RADICAL IDEAS (ver 2.0): Hosted by korn469

[Gordon the Whale]

I think ember is right, there shouldn't be too many specialists. However, I see the artisan/laboror and trader/merchant are entirely different. These are the things in cities that aren't specialists. Beaurocrats, Wise Men, Military Specialists, Entertainers, and such would be specialists, but Laborers represent the Working Class, and Merchants represent the Merchant Class, which both, at various periods of history, made up sizable fractions of city population. Why not have limits, dependant on SE settings, that decide what the maximum amount of each type of city dweller is?

ember: You said you don't like the idea of spontaneously generated cities... I agree totally, the villages shouldn't grow into cities without your explicit permission, but I think it should be something you can do. Make the AI in control of autobuilding villages from cities never allowed to build a village past the limit to make a new city, but if the player wants, they can build the 3rd village on top, or whatever the number is, to make the village a new city. I think it makes things easier. For real newbies, or those concerned with other aspects of the games, have an option to let the AI make you cities.

I had sort of assumed that villagers were content. Most factors affecting happiness are within the city... If villagers' happiness is affected, it should only be by famine.

As I saw it, bringing in the villagers is unlimited, you can bring in however many you want. As for shipping them to other cities, you can only do that along a clear road. So if the enemy blocks off your road (a move which I hope to see very important in Civ3, for many reasons) the only place you can put the villagers is in the city. If your city is a 13, with 6 city-folk and 7 villagers, this will be horrible. This is a city designed to hold 6 people... It has no aqueduct or sewer system. Now it holds 13, and disease runs rampant. In addition, a city that formerly required 130 food, and had that much coming in, is starving. It makes a seige a very dangerous thing, as well as over-building your cities important if you plan to have wars. Making the granary a simple food storage device, abd bigger, would also be good.

If a settler builds a village on a distant sea shore, where does the food go, and (in terms of justification) how does it get there? I disagree, settlers shouldn't be able to build villages. Also, that amounts to free population. (Make 1 settler, then build lots of villages with it.)

Regardless of that, the settlers should now take 2 population to build... One for the new city they will make, and one for the village next to it. Won't be burdensome, because all the cities will have about twice as many people.

[ember]

korn469, I'll try again.
First important point villagers are not in cities. They do not count towards the cities population and they do not affect happiness in a city (unless they stop sending food) For all intesive puropses villagers are content. They don't tend to starve because almost evey square can produce enough food to sustain them. They will always keep enough for themselves, and send the rest to the city/region.

What I mean by twice as many pop is that the cities will have teh same # of pop points, but there will be about the same number of pop points in the villages as in the cities.

In the cities the bulk of the population belongs to the 'average citazen' class.
'Workers' for communism, 'middle class' for democracy, 'serfs' for tyranny, 'peasants' for monarcy, etc.
These classes produce a bit of everything, so a bit of labour, trade and science.
Specialists can only be a certain fraction of the pop in a city. (remeber the people in villages do not belong to a city, they have nothing to do with them...) Specilaists are the types you listed. Labourers, merchants, scientists, clerics, etc. They have much more specialized uses, but can only be (1/3 or something like that) of a citie's pop.

I don't see why you need to limit how many resources a city can use because they are limited in how much industry they can use, and each unit will require a fixed ratio of industry/resources.
The city is still limited in how much it can sustainably use by how much your villages can produce...They can stockpile, with a decay rate for higher difficulty levels.
Same for food.

To limit ICS, make it so that the square a city is on does not produce any resources or food. The square the city is on is critical for future development because it will affect rate of growth and trade. Costal-river squares should be the best for cities.
Hills are bad, but well defended.

Advantages to this system.
1 City radius is no longer used. You can use every square in you territory if you desire, and keep the cities in logical places, like on the coast and river junctions, where cities historically thrived.

2. Rural population is represented. These are a ligitimate target for a pillaging army to kill of enslave. If captured, most historical villagers were not very loyal to the king. They were taxed, and if they weren't mistreated, they didn't care who was in charge.

3. Makes the logical split between resources and industry easier to manage.

4. Would work well with regions. The villages belong to a region and send food straight to it. Cities in the region recieve it as needed. All resources and isdustry could be centrally managed to ease micromanagemnt. Infrastructue is still placed in induvidual cities, but the the industry is calculated centrally. Regions are also good if multiple resource types are used, to reduce micromanagment.

Disadvantages. Some managment of village placement needed, but this is not much harder than for placing citizens. This could be helped by autopalcemnt and 'flaging' squares for development.
Use a setler to 'flag' a square, and the next available villager moves there. This is what I meant by building villages with a settler without using them up.

I feel that to build a village, all that is needed is a pop point. It takes as long as fortifying before the village is productive. Villages can be moved by click and drag, but take the same fortification time to move. Pop from city to city should be easier than it is now, maybe the same click and drag, limited to one a turn (by roads)?

------------------
"Any technology, sufficiently advanced,
is indistinguishable from magic"
-Arthur C. Clark

[raingoon]

Following this discussion about villages -- these are really good ideas.

ember: I understood you were saying that villages can be clicked and dragged to a new location. This makes a village a unit, doesn't it? Sort of a worker for hire, in effect? I'm just seeing if I understand you.

Really good concept that villages funnel resources into cities. I guess I need a definitive answer as to which comes first, the city or the village. Is there some reason why a village can't become a city? Whether on its own, or with the player's approval, I'm a little unclear where people stand on that.

By the way, I posted what you could call a pretty "radical" idea for getting religion into the game, under the religion 2.1 thread, here. It's a pretty clear idea, I'd appreciate any input on it...

raingoon

[Gordon the Whale]

I wouldn't really call the village a unit... It's more just a map representation of a worked tile, with a few more limitations and an inherent population. It has no attack or defense, and enemy units can sit on top of it, like any other TI. It can be captured or pillaged (make both be an option for an enemy unit on top of the village) like some suggestions on railroads in other threads.

ember: using the settler to flag squares for growth is a good idea, I like it now that I understand.

[ember]

A new method for populaation growth.

The population of cities are recorded as x.xxx. This allows fractional population points. The fraction has no gameplay effect until it reaches the next number. It allows groth rates to be experesed as an increase per turn. Attacks that hit population centers can now do fractional pop. points of damage. maybe 0.1 or 0.05 per hit.

The purpose of this proposal is to seperate growth from straight food production.
Growth rates can be expressed as a percentage per turn, (eg 2.5%) to give a familiar sort of look. What this means for gameplay terms is that 0.025 pop points are added every year. This gives a groth of 40 turns.

Pop is recorded as fractional points, but it is easy to convert that to a real pop number.
The formula:
Actual pop = 5000 x (pop points + 0.5)^2 - 1250
Follows the civx model exactly for whole numbers, and can give good values for fractional numbers.

Effects on population growth. All numbers are arbitray and should vary depending on SE choices and tech. This system is desigend to be compatable with the idea of villages.

I have made use of a 'happyness rating', which is (#happy - #unhappy) / # total. This gives 0 for all content, 100 for all happy, and -100 for all unhappy. This can be applied to a city, a region, a civ or the entire world.

Base growth: 10%
Happyness : + city happyness / N. N depends on SE.
villages : + 0.2% per village
medicine : + 2%
etc.

Immigration. To take into account people moving around in your civ and between civs.
The advantages of including this is that large unhappy cites will tend to slow down growth or shrink, while your smaller cities will pick up the extra people.

In civ immigration = (city happyness - civ happyness) / Y. Y depends on SE and the overall level of transportation availabble. In cty immigation tends to have larger volume than between civs.

between civs migration = (city happyness - world happyness) / Z. Z depends on SE and transport of all players. For this calcualtion government types can influence the happyness used. democracy might add 10 points, while communism subtarcts 10 points, to reflect that democracies never have had problems with too many people trying to flee from them.

Wonder: Iron curtain. Prevents all between civ emmigration. (for gameplay all cities count as average happyness level)


------------------
"Any technology, sufficiently advanced,
is indistinguishable from magic"
-Arthur C. Clark

[ember]

I guess fundamentally the village comes first. You could start with the game with a hadnfull of villages and can choose 1 to become your first city.

For fractional populatio I see villages as just having whole number pop points (up to 2-3) to make things easier. Pop is added only when a city has a whole pop point to send to the countyside. Any growth from the villages is added to the city as a small boost to growth.



------------------
"Any technology, sufficiently advanced,
is indistinguishable from magic"
-Arthur C. Clark

[raingoon]

This still strikes me as generally the best solution so far for the ICS problem. ICS is fundamentally a population growth issue, and this slows/changes the population growth rate. That said, after reviewing, I'm still a little foggy on how this suggestion boils down -- i.e., in English. Or if it boils down at all.

But... I CAN say I still don't agree that a village or a city or anything representing population on the map should appear in any other way than from one settler unit that I had to sacrifice to create it. I think the genius of Civ lies in the population spread model of the first two games. It clearly should be changed in some way. The trick is getting rid of ICS w/out throwing the baby out with the bath water.

[Tornado7]

I'm not sure if this is the right spot for this, but I'll try it here.
How about specialtists that increase food or shield production, like Taxmen, scientists or Elvis?
Call them Farmers and Miners or something.
Another thing, kinda related-
Why not increase the effectivness of the specialtists after certain advances? I mean, an entertainer should have more impact in a society with televison as opposed to one just figuring out writing. Just a thought.

[itokugawa]

Firstly, I do not think that villages are necessary. They are represented by the city radius. (At last cities do not feed their population). Anyway, if there are villages what should be the difference between a village and a city?

Secondly I believe that perfectionists must have better chances in the game. I would like to see one of the followings:
1)Libraries, factories etc. lead to 100% increase instead of 50%
2)there can be many libraries, universities etc. Each of them has a 50% effect but if 1st library requires 80 shields and maintainance 1, 2 requires 160 shields-maintainance 2, 3rd 320 and 4, 640 and 8 etc.

Similarly RR, mining irrigation should have stronger effects and for the balance weapons should be more costly.

[Gordon the Whale]

Raingoon: If you need do build a settler for each village, you are sunk. What was a single population point in Civ1/2 is, in the village model, more or less divided into two points, one in the city and one in the village. The one in the city produces trade, science, industry, and the one in the village produces resources and food. Requiring a sacrificed settler to build a village more or less means that you must build a settler EVERY time your city would have grown in Civ2. Actually, you would be building one every 2 times your city grew: City grows due to whatever reason city grows, you build a settler to put this person into a village, reducing the city population by one, sacrifice the settler to build the village, and the city grows again. You would have to do this, in a game with many cities, several times per turn. Villages must be built by cities, unsacrificed settlers, or not at all.

Tornado7: Farmers and miners, in traditional Civ, were represented by the "normal" people, i.e. the nonspecialists, that you put on the terrain squares to work them. Specialists are people who stop working the land and come into the city to do other things. Nobody leaves the family farm and moves to the big city to be a farmer!

itokugawa: Yes, villages are currently represented by the city radius. This is what we'd like to see changed. Here are some reasons:

1)You don't need to worry about the city radius! This would make a weird, nonregular map (geodesated, cubic) a possibility, which is something some people would like to see.

2)It allows you to spread out beyond the city radius. There must be a way for transportation to limit this, for instance, goods can only be shipped to a city within 3 regular squares, 5 road squares, or 10 RR squares.

3)It allows the efficient usage of space, which is currently not possible in Civ, because you can't Tesselate city radii.

4)It more accurately represents the population in the countryside for combat.

5)It more accurately shows the rural/urban population shift brought about by better agriculture. Early in the game, a single village could probably not support a single city population point. Rather, it would take 2:1, or maybe 3:2 to support the people in the city. However, as the game progresses, new technologies and TIs are discovered that gradually improve the food and resources that can be gathered from a terrain square, and you end up being able to support 2 or 3 people in the city for each one in a village. This is how real life worked.

A synopsis of things said earlier in the thread, that should have been made clear:

What is the difference between a city and a village? A village is made of those who, in one way or another, work the land. A city is made of those who don't. Villages get the resources from the square beneath them, cities don't. Cities have only specialists, villages have only regular people. Cities get production, villages don't. A village can be considered a TI, it's just a TI that takes population to build.

[raingoon]

gordon

Do I understand then, that:

1. In this model every time a city grows by one you are automatically given a corresponding village population?

2. And village are placed where you like?

3. And villages have non-specialist populations that are limited in growth potential to size 2 or 3?

4. And city radius is done away with, because villages now produce all resources and those resources are listed at the Civ level only (as opposed to city by city)?

[ember]

Raingoon:
1, Not automatically. You divide your pop between villages and cities as youlike. Generally you will have 2x the civX pop points available. You can focus more on resources/food when you need them, then shift to trade/labour at other times.

2, Within reason, yes. We have proposed that villages must be placed adjacent to anouther village (or city) and within a certain amount of MP of a city...

3 yes.

4 yes. Especially works well for regions, then you can just worry about regional borders...



------------------
"Any technology, sufficiently advanced,
is indistinguishable from magic"
-Arthur C. Clark

[raingoon]

ember

I'm getting closer...

"You divide your pop between villages and cities as youlike. Generally you will have 2x the civX pop points available. You can focus more on resources/food when you need them, then shift to trade/labour at other times."

1. So my civ has a "pool" of regular population points equal roughly to the number I get when I add up all my city sizes?

2. And it is from this pool that I draw to create villages?

3. Which I can place within my borders to maximize resource making? I can futher move these villages around whenever I want?

4. And the work product of all these villages is stored on the civ level, or at the region level, but again, not at an individual city level?

5. But cities still are where units are created?

[ember]

I would say you hit the nail on the head there...

Of course there on some limitations on moving pop. and a certain % loss of resources dependant on transport infrastructure. With fractional pop used, then the total pop points stays exactly the same, no matter how you move them around (not counting growth).

Some pople want villages to send food to induvidual cities, but I favor empire (or region) destributed stuff.



------------------
"Any technology, sufficiently advanced,
is indistinguishable from magic"
-Arthur C. Clark

[tatterdemalion]

This is in response to an Ecce Homo post regarding setting game turns to 1 year through out the game. I don't think that is necessary. Instead why not link the length of game turns to level of technology or general enlightenment of the civ?

Right now the length of game turns is arbitrarily determined by the game designers and pegged to the approximate dates of the historical Enlightenment and Industrial Revolutions. Why not allow game turns to reduce from 20 years to 5 years once Philosophy is discovered. Game years from 5 years to 2 years once Enlightenment period is discovered. Game years reduce from 2 years to 1 year per turn once the Industrial Revolution kicks in. One could make the arguments that the Information age, Genetic Age and Nanite Age would allow for even greater Productivity.

The second part of this recommendation is that civs who are lagging on the tech tree would either get fewer turns to play or have all facets of their production factored down to when competing civs discover the key advances. For example, using the example above, if Greece discovers Philosophy first, then all others civs have their production divided by 4 until they discover Philosophy too. This effect may have to be attenuated to maintain game balance.

With this system, one of the measures of your success would be the number of turns needs to win, not just points at the end.

[raingoon]

Okay, I understand so far. Important question now -- When I start the game, what do I see?

[ember]

If there is no flexable start you see your city with pop 1 and a village square adjasent, also with pop 1. If you start with a settler it will represent 2 pop, and 1 will become your first village...
I feel that you would be better off to start with about 4-5 pop points, 2 in a city, with 2 or 3 villages, just to give things a little boost, but not take away control (you can always move the villages)

The difference between a village and city with the sam epop, is that in a village square there is not just one settlemetn, tehre may be dozens, but a city is 1 settlement.

------------------
"Any technology, sufficiently advanced,
is indistinguishable from magic"
-Arthur C. Clark

[Jon Miller]

Hi all

I think that the difference between an agrarrian civ and in industrial one is very important and should be shown in Civ3

(the village idea does this)

in earlier civs they approximated this by considering your industrial workers as built in (its the reason why 1 pop = 10000 people and 2 pop = 30000 people), I think that it is very important to diffreentiate it

growth can now be devorced from food and production from resources

This means that population growth can be linear and that the cost of units and buildings can go up properly, its because later on civs have a whole ton of workers in their cities

each pop takes a set amount of n to grow (it is unhappy and dies if it does not have enough food, food can be stored in graneries to give time to solve this problem)

this amount is always the same so that your cities are getting really big but most have to be workers because the later units and buildings take so much industry to build

workers are the main (specialist) person inside cities in order for them to build anything

allow for multiple growths a turn to show a fast growing city

allow a city to produce up to like three things, make how much can be given to producing one thing dependent on the SE

you could then have some workers producing luxuries, some a particular building, and some money

here is a big radical idea of mine first let loose at the SE thread:

imagine that certain SE settings allow the people more control of the government

these AIs will have programs of what to do when they are generals and/or civic administrators

people will be able to program there own

each AI will have different strategies that they favor to deal with certain problem

in some SE choices you will be able to choose the AI (but you won't know the program name, you will have to figure out if it will be good at a particular job) and what level of power it will have and some will impose even further limitations on you

In some SE setting you will not have to have an AI at all

these AIs will be programable by gamers so gamers can add new ones to the choices

each one will be in certain bins with the ones that the game is told to consider better in better bins

these bins will be what the computer picks your AI out of when you promote one into your AI pool (each will have a random but historical name)

in the harder difficulty levels you will get worse and worse bins and the computer player will get better and better ones (the computer player would come from extra good ones)

think about it, is the President involved very much with the strategic operation of cities, regions or military?

no, because of the US SE setting

you would give in AI an instruction like this: "use these troops to take these cities" (or you might be limited to: "use these troops to attack this enemy" or "use troops (and the AI picks the troops) to attck this enemy" or a variety of other ones (limited by SE setting)) and then it would go through the strategies programmed into it and use the one that is best suited to accomplish its mission

AIs can be given generalships and/or city administration (a certain military SE setting might make it so that your succesful general are the only ones that can be city administrators) and it would have strategies to deal with both types (most often an AI with good general stragies would not have good administrating strategies but some would be good at both)

the AIs with better stategies would go in better bins making the harder levels a true challenge

you would then have a hard and realistic choice

choose SE settings that give good bonuses but take control away from you in the three areas (military, civil, and national; an example of a loss of national control is the Senate in civ: there would be different levels of loss of control) or you can choose SE settings that are perhaps more despiotic (and bad bonuses) but give you more control over your civ

this would also make the hard levels a lot harder and add more internal action

also this would hopefully make it so that we would have a decent AI and make a lot of the differences of the harder levels based on AI difficulty

a civic administator you would give instructions to like "build these things and keep the people happy" (this would be good civic control but not complete control) and then the AI you have manage that city (or group of cities or group of cities and military units) would choose based on their programmed strategies what order to build the things listed and in what manner to keep the people happy (make an entertainer, build a happy improvement, etc.)

you would be limited in how many AIs you could have by how many cities you had, your SE structure, ect.

if you draw in AI out of that bin it does not go away from that bin, instead it just gets harder to get from that bin (you still hve the same chance of drawing from that bin as set in difficulty level, ect.)

this AI idea could work with a lot of different SE ideas not just mine like in one similar to smac: free market would decrease your control of civic, democracy would decrease you control of all three, power would decrease your control of millitary (the reason for this is that in a power society the military has a lot of power so it would be more independent), fundamentalist would decrease your control of national, wealth would decrease your control of civic, planned would increase you control of civic, etc.

I gave a lot more info on this in the SE thread

(I got thinking about this by thinking about SE, smac governors and auto settlers, and talking to a fellow civer/smacer)

Jon Miller

[itokugawa]

I do not think that villages will give more fun. They will make game much more complicated. This is not bad but I would prefer to see more complexity with i.e. diplomatic options.

It is true that in cities we expect only specialists and workers but it is only a matter of definition. If for example we have Londonshire, Delhishire etc. instead of London and Delhi everything would be OK.

On the other hand I do not like the idea of specialists working in cities because I have bad experience from colonization (the game goes too slowly). The only necessary change in this point is that technologies should let you i.e mine more effectively and factories/libraries etc should rather have 100% effect instead of 50%.


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[will I]

On villages:

I find the village idea interesting, but I've got a few problems.

1. Resource allocation. If villages are the resource-producing sites, and must be built over several turns, the player loses a tremendous amount of the resource allocation flexibility that made it possible to handle emergencies in Civ1/2. For example, if I have been focusing on food production and am invaded, it will take me several turns to reorganize to get the resources needed for defense. I don't think this is realistic -- for most of history, various sorts of manual labor have been essentially interchangeable. I also don't think this is fun, as it greatly increases a perfectionist-type civ's vulnerability to surprise attack.

2. Vulnerability to attack. The village concept makes it far too easy for an invading army to destroy another civ's economy. Again, history shows that this was rarely a strategy in the old days, since peasants could run from invaders and reestablish their relatively low-tech farms pretty easily. Even in the modern age, invasion has not had a long-term impact on agriculture. Also, this vulnerability reduces fun. It's already annoying enough in Civ2 that an enemy can waltz in and in a single turn wreck an improvement that I spent many multiple turns to make. The village proposal means that the computer civs can also knock off huge portions of my population with ease. I don't think the refugee concept solves this problem, since it will be relatively easy for the computer civ to send villages packing turn after turn.

3. Complexity. The village concept adds a lot of complexity and -- dare I say it -- micromanagement to solve a problem (the city radius) that really isn't that troublesome.

4. If you're worried about being able to cluster cities in realistic locations and get supplies from the interior, I think an easier solution would be to have an equivalent of the supply pods in SMAC. A resource extraction city could set up a trade route to feed food or minerals to a growth city. In addition, the supply pod unit could set up a base outside of the various city radii that would funnel supplies back to the origin city. This would seem to keep the ease of the city radius, while allowing relatively easy expansion outside of the radius for those players who are so inclined.

[Jimmy]

I am against the "village" idea completely. It adds micromanagement and goes against historical accuracy. There are better ways to represent how cities work. Colonization had a good system that required a lot of micromanagement but was fairly accurate.

My suggestion is to use real population numbers ( ie 10,390 or 20,300). growth would not depend on food but on other factors. Default pop growth might be like 3% (pop increases by 3% per turn). The factors would add a few percentage points up or down. Food would only determine if the growth is positive or negative. (food deficit would make growth negative, surplus would make it positive).
Citizens would not work squares. Instead, there would be sliders that would allow the player to distribute the pop among tasks (like agriculture, industry, economy, military, happiness) With the sliders, the player would change percentages of pop in each sector NOT actual numbers of pop (this would reduce micromanagement since a player can handle percentages better than actual numbers especially for large cities).
The more people in agriculture, the more food (facilities would enhance productivity).
The more people in industry, the faster a facility or weapon would be completed (facilities would enhance productivity). etc for the other sectors.
The city radius would determine what ressources are available to the city. If a city lacked ressources or used them up, it would have to get the ressources from somewhere else (this would make trade very important).
I will be more specific when I finish working out the details of this model.

We need a model where the civ3 "city" is a village when it is small, and becomes a town and eventually a metropolis as it grows in pop and number of facilities.

[Jimmy]

I am against the "village" idea completely. It adds micromanagement and goes against historical accuracy. There are better ways to represent how cities work. Colonization had a good system that required a lot of micromanagement but was fairly accurate.

My suggestion is to use real population numbers ( ie 10,390 or 20,300). growth would not depend on food but on other factors. Default pop growth might be like 3% (pop increases by 3% per turn). The factors would add a few percentage points up or down. Food would only determine if the growth is positive or negative. (food deficit would make growth negative, surplus would make it positive).
Citizens would not work squares. Instead, there would be sliders that would allow the player to distribute the pop among tasks (like agriculture, industry, economy, military, happiness) With the sliders, the player would change percentages of pop in each sector NOT actual numbers of pop (this would reduce micromanagement since a player can handle percentages better than actual numbers especially for large cities).
The more people in agriculture, the more food (facilities would enhance productivity).
The more people in industry, the faster a facility or weapon would be completed (facilities would enhance productivity). etc for the other sectors.
The city radius would determine what ressources are available to the city. If a city lacked ressources or used them up, it would have to get the ressources from somewhere else (this would make trade very important).
I will be more specific when I finish working out the details of this model.

We need a model where the civ3 "city" is a village when it is small, and becomes a town and eventually a metropolis as it grows in pop and number of facilities.

[Jimmy]

I am against the "village" idea completely. It adds micromanagement and goes against historical accuracy. There are better ways to represent how cities work. Colonization had a good system that required a lot of micromanagement but was fairly accurate.

My suggestion is to use real population numbers ( ie 10,390 or 20,300). growth would not depend on food but on other factors. Default pop growth might be like 3% (pop increases by 3% per turn). The factors would add a few percentage points up or down. Food would only determine if the growth is positive or negative. (food deficit would make growth negative, surplus would make it positive).
Citizens would not work squares. Instead, there would be sliders that would allow the player to distribute the pop among tasks (like agriculture, industry, economy, military, happiness) With the sliders, the player would change percentages of pop in each sector NOT actual numbers of pop (this would reduce micromanagement since a player can handle percentages better than actual numbers especially for large cities).
The more people in agriculture, the more food (facilities would enhance productivity).
The more people in industry, the faster a facility or weapon would be completed (facilities would enhance productivity). etc for the other sectors.
The city radius would determine what ressources are available to the city. If a city lacked ressources or used them up, it would have to get the ressources from somewhere else (this would make trade very important).
I will be more specific when I finish working out the details of this model.

We need a model where the civ3 "city" is a village when it is small, and becomes a town and eventually a metropolis as it grows in pop and number of facilities.

[Jimmy]

Sorry for the triple post.

[ember]

BTW Jimmy, you can use the edit button to dispose of the text in a couple of those posts.

Will:
1) Villages don't cost resources to build. The time to change over is the same as fortification time for units. This represents the time (1 turn) needed to move the people, and plant the crops, set up a blacksmith, etc. It is realistic that way. Constantly swithcing citizens is more flexible, but there should be a small cost to do it (1 turn lost production, in this case)

2) It does add a bit. This could be helped by requiring all laning units to use all MP to land, giving you time to counter, and allowing you to attack units in your borders with the same diplomatic impact as asking them to be removed. It would also require perfectionists to keep some military prepardness to avoid raids. Most perfectionists are like Poland at the start of WWII, expecting to be left alone, even though they had obsolete defenses.

3) I don't think it adds that much. You set the ratio of village / city pop. Civ automatically pumps out new pop where it is needed. You can set priority 'flags' where you want villages the most if you have a special preference. They are visiable on teh mpa in some alternate terrain view mode, so you can set your whole civs at once, without going to all the civ views.
There are no improvments to be built other than normal TI's... I don't think it adds that much.

4) Villages allow more flexibility, and allow the rules to remain consistent for every square. You don't have the wierd situation where you can gather stuff without pop living on the land and velnerable, but the moment you go outside of a city radius your unit is a target. It still doesn't help the wierdness of positioning a city so that a coal mine is 250 miles from the city center as well as the rich fish bed, while cities really rose at ocean river squares first,t ehn along other river squares or ocean/lake areas next, and rarely inland unil moderen times.

Jimmy, look at fractional pop growth, in the city improvment/other/this thread. It is similiar, but keeps pop points.

Your sliders are similiar to assigning citizens in cites to be laboures or merchants (or soldier speicialist, if they take off the penalties). Pop in cities do not work the land under this system.

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"Any technology, sufficiently advanced,
is indistinguishable from magic"
-Arthur C. Clark

[Theben]

I'm also have some reservations with the village idea. I do like it, but if it isn't done well it could easily ruin the game. Without getting into too many details, here are my questions:
[list=1][*]Micromanagement. It has been covered by most other people.[*]Growth into cities. To be historical, most villages next to major metropolitan centers would be the next to turn into cities. This could create a new ICS problem as huge numbers of cities are clustered together.[*]Supply. Which city gets which supplies? How to keep track of them all?[*]This also creates the question of whether the city screen is still necessary. The city picture is unnecessary at the very least if villages aren't bound by a radius around the city.[/list=a]

My thoughts:[list=1][*]Leave villages as a TI. They increase the value of all food/resources/trade by a %, more if more laborers are placed in the same tile.[*]To fight ICS, you don't get a citizen to place in the field until size 2. This would require a minimum amount of food, etc. in the city square for it to grow, build, etc.[*]Limit the distance villages can send supplies even more than Gordon proposed: 1 square w/o roads, 3 with, but further with rr's.[*]Set/Eng/public works build villages. These are needed to create a new city. The only way to allow them to grow into another city is by settling on them with a settler, or by having the village build a "town center", costing the same as a settler. This is the only thing a village can build, and would only require a small box to show % completion instead of an entire city window. In this case there should be a minimum distance between cities; 2-3 squares at least. Your palace counts as a center.[*]Regarding specialists: I am against them normally, but if this system is adopted I can agree to some of them (worker, scientist, merchant). However, the ability to switch one to another must be severely limited, as changing tasks isn't that simple. This wouldn't apply to changing something to a worker (that's easy, and they shouldn't count as specialists) but to switch from a worker to a scientist would require some time , money or something else.[/list=a]

My 2 cents. @@
<font size=1 face=Arial color=444444>[This message has been edited by Theben (edited August 10, 1999).]</font>

[Diodorus Sicilus]

Villages would be a great idea if we weren't trying to play a game called Civilization. Civilization comes from the same word root as 'civil' and 'city' and it implies cities. There is a reason for this (Oh God, I'm into lecture mode again...)
Villages do not have the concentration of surplus resources to support the specialist, non-food-producers that make up a civilization: the scribes, builders, engineers, high priests, etc. Furthermore, if a village does have a surplus it can't be certain of having a surplus (of food) the next year or the next season, so there is, again, no sustained civilization-building.
To build a civilization, at least in every historical instance we have so far, you need to concentrate surplus food and resources so they can be used to support specialists that in turn build the social and physical infrastructure of the civilization. That is, a city.
If a bunch of villages in a given region all have surpluses, they still cannot be used untl they are concentrated for redistribution. In other words, a village or group of villages is going to spawn a city, and then the civilization-building starts.
This is all adequately modeled by a city radius with varying Resources mobilizable based on the terrain in the radius. My only quibble is that the radius should vary based on transportation technology, so that the growth of cities is much more variable than it is in the current games: Babylon hit 1,000,000 people in 7th century BC because it was both a political capital (which attracts the ambitious from the villages) and the center of a river system of transport to bring in trade and food from afar. Later cities all show the same variations in size based on transportation technology and location, and variable city radius will show this better than cluttering the map with village icons to do essentially the same thing.
By the way, not all terrain can support villages or a village population density. In fact, Population Geographers can plot the location of cities based on the food production capacity of the terrain and the speed of transportation, because the population density required for a City Start Up is based on those factors.

[FinnishGuy]

Here's something I cooked up in "The rise and fall of empires" thread (CIV3-General). Thanks to Foobar for starting the thread and giving inspiration.


Quote from my post:

" ... Foobar has a good point there too that once you've properly established your civilization (i.e., have enough cities), there just isn't any real threat to you no more. If you have a counterpart of historical Rome on its' height in CIV/CIV2, you simply can't lose it to a bunch of barbarians!

I think you have a good idea, Foobar. Maintaining a large empire especially in ancient times should be a difficult, yet not impossible, task in CIV3. Yes, there's already the "increased unhappiness from too many cities" factor, but the effect of it alone is all too weak to really make a difference. Besides, this factor was originally patched to CIV1 explicitly to discourage a certain abusive strategy ("despotic conquest"; you stay in despotism, crank out only military units and conquer everybody), not to reflect some historical experiences in ruling large empires.

The unhappiness factor could be just a first step in a series of increasingly severe penalizing effects taking place the more cities you own:

1. increased unhappiness [starts when # of cities goes over limit]
2. increased corruption = less science, money, production
3. low military unit morale
4. chance of spontaneously falling to anarchy = civil war, or throne war, can happen several times
5. increased military unit costs = military service less appealing to populace
6. chance of massive barbarian hordes invading = they are looking for an opportunity to plunder a weak, overextended empire; may happen several times
7. chance of empire breaking up [may occur when you have more cities than three times limit]

Also the strength (or chance) of each effect would increase with increasing number of cities. Note that items 4, 6 and 7 are _chances_, so there's also chance that they won't occur.

I've tried to design the above list roughly according to what historical Rome "experienced". The Chinese did not (?) break up (item 7) while Alexander the Great's short-lived empire did not face barbarians (item 6). To certain extent, the penalties could be applied even to such a relatively advanced empire as the czarist Russia.

If a civilization breaks up, one or more new civilizations split off from the old empire, and the above penalties are then reapplied to each (including the old) according to their new number of cities.

Later, new inspiring ideologies (and religions) and more advanced forms of government would increase the city limit and thus reduce or even finally eliminate (with Nationalism) the penalizing effects. IMO, Nationalism should then introduce a whole new set of problems in ruling a civilization, but I won't get into that here (see posts in TECHNOLOGY and CIVILIZATIONS threads)."


Quote from another post:

" ... In my above post I proposed a system which could simulate historical events similar to those that lead to decline or demise of ancient empires. The system should be further complemented with the barbarians' ability to steal techs (i.e., they adopt "cultural" influences from the victim civilization), and to found new civilizations. Then there could be a chain of events in CIV3 that would accurately enough recreate the fall of Rome and the rise of Europe."

[FinnishGuy]

As a second thought, even Nationalism shouldn't completely remove extra unhappiness and corruption from having too many cities. But the rest of the penalties, yes.

And to be clear: the barbarians can found a new civilization IF they have captured cities (I think this feature has been proposed also before).

Item 7 specifically means break up of empire due to internal strife or lack of adequate administrative means in the far past to govern a very large empire. (Like the splitting of Rome to Western and Eastern empires.)
<font size=1 face=Arial color=444444>[This message has been edited by FinnishGuy (edited August 11, 1999).]</font>

[itokugawa]

what's the difference between a city and a village? Villages can grow to cities and great cities can be villages or small cities.

If we accept the idea of villages why villages cannnot grow to cities? I would prefer a different definition:

Village: 1-4 citizens, no specialists (except entertainers and farmers) and non-militaristic buildings requiring more than 1 coin for maintainance (i.e. bank) are not allowed.
Exception: Aquedact for village of 4 citizens. Required for further increase.
No increase of population with luxuries.
Village radius 1.

Small city: 5-10 citizens, 3rd level improvements (stoch exchange, research lab, mfg plant) and superhighways are not allowed. City radius as now.

Large city: 11-18 citizens. Requires sewer system. City radius 36 squares (radius 3 except 3 squares for every corner).

Huge city: More than 18 citizens. City radius 48 squares (radius 3).

Specialists: Entertainers, scientists, traders, workers (only for factories), farmers. Every new citizen is unexperienced but he can learn any one of these specialities in school (workers-farmers), college (entertainers-traders), university (scientists). A skilled citizen produces +1 if he works in his speciality
(similarly as colonization). With 1 restriction: You can have no more than i.e. 20% scientists (there are few grear brains), 50% workers+farmers (not everybody is strong) etc.

Wonders: You can build ancient wonders everywhere, medieval not in villages ... modern wonders only in huge cities.
(not realistic for manhattan project but good for the game).


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