AAAAAAAAAAAAAAARRRGH!!!
Okay Meta, deep breaths. It's not THAT bad. It's certainly a far more interesting and dynamic model than CtP1. And they tried, they really did; that much is clear. Come on, breathe in, breathe out...
Oh, er, sorry, I was distacted. You see, just last night I figured out how the new zone-based production works. Curious? Please, by all means, allow me to share. Some of this info might be known already, so forgive me for repeating it, but I've a driving desire to share knowledge. Especially this knowledge, hoo boy.
To start out, I couldn't find this sort of information anywhere in the "manual" *snicker* and I didn't take it upon myself to start rummaging through the gamefiles. I'll probably save that for tonight... *shudder*
Instead, I started a new game, opened up the map editor, and started experimenting. I forgot to bring my notes into work with me, so I'm going to do this off the seat of my pants... If there are typos etc feel free to nitpick; I'm not proud.
I am also operating under the general presumption that the purpose behind the changes in the economic model from CtP1 to CtP2 were for the (explicit) purpose of reducing or eliminating ICS. I presume anybody reading the posts on this forum to be familiar with the ICS concept; if not, I'll be droolingly happy to describe it in detail -- in another post.
Welcome to the hideous nightmare death world that is CtP2 city production. As you've no doubt noted, when you plop a city down in CtP2, it no longer has a "city zone" consisting of 21 tiles; instead, it only accesses 9 tiles -- the city square itself, and the 8 tiles around it. Of course, someday, it will hit size 7 and access 21 tiles like the days of eld; and after that, it will hit size 19 and have an even bigger radius. Woohoo!
A bigger change in the economic model is that you can no longer directly allocate a worker to a specific tile to collect resources there. Instead, the worker seems to mysteriously carry home some arbitrary quantity of food, production, and trade of his own volition, yielding all sorts of strange totals on the production screen (best seen from the "specialist" tab). Well, I for one hate mysterious numbers, so I tried to figure out where exactly the stuff was coming from, and why. I analyzed food first, operating under the presumption that all the resources are harvested under the same design scheme.
Experimentation has revealed (and this is very easy to reproduce; feel free to fool around with it yourselves via the map editor, if only to verify my number-crunching) that first of all, the tile that the city occupies is AUTOMATICALLY harvested, IN FULL, every turn. This includes, of course, the "city bonus" of 10 food, 15 production, and 15 trade; and is totally irrespective of city population or worker/specialist allocation.
Hmm, city tile harvested for free... This sounds vaguely famililar.....
The next step is to add up all of the resources of all of the surrounding 8 tiles (including bonuses from river or tile improvements (TIs) ). I will term this sum the "resource potential", or RP.
Each worker you permit to work the land as normal (i.e., non-specialized) will return one-sixth of the RP, for an eventual grand total of 6/6 * RP for a city of size 6.
Yes that's right, one-sixth of EIGHT tiles. This means that a city of size one returns resources from:
-- the city tile itself, in FULL; plus
-- the city bonus of 10/15/15; plus
-- 1.33 * the average of the eight surrounding tiles.
( 1.33, not 1.67. Silly Meta. 11/29/00 )
This of course is then further modified by your government type. I did my testing under Monarchy, which I believe has a food modifier of 0%; Tyranny has a -15% food penalty, if my numbers were correct. Of course, I coulda probably just opened govern.txt... Heh.
So let's take a hypothetical example. Let's say you build a city on... oh, gosh, I don't know... a grassland with a river on it. (God I hate river... Did I mention lately that I hate river?) And let's say that this grassland with river tile is surrounded by 8 plains tiles, for an RP of 8 * 10 = 80. This means that your food production is:
-- Grassland in city tile, for 15 food; plus
-- River in city tile, for 5 food; plus
-- The city bonus, for 10 food; plus
-- 1/6th of the RP, for 80/6 = 13 food
For a total of 43 food -- again, ignoring government type (it would probably be around 36 or 37 under Tyranny). As you can see, the tile the city occupies is producing 20 food total (the most any tile can naturally produce), whereas the surrounding tile average is a mere 13, and probably wouldn't go up much even if you improved some of the land tiles to have river or be grasslands. This in turn implies that it's VERY VERY IMPORTANT to place your first few cities directly on grassland with river tiles to maximize their short-term growth potential.
Hmm, maximizing short-term growth potential... Why does that ring a bell...
Now, if you take workers off the land and make them farmers, they produce 30 food. Again, ignoring modifiers from government. So in the above example, if you took that worker off the land, you'd have:
-- Grassland in city tile, for 15 food; plus
-- River in city tile, for 5 food; plus
-- The city bonus, for 10 food; plus
-- Farmer, for 30 food
For a total of 60 food. Yum.
Of course, this means that you have to take the worker off the land, which hurts your production and trade. So in the long run this doesn't pay. But in the short term, it's a quick and dirty way to increase population from 1 to 2 much more quickly even in a dirtball city.
Hmm, quickly increasing population from 1 to 2... This sounds familiar too...
Follow all that so far? Great, because here's where the roller coaster goes upside-down. Hope you don't throw up like I did.
When your city hits size 7, its zone expands to include the extra 12 squares that it "used" to have in CtP1. The game designers, rather than trying to accomodate for the new zone with a clever, interesting, dynamic algorithm for the determination of the new resource model, instead decided to "append" this new space, much akin to adding a room to your house for your mother-in-law.
Population points 7-18 do NOT work on the 8 squares just outside of your city. Instead, they work EXCLUSIVELY on the 12 squares on the outer rim. Conversely, your first 6 population points still work the inner ring -- and NEVER outside of it.
I tend to refer to these population points as "First String" and "Second String". First string population points work the inner 8 tiles; second string work the outer 12 tiles. And never the twain shall meet.
Is this important? Well, sort of. Overall, in abstract, nobody really gives a crap, since big cities make oodles of "stuff" and micromanaging them down to the nittiest gritty doesn't serve a lot of purpose. Usually.
But some really bizarre strangeness can crop up when you plunk a city down in unusual terrain. Consider the following city:
GGG
GTTTG
GTCTG
GTTTG
GGG
G = Grassland
C = City of size 6, on grassland
T = Tundra
This bizarre city will produce 25 food -- 15 the from grassland the city occupies, and 10 for city bonus (again, ignoring government modifiers). Allocating all six workers to the land as normal will produce an additional ZERO food, since the RP for the eight surrounding tiles for food production is zero, and six-sixths of zilch is still zilch.
When the city hits 7 population, the 7th worker -- and ONLY the 7th worker -- trudges BEYOND the tundra and starts working the outer ring. The ratio for outer ring workers is 1/12th, rather than 1/6th, by the way. So you get 1/12th of the RP for the outer ring. The RP for the outer ring is 15 x 12 = 180; so the worker will give you 15 more food. But the first six population points aren't permitted to wander any farther from the city than one tile; they MUST work the tundra, and produce NOTHING as a result.
Now, being a clever fellow, you might be tempted to take the six inner ring workers, and make them all farmers. Farmers produce 30 food. I'm not sure where they're getting this food, considering their city is surrounded by a tundra wasteland, but ours is not to ask why. And then you could leave the 7th worker out on the outer rim to work the land, getting less food but at least getting some production and trade for your time.
Bzzt! Sorry. You're not allowed. See, when you turn workers into specialists, it takes them from the top of your population, not the bottom. It turns second string workers into specialists before it turns first string workers into specialists. So in order to take anyone from the first string off the land, you first have to take EVERYONE from the second string off the land.
Argh. Some sort of strange seniority system, apparently. Who says there's no castes in a communism?
Anyway, we see that many of the deadly, crippling aspects of ICS play are still present:
1) The tile that the city occupies is harvested automatically, for free.
2) The city itself gives a HUGE resource bonus just for standing there, again collected automatically, for free.
3) Specialization accomodates for swiftly increasing population in very small cities.
On the upswing, it's no longer possible to specialize for purposes of production early in the game. So it's much harder to pump out settlers in massive quantities. Plus, the empire size maximums were reduced, in accordance with a variety of mods from CtP1 (including mine
).
But the really good news, the only saving grace of the entire design model, is the fact that cities which are placed too close to one another do NOT overlap city zones; instead, one city gets the big bucks, and the other one gets blown off.
Consider the following model:
111GGG
1C1GGG
111GGG
C = City
1 = Zone of city #1
G = Grassland with river
An ICSer, wanting to save space, would normally plunk a city down 2 tiles away from his previous city, repeatedly and exponentially. If he did that, however, he would get the following:
11122G
1C1C2G
11122G
C = City
1 = Zone of city #1
2 = Zone of city #2
G = Grassland with river
Now, yes, city #2 enjoys all of the home tile benefits that city #1 gets; it gets the full resources of its occupied tile, plus the city bonus itself. However, its one worker will produce one sixth of an RP factor based on only FIVE land tiles, rather than eight; so 1/6 becomes 1/6 * 5/8 = 5/48 or around 1/10, a sharp reduction in efficiency. And this pattern continues for the more cities the ICSer tries to cram into the same space.
Yes, in the VERY short term, it might still pay off; especially in a small, eight player game where your opponents intend to fling themselves mercilessly and endlessly at you. But very soon thereafter, it starts to hurt. Particularly so once you hit the empire size limit, and realize that you've short-changed yourself a tremendous amount of resource potential.
So the ICSer has to be a tad wiser. To illustrate the point, I made a gigantic world of mostly land with 2 opponents (on impossible difficulty of course... no fun otherwise). And I placed my cities 3 apart minimum, always on a grassland with river tile.
The result? Well, let me put it to you this way: It's 2000 BC or so. I have 21 cities. I'm a Republic. I have Gunpowder.
BUT, that's in an environment where I'm virtually unlimited in my ability to pick and choose my city locales, in an absurdly huge game with innumerable huts (God huts are broken... *grumble*), against two clueless AIs. I expect that with the odds tweaked more against me, ICSing will become dramatically less feasible.
Not impossible, of course. But less feasible. I suppose I can live with that for now.
- Metamorph
[This message has been edited by Metamorph (edited November 29, 2000).]
......see, we need this on the info-page!
