Talk:4x Design
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[edit] On expansion
"Expansion leads to more rapid expansion, and so you get a base curve of growth that is not linear. This is a key problem. In order to allow other strategies than 'expand expand expand', there must be rewards of equal importance for choosing building in depth."
However equal importance does not mean non-linear. Vertical growth may be linear while horizontal growth is (nearly) exponential, but if the rate of the vertical growth is large enough it will be a viable strategy. At this point you have to look into balancing things so that either strategy is viable, or so that the superior strategy depends on situation.
[edit] On micromanagement
I don't think reducing the number of production bases in the late game is viable. Whatever strategy you choose is always better with more production bases. The only exceptions are when it takes too much micromanagement (in timed games) or when there is a fixed cap (e.g., the starcraft unit cap). However both of these are problems in their own right. What is needed is a way to manage more than one base in sync. Auto-redirection of units is one possibility here. Another is sharing of resources between bases that have only one production target. Then there is the ever-present citizen management problem - using specialists (only) instead of workers has some advantages here, and allows easy "global" toggling of production. The problem is how to get this to work together with the micromanagement that is a vital (and fun) part of the early game.
One possibility is simply to allow merging of cities into metropolises. Take two nearby cities, and allow/force the player to "merge" them. The resulting metropolis has the number of people (NOT citizens) as the entirety of the cities it is formed from. It has more than one "tile", and loses its citymap - instead its citizens may only be specialists (with abilities determined from the terrain the metropolis covers). Its foodbox is doubled (maybe?) and it loses the free-city-center bonus. The great advantage of course is that if you just need one factory per metropolis, vertical growth becomes much easier.
- Rather than reducing the number of bases, you could decouple the production capacity of a base from the ability to produce an item at a base. To clarify, each base contributes its production points to an empire pool, and each base can spend from the empire pool according to some limits. Various structures, such as barracks or factories or forges would permit greater spending at a particular base, and would increase this capacity significantly. Some units would be so expensive that it would be impossible to practically produce them at a city that is not equipped with capacity increasing structures (or perhaps not possible at all, eg. requiring a shipyard for naval units, or a factory for mechanized units). You could build additional cities, which would provide you with additional places to build, but you would not have to build anything at those cities in order to be able to use the production points that they produce: these points can be spent at other, built up cities. And, more importantly, you can build more than one thing at at time at built-up cities. This drastically reduces the number of build queues that need to be checked and adjusted each turn. Also, buildings that increase production capacity would do so significantly, so that it's rare that you need more than one production location per very large number of smaller non-production loation cities. Building up a new production location would be done because its in a strategically important location and being able to produce stuff there is important. It would be a waste of resources to build up all your cities. Alternatively, you could remove the requirement for production-enabling buildings altogether, but doing this would create strategic problems where you can produce with your whole empire's capacity at any tiny captured city in the middle of nowhere, or on the front lines.
[edit] Game Challenge
The original intent of the space race was probably to be a "superweapon." It is a massive project that relatively quickly insures a win for a player that is far ahead. It is also relatively simply disruptable by other players who are on roughly the same level as the winning player. The only problem with it is that it may, in fact, take too much time to achieve, and require that the one player is too overwhelmingly strong. It shows up too late and it requires techs that are too divergent from a normal war path. By the time it comes around, it is a worse prospect. A UN/cultural victory (where a player with overwhelmingly more influence for a certain number of turns wins) might be a better alternative for shorter games.
[edit] Micromanagement
Since cities connected by railways are generally (for land units, not considering ZoC and some other things) "coincident," in that units created in one are effectively also present in the others, that seems like a logical level to group production queues into. This could even work with air units, sea units, and buildings, because parts can be shipped (instantaneously, in Freeciv terms) over the railroad networks to where the need to go: iron for building ships during World War II was not mined at the boatyard.
