Growth - should it be related to food

[Fosse]

I like that Maniac. It's more realistic than thousands of people starving to death because you were one bushel short that year, and it destroys the ability to starve the enemy (or yourself, ifyou want) without facing real consequences.

Now, you'd better feed the other guy's citizens or they'll revolt in no time.

The several ideas for what could cause growth mentioned in this thread are great, and I really hope that Firaxis is still listening and being influenced.


And regarding food availability capping population... Why? The whole idea of divorcing food from growth is to insert the risk that your cities become too big for you to feed.

[Martin the Dane]

And regarding food availability capping population... Why? The whole idea of divorcing food from growth is to insert the risk that your cities become too big for you to feed.

Is'n that just an other way of limiting growth

[Xorbon]

Population growth from food surpluses works in two ways. First, a food surplus means the population is eating well, and as a result, aren't dying of starvation and malnutrition as much. Lower death rates means higher population growth. Second, a food surplus frees up workers to do jobs other than food gathering. This leads to the establishment and growth of towns as people move to centralized areas for mutual defense and ease of trade. The migration of people from rural to urban areas is known as 'urbanization'. Urbanization doesn't affect total population so much as it affects growth of urban areas. As civilizations advance to modern times, this mode of city growth becomes less important than other factors.

Industrialization is another factor in urbanization. Industrialization not only increases food surpluses because of agri-technology improvements, but also causes cities to become 'magnets' for people looking for work (at factories).

Inter-city migration (i.e. immigration and emigration) is another thing affecting city growth (or shrinkage). A city's quality of life, wealth (because of trade), employment rates, etc. affect its immigration. People will tend to emigrate from cities with high pollution, low happiness, high unemployment, etc. Even with these factors, people with only migrate if they have the means. In other words, migrants may be restricted in their movement based on their wealth and/or access to affordable transportation. This may limit the amount of long-distance migration.

Natural growth is the final factor in population growth. Natural growth is the number of births minus the number of deaths. Natural growth affects the total world population, as well as local rural and urban populations. Factors for death rates include health, nutrition, sanitation, medicine, and pollution. Overcrowding can cause an increase in deaths because of ease of disease transmission and lowered sanitary conditions (at least until modern times). Certain disasters (such as war, disease, and famine) can cause temporary increases in death rates.

Birth rates are affected by improved nutrition and health, birth contol and education, and 'urbanism' (a change from rural to urban attitudes - rural folk have lots of children to 'help out of the farm'; while urbanites have less children to reduce the costs of raising a family).

Governments can affect population growth and movement as well. Totalitarian states often retrict migration into or out of their nations. Other countries make migration relatively easy. Governments can control migration through forced relocation. To affect bith rates, governments can offer incentives for people to have large families, or can limit family sizes (like in modern-China).

If you take all of these factors (as well as factors I've failed to mention) and apply them to a city/population growth model in Civ, you could end up with a fairly complex system. As always, the trick is to balance realism with playability.

[The_Aussie_Lurker]

Hiya Xorbon,

I feel that your city's surplus food should act as your base 'population growth factor'-assuming a fertility rate of 2 (i.e. 2 children/family).
Increased wealth reduces the base, increased health care increases the base. Increased Education decreases the base and certain governments will either increase or decrease the base.
As secularity increases, base pop growth will decrease. I think that, so long as these main factors are accounted for, then we will have a much better model for population growth-but one that is still quite simple!
Emmigration and Immigration would be a seperate factor, but should definitely be incorporated into civ4.
Lastly, I also believe that the way population is measured should change, to make a more 'even gradation'. For instance, instead of a straight pop 1, pop 2 etc, it should be pop 1.1, pop 1.2 etc. Each increase in the integer should require more fractions to get to the next. For instance, pop 1.1 to 1.5, then pop 2.1 to 2.10, then pop 3.1 to 3.20, then pop 4.1 to 4. 30 and so on! This would allow bombardment and invasions of a city to cost .x of a population point, rather than X pop points. In addition plagues and unit building could also cost a fraction of a population point-making things MUCH more 'realistic'!

Yours,
Aussie_Lurker.

[GePap]

Base fertility should be high, like 5 or 6-that is what it is naturally. 2 is a very modern level.

The balance to a very high fertility rate is a very high mortality rate-the main population boom occurs when the death rate drops but ferlity stays high-then it levels of as fertility comes down sharply.

As for pop. points-no need to use increments, just have each Pop. point=set number of people, then increase the pop. points so that cities have ppoulations of 90 or 150, not 5 or 20.

[Tassadar500]

I rather have the population as 5 or 20, because if we do it another way, you could end up with a number of 100,000

[Martin the Dane]

Originally posted by Nuclear Master
I rather have the population as 5 or 20, because if we do it another way, you could end up with a number of 100,000

Is that a problem? after all I'm not living in a size 5 city but a city with 250k inhabitants.

[Tassadar500]

But it is not as aesthetically pleasing

[Odin]

The thing that annoys me in earlier civs is that fully-grown cities end up in a surplus-starvation yo-yo that basically wastes food. This gave me an idea that is similar to the "rations" in CtP; increasing rations would increase happiness and worker productivity but lower the birth rate, and visa-versa. The rations can be customized to each city so one city can have high productinty and builds millitary units, another can have low rations and be a settler-worker factory.

[The_Aussie_Lurker]

You know, Odin, that is soooo spooky ! I was just writing a reply along almost identical lines to yours!!

Aside from what I have mentioned above, I feel that there are THREE (3) major ways that you can use food to control population growth-none of which are mutually exlusive.
The first is, as Odin suggested, to have a CtP food rationing system. If this system were adopted, though, there should be a seperate ration bar for your 'native population' and your foreign/slave population (if applicable). This would allow you to differentiate between how you treat your population, and how you treat those seen as 'different' from you.

The second system is by converting 'raw' food into 'processed' or 'manufactured' food. Like increasing food rations, this increases happiness, but reduces population growth (consider processed food as luxury foods and fast food!)

The final method is by being able to vector surplus food towards other cities, via a central 'food pool'!
Anyway, just a thought!

Yours,
Aussie_Lurker.

[Odin]

Originally posted by The_Aussie_Lurker
You know, Odin, that is soooo spooky ! I was just writing a reply along almost identical lines to yours!!

Aside from what I have mentioned above, I feel that there are THREE (3) major ways that you can use food to control population growth-none of which are mutually exlusive.
The first is, as Odin suggested, to have a CtP food rationing system. If this system were adopted, though, there should be a seperate ration bar for your 'native population' and your foreign/slave population (if applicable). This would allow you to differentiate between how you treat your population, and how you treat those seen as 'different' from you.

The second system is by converting 'raw' food into 'processed' or 'manufactured' food. Like increasing food rations, this increases happiness, but reduces population growth (consider processed food as luxury foods and fast food!)

The final method is by being able to vector surplus food towards other cities, via a central 'food pool'!
Anyway, just a thought!

Yours,
Aussie_Lurker.

Both of your additional ideas I was thinking of too!

[Sir Og]

Originally posted by Fosse

And regarding food availability capping population... Why? The whole idea of divorcing food from growth is to insert the risk that your cities become too big for you to feed.

Maybe capping is not the correct term. I ment that food would only affect population when it is not enough. So surplus of food would have no effect on pop growth, but shortage of food would cause higher death rates wich could lead to decrease in the population.


And some more details on the ideas that I posted earlyer.
The 'food pool/basket' should affect only connected cities and cities that are not under seage(cities that have all their surrounding tiles in enemy ZOC). Otherwise a shortage of food in a distant newly captured city would cause a shortage in your core cities which is unrealistic.

There should also be some tools for controlling the distribution of food. So that you can starve a certain city or make shure that a certain city has enough food even when there is a shortage in the empire.

[GePap]

Originally posted by Nuclear Master
I rather have the population as 5 or 20, because if we do it another way, you could end up with a number of 100,000

You you don't. As for what is aesthetically pleasing-who said you have to display the size on a map-you can always shopw this graphically, or better yet, you can show Levels on the map: this serves the same function- example:

Cities with pop 1-5 show as Level 1 - you see a 1 on the city
6-10 as 2, 11-20 as 3, 21-30 as 4, 31-50 as 5, 51-75 as 6, 76-100 as 7, 101-150 as 8 and so forth.

That solves the aesthetic issue, it gives attacker s afair idea of the size city they face, but not exact info as to its population (information an attacker would really not have unless they spied into the city in real life either), while allowing more sane population management.

[GePap]

I would love a system in civ that allowed you to assign workers like in Colonization-each building not only has a resource cost but a staffing cost (so a tiny city will not have a stock exchange no matter what you do), a minimum pop to meet and a number of pop. points minimal to use. You can always assing more pop. point to it, to diversify the economy and increase a specific output. You could also use certain squares of terrain more heavily than others-so fi you want 10 citizens working at a food rich square, you can and production increases. Obviously, tech levels determine how many people you need as a minimum to start a specific structure, how many can staff, how many can be assigned to a structure or square, and what the returns are: example, early in the game you might assing 5 people to farm a square, but the returns decline rapidly with each new on and there is a cap to total production-in the future, a single person would be sufficient to do the same work and even more as technology improves-freeing population up from economic production.

Obviosuly you need pop points to staff military units, so again, some tiny city in the middle of nowhere, no matter how reasource rich, will not the be the grand military center of your empire.

[Martin the Dane]

Originally posted by GePap
Obviosuly you need pop points to staff military units, so again, some tiny city in the middle of nowhere, no matter how reasource rich, will not the be the grand military center of your empire.

Why not?

After all Peral Harbour isn't all that big, and it is still the home of one of USAs fleets, with quite a lot of sailors.
How many of those sailors comes from Hawaii?
How many of those ships was built there?
How many of them are actually funded from there?

In real life having a large military base/beeing home of an army, is an economical benefit to the city. They generate a lot of jobs, all paied for by the government, while all those workers spend most of their money locally.