Rhennic:
Posted a couple times on this and am doing it now in the mod I play. In one game I think I was watching the Romans build a city to oblivion, though. But, I really like the feel of it from the player standpoint. Still doesn't seem to stop the unit diarhea, or utter disregard for your borders (note to Fireaxis: make it like wheeled vehicles stricture and EU: no declaration of war, no right of passage then its just like a no road mountain to a catapult). Willem pointed out he's using unit maintenance cost to control unit numbers effectively, combined with free unit costs to balance out not making it too hard to build enough to develop & defend cities.
My scheme, can't remember it all perfectly but:
legionaires: 1, but they build roads and forts.
muskets, pikes, rifles, frigates, ironclads: 1
infantry, tanks, fighters, destroyers, Aegis, subs, nuke subs: 2
mech inf, mod armor, panzers: 3
carriers, F15s, stealth bombers, bombers, battleships: 3
What it forces is subsidizing the later game colonization effort from the center of your empire, and a balancing act for the player, you can only build stuff so fast or it overly cuts your big cities down to size. I like it too because it directly reflects if the people are in the military they aren't producing for the economy.
Here's where maybe change Women's sufferage to a small wonder, and its effect might come in as an economic benefit that mitigates the cost of units - women going to work in factories - certainly more realistic and historical in some ways than its effect now.
the other thing to do with this is let them add this pop to cities, kind of a different disbanding option.
am really looking forward to using it with increased maintenance costs and if the coding will let me, changing free units for cities on republic and democracy.
republic: cost 2, free 0/1/1
democracy: cost 3, free 0/1/2
Sava:
Been thinking of how that could work, but would have to be something Fireaxis does for us. Would go with the above, and make a nice "civ" mechanism use of workers. Been thinking of formally writing it up for some time. Well here it goes now:
Basically units having pop cost are still part of the city they were built at once built. Second, workers from other cities can go to a city starting to build a pop cost unit and be consumed. Like trainees showing up for bootcamp. Change disbanding in a city to getting the workers back, becoming civilians again, and a reduced shield award to the city. If you disband outside city then you just get the workers back. Of course you can straight build a unit with a city and just let the city suck the pop loss. Which by the way should occur when you commit to building the unit. If you then change to a building you get the pop or workers back. This would all be a selection dialog box at start of building. Would make you think about how many units any one city could sustain.
Now you use this to make war weariness concrete: even when the workers are away they count as part of the city for "keeping people happy" purposes, and show up on the head display of the city, over to the right probably. When they win battles they count as double heads stacked up/down in the display, when they lose, or the wars long they count double unhappy same way.
(This is concept here not necessarily hard numbers)
plus war weary civilians are marked on the new display.
Food:
Food would work different too than now and tied in to the above. If you have a granary in the city you would be able to put some of your excess food rate into a "national food pool" to be consumed by units shown over at the right of the food display, where the extra is now as another subdivsion. Import from the "the national food pool" would be to the left. Again selectable dialog boxes. Also would want to have a mechanism to be able to cede some bread slices directly from the food display of the city to a national food bank. Haven't quite got my head around how to reflect storage in granaries that isn't used up - where this could get messy. Perhaps a separate bin to the right of the current one - when its filled thats all you can store and food production goes back to the city, and whats stored goes away at a certain rate over time - a little like spoilage in RT2. All the national food bank stuff requires being on the trade net or nets of course.
One way for supply of units also could be simple too, whats the food by square on the land the unit(s) on that has pop cost, if its not enough then unit(s) needs supply from national food pool, the unit would have to be "on the net" to do so. No more 50 cav on square unless they have food from somewhere else or they die of starvation just like city dwellers. I love the way these hordes of troops wander around the jungle without a care in the world.
This all would want to have management/monitoring ability from the military advisor and domestic advisor screens
Was just thinking this would be an elegant way to reflect historic fact: ancient armies ate off the land, modern units and armies are bigger and need to be supplied. An armored division takes more to feed than Winfield Scott Hancock's II Corps, AOP.
I would tie this into something like Trip's suggestions on improved resource rules, too.
And yes, I own an unpunched copy of SPI's Campaign For North Africa
and have played GDW's Fire In the East/Scortched Earth in all its glory a couple times not to mention SPI's War in the East.
Well there it is, ready for people to take potshots at.
