Urban Sprawl? (like ctp2)

[Kuciwalker]

Originally posted by realpolitic
When I left the city Pheonix in '87 it was 650 square miles 2/3 the size of the state of Rhode Island, they kept on annexing dessert. Cities most often expand by adding subburbs. The metropolis from Boston to Washington DC is one example, another is Los Angeles.

If a city's population doesn't expand upward it has to expand outward, or get more cramped.

They don't expand outward on a civ scale, though. Look at the distribution of cities in the US, for instance - you have areas of sparse and (mostly) low-population cities and areas of densely packed, high-population cities.

[Sava]

I'd like to see city growth based upon trade and immigration, growth just because of local food supply isn't very realistic... especially in modern times where refrigeration and transportation allows food to be shipped from farms to cities.

[Kuciwalker]

Originally posted by hexagonian
Please go back to the second half of my post - scale, as represented in a civstyle game is laughable.

Except in this case you can't ignore it. Just think - what distribution of cities does the CtP2 model produce? Areas with sparse, high-population cities, and areas with dense, low-population cities. Simply looking at it on the map, it looks exactly opposite reality.

[hexagonian]

Originally posted by Kuciwalker
Except in this case you can't ignore it. Just think - what distribution of cities does the CtP2 model produce? Areas with sparse, high-population cities, and areas with dense, low-population cities. Simply looking at it on the map, it looks exactly opposite reality.

...and this is the exact same model produced in civ3 - you choose to either build cities close together and crimp city growth, or spread them out farther to maximize tile usegae. Large 21-tile cities are further away than 8-tile cities.

Please read my followup post from above...and I will try to clarify what probably could of been settled in a clear matter if the designers of CTP2 had simply labeled the 'cities' differently...

Originally posted by hexagonian
City sprawl in CTP2 is not really any different than it is in civ3. You have to plan for city placement in both, allowing for eventual growth. The growth margins are just greater in CTP2, and actually promote the idea that the farflung tiles are less productive, which also happens in society.

Most countries are a collection of cities and small towns. All areas on a map generally have some sort of production/commerce value. In civ3, you normally have more gaps in your empire that do not produce anything. In CTP2, those gaps are rarer because of greater sprawl, and better reflect that even the most rural areas in a country has something to contribute to society.

Perhaps a better way to look at the issue is the 'cities' of CTP2 should have been labeled by the original designers as regions, provinces or states, instead of cities. This would maintain the scale issue very nicely.

[Max Sinister]

But even then... the Boswash region is smaller than, let's say, Texas, but has more people living there than all the prairie states combined. I wish I knew a way how to simulate the Real World where some areas are the bread-baskets for the megacities.

[Kuciwalker]

Originally posted by hexagonian
...and this is the exact same model produced in civ3 - you choose to either build cities close together and crimp city growth, or spread them out farther to maximize tile usegae. Large 21-tile cities are further away than 8-tile cities.

They're still all pretty close together. The problem is, ultimately, with the entire system, but CtP's makes it a lot worse.

[Sava]

I agree Kuciwalker. THe whole notion of city radii to gather resources is stupid. THere are many areas in the world where massive cities are close together. Look at the Northeast United States, for instance. New York, Philadelphia and Boston are relatively close together. And people living in those cities don't go out and collect resources... things are shipped to those cities from other parts of the country and world.

[Straybow]

Ancient-to-medieval cities in Eur and NME were supported by farms no more than 25 miles from the city. Around the Med some cities chose to export goods in exchange for grain because the sea trade made it possible, yet in nearly all cases farming the surrounding lands (all within the city tile except for absurdly small scale maps) could have supported them.

Cities ruled and collected high value resources from wider regions because they could, not because they had to.

[Urban Ranger]

Expanding city radius is good, because it is one of the things that encourage the building of a few large cities instead of a mess of small ones. IOW, part of the solution to ICS.

[Kuciwalker]

Except it produces results opposite what one observes IRL. It's the wrong solution to the problem.

[hexagonian]

...and yet no solution or alternative is offered

[realpolitic]

Originally posted by Kuciwalker

Its not even "urban sprawl". In CtP2 the radius a city collects resources from expands as the city grows, which makes sense.

Not really, not in the way CtP2 does it. NYC doesn't collect resources from some expanding radius around it, it gets resources from all over the place. The problem is that the entire system is broken once one goes into modern times, and a lot before as well. Egypt fed Rome. There's no way to have that happen in C3 or CtP2, and it's somewhat clunky in C2.

Yes it's really broken in modern times. Wealthy countries may be able to afford more food, (it takes 20 pounds of grain protein to produce 1 pound of beef protein, and still Americans become obese), but rich countries have lower fertility rates:

Rich:
Europe's fertility rate started dropping around 1860, by 1930 it was around break-even. Now it's population would be aging, execpt for immigration.

America:
Dropped to nearly 2 children/couple around 1960. Increase since then was "population bulge" : baby boomers reaching childbearing age.

Poor:
Africa: near breakeven now largely because of AIDS, famine, some birth control used.

China: government encouraged children through 1970's, near breakeven now because of government coersion.

India: still having plenty of babies

South America: Huge families are still the rule, some increase in birth control.


Its the poor countries of the world who are causing the population increase. Food is no longer the cause of overpopulation.

If anything, entering the Modern Era, lowers the increase in population.

[Locutus]

Originally posted by Kuciwalker
Except it produces results opposite what one observes IRL. It's the wrong solution to the problem.

No, from your point of view it's the right solution for the wrong problem. From a gameplay point of view, CtP2's solution works nicely (as UR explained). From a historical point of view, it works just as poorly as any other part of Civ (or CtP). I mean, really, when you think abou it, what part of civ is actually remotely historically accurate? Combat is unrealistic, trade, scientific advancement, city production, resource collection, etc. Nothing is remotely accurate, yet it's a fun game. To quote Chris Crawford (game designer and founder of the GDC):

There are few games that show any flair for simplification. 'Sid Meier’s Civilization' is one; Sid was so brutal in his simplification of history that I sometimes wince at the game's inaccuracies. Yet the result of Sid's design parsimony was one of the greatest computer games of all time. A lesser designer would have succumbed to the temptation to pile it on.

Civ may be a game about history, but let's not pretend it's actually trying to be accurate in it's portrayal of it...


BTW, note how in the list effort and other suggestions posted in this forum, people do often have the tendecy to pile it on

[Straybow]

There have been solutions offered to ICS... see Civ3 List.

For ex: Vagabond's Urbanization solution. He introduced the idea of letting improvements have "positions" that can be filled by workers just as terrain tiles. These workers would generate a trade arrow or two and a resource befitting the improvement type (typically shields). They would also "power" the improvement, so that an unfilled factory would only provide a 25% increase to shields, etc.

[Kuciwalker]

Originally posted by hexagonian
...and yet no solution or alternative is offered

I've said that the entire system is fundamentally flawed. C3's is least flawed in that the result at least looks like reality.