City layout (reposted from CGN)

[orange]

quote: Sunday Mourning Controller The People's Moderator PA, USA Oct 2000 posted 09 February 2001 16:25 ------------------------------------------------ Civ games have always focused on having a city with farms and mining which would help the city to grow. Many people disagreed with this, as cities import their food from other places, and most cities do not have nearby mining... I propose that we keep the system of squares in a city radius, but we bring in a new tile - "citylimits" and "suburbs" Here is the current design... (F=farm, M=mine, C=city) _FFF FFMFM MFCFF FFFMF _MMF Here is what I am proposing... (F=farm, M=mine, C=city, S=suburb, L=city limits) _MMF FSLSS SLCLS SSLSF _SFF Cities can grow in a "plus" (with city limits) after reaching a certain population. Old farms can be replaced by city limits, and further away from the city - suburbs... Suburbs - 1/9 the population of the city City Limits - 1/4 the population of the city So using the proposed model from above... If the city tile was home to 900,000 people, the 4 city limit tiles would add on another 900,000 {4(1/4X900,000) The suburbs would add an extra 900,000 people as well {9(1/9X900,000) The entire population of the ENTIRE CITY AREA as a whole would be... City+Limits+Suburbs = 900,000+900,000+900,000...a grand total of 2,700,000. ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~(shift in thinking) Ok. Now...how do feed these people?! Food. It comes from large areas of farming. Make sense? I thought so! Through this model, it should be possible to create cities based solely on farming and with the goal to market food! A farm tile with one worker designated to it should yield 100 units of food per turn. Each citizen should require 1 food unit per turn (though this can change with government) More workers = more crops. Same goes for mining. It should not be required that resources be used by the cities that they are nearest...instead...these cities can export the resources to other cities that will capitalize on them, increasing the speed at which things are produced. ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ Lets take America for an example... The major metropolis is in the North East, stretching from Boston to D.C. This area would be almost completely cities, city limits, and suburbs. The midwest however (the region between the Rocky Mts. and Mississippi River) would be the farming center. Here, cities could grow...but not to an overly high amount because farms and mining would be in the place of suburbs and even city limits. The midwestern cities, Kansas city for example, export their grain to places like Philadelphia and NYC to be consumed. Cities are fed, Farmers are paid. Everyone is happy. No farms? Your people starve! No mining towns? Slow production! No central urban areas? Your economy is punished! ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ I wrote this very fast, so I know I left things out. Please comment IP: Logged ------------------------------------------------ assos Emigrant SH, Florida USA Feb 2001 posted 09 February 2001 17:59 I agree with you completely. The fact of the matter is no civilzation is jut based in the cities. A larger city unit would be much more realistic. The Northeastern megopolis is a perfect example. much more practical to judge a civ by the mass of the people then just simple cities. IP: Logged ------------------------------------------------ Sunday Mourning Controller The People's Moderator PA, USA Oct 2000 posted 09 February 2001 18:31 -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- yup. I especially get annoyed when every city you build essentially grows at the same rate, and you get a bunch of similarly sized cities...not realistic. This idea would definitely require a much larger map...but I hope Civ 3 has that anyway. It would definitely add character to your civ, and also increase the idea of trading between civs. If you are dependant on a rival civ for food, you won't go to war with them.

Sunday Mourning = Me

Haven't been getting a whole bunch of responses at CGN...

any thoughts/additions/comments to this?

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Civilization Gaming Network Forums
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yeah, CGN is not visited frequently enough. it's a shame, posts like this stay unread there.

[orange]

Well I got 10 hits there...and so far none here

C'mon people!

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[Grumbold]

I thought we had said stuff about this fairly recently but I can't find the thread. To make this work, the evolution of a city needs to be very different. Initially, you really would have farms right outside your doorstep because the easily degradable material had to be sold within a day or two of harvesting. Only easily stored foods like grain would come any great distance (and animals that could be walked to the slaughterhouses under their own power.)

Sea trade routes and granaries for storage would allow dry goods to be imported great distances and saved until needed. The grain fleets from Egypt to Rome allowed that city to rise to in excess of a million people at a time when the largest before it had not topped 200,000.

Improved storage methods, road design and railways made this far more widespread. One of the biggest problems for WWII Britain was food production because it had relied on overseas trade for so much of it.

The only way I can see this working in Civ is that once you have built a transport network you can assign tiles to farm for a city as long as it is within transport range. Once you have efficient railways and ports this could be almost anywhere in the world. Cities themselves would grow along these transport links rather than equally in all directions regardless of terrain. Like the Eastern seaboard of America, the cities could rub shoulders with each other on the coast and extend their influence inland.

In game terms this would make for much easier city placement. Almost anywhere will do once the roads are in place and a coastal city can get goods from anywhere ships in its port can reach. Unfortunately the movement and distribution of goods then becomes very complex. Blocades and supply routes become almost essential to implement. A great idea, but not one that I think is ready to see the light of day in a Civ game yet.

quote: Originally posted by orange on 02-13-2001 12:54 AM Well I got 10 hits there...and so far none here C'mon people!

be grateful I bumoed it

[orange]

Obviously you wouldn't have the option for these things right away...but later in the game when populations are expanding and spilling over.

I also agree that city radii should start small and grow with advancement, population growth, immigration, and better life expectancy

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[EnochF]

It's an okay system, but I'd rather have Regions in the late game, rather than expanding city radii. (See the thread-killing system I suggested here.)

But I might like to have some sort of option to change the configuration of the initial city radius. So that I could start out the game with a 9-square city instead of 21.

[Grumbold]

City radius is a concept I think would disappear using this system. Once cities get food and goods being transported hundreds of miles from overseas or overland to support thier population or industry, no radius is adequate. Three tiles distance over mountains without roads will be less practical to reach than ten tiles by road or fifty by rail. It becomes a function of individual tile distances from the city based on the transport method available and how perishable the goods are. Coal, oil, metal ore and such can take ages to reach their final destination provided their value is greater than the transport costs because they do not degrade.

Supplying cities in this way could be a delight for micromanagers but doesn't strike me as the sort of thing Sid would approve of. Imperialism II takes this approach to a certain extent and it works quite well for the shorter timespan, limited resources, limited number of regions that the game has. All resources have to travel by road (later rail) and sea back to at least one city in the home country. There they go into one big pot for spending any way the player wants in any territory they own. The right type of unit must be present in the tile where resources are spent, but travel to any other tile takes only one turn so engineer types can bounce around the map as much as required.

[Sarxis]

Good idea about the suburbs, but should probably be tech dependent, namely, industrial revolution or automobiles, or some such.

If you think about it, sprawling cities like we have today would have been impossible to live in even a hundred years ago. This being due largely to the era's transit system (few automobiles, some horse/buggy, and much footwork).

[Roman]

I propose a complete separation of food supply and birth-rate + death-rate. Of course there would be a connection between the two, but it would not be direct.

I concur the suburb idea is a good one - but yes, it should only come into play later on in the game (after industrial revolution).

[Straybow]

Why does the population of the city matter? If the city is still "size" X then adding suburbs or extended city tiles doesn't change the number of population icons that extract food, shields, and trade arrows from the terrain. So before we worry about the representation of the physical city we need to inject some urbanization into the model.

Besides, you'd be hard pressed to find a metropolis that extends more than one tile at the map scale in civ2—about 100 miles across. The Boston-DC corridor may be 300+ miles long but it is quite narrow. Some metro areas are more circular (London, Paris, Moscow) but they still would fit within one tile (any overlap into an adjacent tile would be insignificant).

The tiles are huge and the "city" radius is really a state or province with the city as its capitol. A special tile improvement might serve to increase population representing a second major city within the province. Growth could be determined from formulas (x sizes smaller than the principle city) or by requiring some action or management to grow.

There should be some costs connected with them. City improvements should increase in maintanence cost to "cover" each secondary city. Secondary cities should be considered one developmental "level" below the principle city, so that a city with an Aquaduct would have secondary cities limited to the equivalent of size 8 (although they would enjoy the Aquaduct's health and fire prevention benefits).

I think such an idea would still be too dependent on terrain, whereas the primary concept of "city" is trade and production generated within being more efficient than that extracted from raw resources. But if more city improvements directly produced shields and trade arrows then there would be a reason for multiplying this effect through secondary cities within the radius.