Trade bonus if the city has a unit inside

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Alien Valkyrie
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Re: Trade bonus if the city has a unit inside

Post by Alien Valkyrie »

I have to strongly agree with Corbeau here. Not having your cities occupied is a valid playstyle. It's unsafe, sure, but in peacetime, one should be able to divert their resources to other things. This would also allow for diplomatic and psychological games, such as forcing your neighbors to build defensive units in their cities just with your mere presence.

And for the realism side of it, I am under the impression that a military unit in Freeciv is very small compared to population – building one typically doesn't cost any citizens (or the food that would otherwise make the city grow) – so them using services, buying stuff and going to pubs probably won't have much of an impact comared to the output of the actual citizens. That said, I'd be surprised to hear that the majority of cities in modern countries have military posted inside.

Under governments allowing martial law, you'll probably have units inside your cities anyways, so giving any kind of bonus for that makes those governments inherently stronger compared to other governments that would have you focus on other things (i.e. not putting unnecessary units in your cities). On the other hand, only giving the bonus to governments without martial law wouldn't make that much sense either.

I'd say it's probably for the better to ditch the bonus altogether. Someone (quite successful) in the web-longturn games I've discussed with pointed out a lot of nuances of how the original supplied rulesets allow for different playstyles that are finely balanced – a change like this would probably throw part of that out the window.
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Re: Trade bonus if the city has a unit inside

Post by wieder »

Having the cities not occupied is a valid strategy. In this case however the idea was to replace another penalty with another one. If the old one is only removed and not replaced, there will be an advantage for some play styles. However this is probably nothing too serious.

Also, the rulesets (LT39, LT40) in question are already heavily modified from what they once were. There are much more powerful bonus features for many govs, units, buildings and even terrain types.

The unit types usually, most likely, only reflect a small portion of the people but it's very hard to say how small exactly. There is a number of units a city can support without actually consuming more food. This might suggest that for a small city a unit could be maybe 10% of the population and that's a reasonable number of people if the idea is to give one unit of trade as a bonus. Then again on some rulesets, like the one in LT40, building military units may cost population. The actual number people people the cities have is mostly symbolic anyway. A city with multi million people could lose 500 000 people when a unit is built or a city of 40 000 could lose 30 000 when building the same unit.

The original ruleset is well balanced for a single player experience but it's just horrible for multiplayer. The caravans, partisans, great wonders and all that just won't work when there are lots of people playing the game. The multiplayer ruleset also has some issues, just like the current LT rulesets. This is still an ongoing task to improve the rulesets for the best possible multiplayer experience.

In any case it's great to heat that 2.6 will allow a feature like this to be implemented. If not for this, maybe it could be used for something else. JTN's solution is a very good one. Or would be for this particular task if longturn.org wouldn't be using 2.5 instead of 2.6 :P No need to check the unit type. Just needed to know if there is a unit of any type.
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