ 27%
4 __________________ 34%
5 __________________ 41%
6 __________________ 47%
This corruption is applied to every city. Obviously, if this mechanism is employed, then there is some number of cities after which it is not profitable to build more cities. That number, and the above table depends on factor b, which should be choosen by developers.
I personally like to play with only a few cities, so b=10% suits me fine. Howewer, there may be people who like to play with huge civilizations. So, I got even better idea. The b factor should be chosen on start of the game, on the same way that the size of the map an the number of competing civs are choosen. The choices could be:
Small civilizations (b=10%)
Medium civilizations (b=6%)
Large civilizations (b=2%)
Also, b factor should affect your final score.
The number of units will be directly affected by number of cities. If it is required to even further decrease the number of units, this could be done with stronger, more expensive units (or some concept like armies).
Well, I hope at least someone will like my idea.
