New City specialists

[Odin]

I would really like food trading. We should also have shield sharing too. in RL places poor in stone or wood would import it from somewere else. Also, if the city is just making weath you can transfer all thier sheilds to a place that needs them, like Dallas importing iron from Minneapolis, wood from Seatle, or stone from Denver.

[Johann Moritz]

Originally posted by Odin
I would really like food trading. We should also have shield sharing too. in RL places poor in stone or wood would import it from somewere else. Also, if the city is just making weath you can transfer all thier sheilds to a place that needs them, like Dallas importing iron from Minneapolis, wood from Seatle, or stone from Denver.

Well, shield sharing is already available in the game! Perhaps you won't notice, but it is there. Ever wondered how a city producing shields exclusively from forests managed to produce Mech. Inf? Virtually, you can consider certain raw materials go from one city to another but without any change in total production.
Of course you can also forget about this.

[Ijuin]

I think that the easiest way to transfer food and shields between cities would be to have "treasuries"--national-level pools in which they are stored. Thus, in each city you could set how many shields/food you want to have sent to the national storage each turn from that city, or how many you want it to draw from national storage (to keep things balanced, let's say that it can not draw more than one unit of food/shields from the national storehouse for each citizen in the city, so a city of population 8 would only be able to draw 8 per turn for example).

[joncnunn]

That's sounds way too micromanagment intenstive.

But perhaps a new power to Graneries:

If any city with a Granery is experceing a food shortage,
then food auto-taken from the city(ies) with the highest food surplus that have a Granery and is rail-road connected.

[Kuciwalker]

Too much micromanagement? You just click a little button on the city screen and type how many shields you want to go to the national pool. You go to another city and type how many shields you want to take from the national pool.

[Johann Moritz]

Please read my reply above. It explains something we don't usually think about, but that is important in this thread.
And skywalker, if you think that is not micromanagement, think about all the work to change orders if one city is captured, or changing orders almost every turn as conditions change.
Just terrifying

[Kuciwalker]

What you're describing is the sharing of abstract RESOURCES. The actual amount of material is not shared. A five-shield city can't use twenty shields.

[Johann Moritz]

That´s because if it produces five shields it can´t change it for twenty, and that city will always be very slow when building. The point is that you cannot change it, so every city is unique with no way to minimize the differences.

[Kuciwalker]

It shouldn't be that way though. Especially for food. Look at it this way:

In the US there are many industrial cities on the east coast. Most of the entire region is given over to industry, not agriculture. On its own, it doesn't produce enough food to support itself and its huge industrial mass. However, with food from other areas, especially the Great Plains, the breadbasket of the US, it can support that population and hence its industrial power.

[Vince278]

Originally posted by skywalker
In the US there are many industrial cities on the east coast. Most of the entire region is given over to industry, not agriculture. On its own, it doesn't produce enough food to support itself and its huge industrial mass. However, with food from other areas, especially the Great Plains, the breadbasket of the US, it can support that population and hence its industrial power.

I humbly disagree. I am from Lancaster County, PA and we are mostly farmland. So is the surrounding area. We are a regional breadbasket ourselves. Yet PA is known for its industry. Sure, it may be difficult for individual cities to feed themselves but as a region or state we are doing quite nicely.

[Johann Moritz]

I´m sorry, but which state is PA?
Anyway, you can build workers or settlers in the Great Plains and take them to the East Coast to join a city. That´s an artificial way of sustaining population, but that´s what happens when you transport millions of tonnes of food every month from the Plains to the Coast, thus taking growth potential from those agricultural cities which, with some exceptions, are relatively small.
Or perhaps the Great Plains aren´t that important for the East Coast...

[Kuciwalker]

Pennsylvania.

[Kuciwalker]

Originally posted by Kaiser Wilhem
I´m sorry, but which state is PA?
Anyway, you can build workers or settlers in the Great Plains and take them to the East Coast to join a city. That´s an artificial way of sustaining population, but that´s what happens when you transport millions of tonnes of food every month from the Plains to the Coast, thus taking growth potential from those agricultural cities which, with some exceptions, are relatively small.
Or perhaps the Great Plains aren´t that important for the East Coast...

But then they starve. The thing is, more people live in big cities that have relatively little agriculture around them whereas few people live in the major agricultural regions.

[Johann Moritz]

Yeah, they starve, but there is a continous flow of settlers, food, or whatever coming from the agricultural regions, so by the moment it is going to lose population there comes the settler to restore it. That´s what I meant when I said that was an artificial way of sustaining population.

[Vince278]

Originally posted by Kaiser Wilhem
I´m sorry, but which state is PA?

I apologize. I should not have used our two letter state postal codes in an international forum where some may not be familiar with their usage.