Minimal distance between cities

[jpsm]

I suggest that in next versions of the game have a minimal distance between cities as a rule, this distance should be based on the amount of tilesets that a municipality would have after the city achieved its maximum level. it would be something like a city "frontier" (like in real world that a frontier divide the countryside of a city from the countryside of another city), and that settlers don't to able to found cities in a land that is part of municipality of other cities. In the current version of the game you can't built a city inside foreign frontiers so it should have municipal frontiers too to prevent ugly-looking countries full of small cities too close to each other.
PS: In history all civilizations really grew only after some of its cities became big cities, its unrealistic and weird that civilization that purposefully stuck at village level can be stronger than civilization with bigger cities.

[nef]

There is a ruleset parameter that does exactly this. The civ2civ3 ruleset sets citymindist to 3 so that a new city cannot be built within the city radius of an existing city. There is a slight wrinkle: the metric is NQR so one can end up with a small number of tiles that cannot be worked, but it is not a huge issue. The bigger issue is the fc AI apparently trying to replicate the (reputed) success of the ICS (aka smallpox) strategy developed in the days of Civ II. I have no real experience of Civ II but the AI implementation in fc is problematic. Works well enough for a quick start but then becomes a serious handicap once the empire becomes established. Makes for an uneven game: survive the start and the rest becomes pedestrian as the Ai's become choked with size 2 cities. It is my understanding that NONE of the commercial versions have such a fixed rule. My experience of CIV I is that the AI could build a city anywhere (close), but typically didn't.

[jpsm]

I was researching for smallpox to understand it and I discover that the rule that generate unhappiness when you have much cities was create to fight smallpox, this is not the way because if you are a largepox in you manage to get ships as soon ass possible and send settlers in ships to other parts of the world that are still not colonized and can get this unhappiness punishment too.
I propose substitute this unhappiness punishment based on numbers of cities for an unhappiness punishment based on shared countryside when 2 cities that are property of the same player share countryside (what diminish the size of the countryside of both) 40% of the population of each of these cities get unhappy.