City smallpox

Smallpox is also known as infinite city sprawl (ICS). This was an issue in the early days of Freeciv that was inherited from a grave imbalance in the original Civilization rules. Those rules made penalties for growing cities to a larger number of citizens, but did not make penalties for growing the number of cities themselves. Thus, one could simply avoid penalties by creating a ridiculous number of small cities. This resulted in a map densely marked with small cities packed close together like pox marks. Hence, the name smallpox.
Many attempts were made to lessen the "disease", but it was ultimately "cured" by the introduction of Empire Step Size. This was similar to a commercial fix made in the later Civilization: Call to Power series (CTP). This along with some other anti-smallpox "treatments" were released around the time of Freeciv 2.x. Except for the CTP series, the commercial series moved on to profit from new versions and never patched the bug in the original versions of Civilization. Thus, Freeciv developers could not simply emulate the original rules, but were forced to arbitrarily diverge from the original rules to the degree necessary to patch this critical imbalance. For this reason, all bundled rulesets in Freeciv have an implementation of Empire Step Size, including the emulations of the original Civ1 and Civ2.
Description of Smallpox strategy
The critical imbalance incentivized an OP advantage for the smallpox strategy. In essence, you would build lots of small cities that never go over the unhappy limit. As the cost of settling a new city was more favorable than the great number of improvements needed for larger cities, one simply took a "quantity over quality" approach in making as many small undeveloped cities as possible. This resulted in a huge production potential and made the cities easy to manage, because you never needed to build improvements. True, you had to make Settlers, but the cost of this was offset by getting one extra city tile worker per new city. Never needing to build improvements meant that one could devote one's entire economy exclusively into producing offensive military units.
Smallpox was at its height at Freeciv 1.14. The Largepox movement arose thereafter, where the goal was to have games with server- and game- settings that restored the conventional look and feel, character, and strategies of the game. Many changes were made in 2.0 and 2.1 to ultimately make smallpox less advantageous than a normal and sane play-style. 
Some reasons why smallpox was an issue (i.e. reasons why having more small cities was better than having fewer large cities):
* every additional city gives a free tile worker
* every additional city gave "naturally content" citizens, with no limit on the number of new cities that yield more content citizens.
* every additional city supports military units for free, in authoritarian governments.
* small cities grow quicker than big cities (the foodbox is smaller)
== Other names ==
* ICS: infinite city sprawl.
== See also ==
* Forum:Another Freeciv smallpox fix
* Freeciv without city smallpox
Category:Gameplay