> If you send a small amount of bits over the network, the amount of responses you can get is commensurately small.
Oh, come on! You can entirely specify a cosmically hard problem in just a few kB. Prime factorization, anyone? Use discrete logarithms in finite fields, and you get down to handfuls of bytes.
Your conclusion is probably right, but your theoretical basis for it leaves a lot to be desired.
If a response is too small to describe the changes to the state of your city at that time, clearly it's a thick client which mostly knows how to simulate the city.
That sounds much better -- less like some pseudo information theory or complexity nonsense.
That said, I would put some small calculations on a server if I thought cheating was an issue. This wouldn't necessarily apply to single player games, though.
Oh, come on! You can entirely specify a cosmically hard problem in just a few kB. Prime factorization, anyone? Use discrete logarithms in finite fields, and you get down to handfuls of bytes.
Your conclusion is probably right, but your theoretical basis for it leaves a lot to be desired.