On Fri, 9 Mar 2007, (Eddie_Anderson) wrote:
This is an experimental patch. It replaces "real map distance"
(RMD) with pathfinder (PF) distance in the calculation of "waste /
corruption by distance from the capital".
I like the idea, but the implementation (or any implementation) has these
problems:
- It is strongly tied to a unit type, and changes to this unit type will
create colossal changes to waste levels, which may not be obvious or
desirable.
- Changing roads does not recalculate waste levels until end of turn,
which changes the way this has been handled up until now. Currently we
guarantee that what you see in the city dialog as you press end turn is
what you will get on turn end. There are no surprises, which is probably a
good thing. We could recalculate all city distances every time a road is
built, but it would also be affected by moving units and their ZoC, and
we can't recalculate city distances for each unit movement.
Possible solutions:
* Perhaps a "standard unit" should be created for tracing distances,
which could be amphibious, now that we have such units.
I do not see how to solve the changing roads / moving units problem.
Perhaps the biggest question I still have about this code is
about the form of the PF search. AIUI the method used here is an
outward search of surrounding tiles that looks for cities. But
since the locations of cities are *known*, wouldn't a PF search for
a path (between two known points) be more efficient?
IIRC, no. Remember that the straight path may not be the longest, so we
need to do an exhaustive search to find the guaranteed shortest path.
But let us take a step back and look at why there is waste in the first
place. I think the point is to give a penalty for building cities wide
apart - but why? It punishes bigpox much harder than smallpox, since
bigpox cities are generally further apart. Since there is less tiles
between smallpox cities, it will be far easier to connected smallpox
cities by road and avoid the waste distance penalty.
Though, it is good that there is an incentive to build a cohesive empire,
rather than just a loose collection of cities around the globe, but this
can be accomplished in different ways.
We could just retire the distance based waste penalty.
- Per
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