Do shields still make sense?

[Sandman]

Ok. In civs 1 and 2 important commodities like wood, stone, metals, oil and uh.. whale blubber were abstracted as resource shields. Prime sources were forests, mined hills and bonus squares.

Now we have strategic resources: Horses, iron, saltpeter, coal, oil, rubber, aluminium and uranium. These are strategic because of their relative rarity compared to wood and stone.

Now the shields only represent wood, stone and some less used metals. These are pretty common as well. This is acceptable for buildings ( although how much stone and wood does a barracks need? ) but it makes little sense for units.

Consider two cities, X and Y, that are ordered to construct knights. Both recieve iron and horses from the trade network. City X has two hills mined, city Y has little in the way of hills and forests. X can produce many more knights than Y ever could. Even if Y is much bigger than X, and is receiving the most crucial resources, it will still fall behind in production. This is clearly a nonsensical situation.

My alternative would be a system which took into account the population as the main factor behind production. Other factors could include happiness, education, factories, and government type.

[Gramphos]

Actually shields represents the labor working on gathering the building materials and putting them together as well as the building material itself.

[Sabre2th]

Gramphos is right there, but you also have to consider that it's a game. Things like that are abstracted just to keep the game from getting too complex. Certain levels of complexity just aren't as much fun.

[Lorizael]

Well with the Forced Labor that Dan mentioned, it appears that shields are based somewhat on the labor of your citizens. I still think building military units should affect your population though.

[Faboba]

Nope, In my opinion sheilds stood for what they always claimed to be - production. That is why sheilds were impoved with power plants ( which is really LESS labour for the citizens surely )

Sheilds represent the ammount of work able to be produced ( sounds strange I know when you talk of getting work produced by mountains............ when you think about the whole shields thing it is strangely complicated )

[Lorizael]

Here's the problem.

Cities were built when technology was advanced enough that not all of the people had to be farmers. Therefore, specialists should be more common then they really are.

Most, not all of your people should be farmers. And then a few people (this number would of course increase as techonology increased and your population expanded) could be laborers, who giveyou production, scientists who science (duh), merchants, traders, that give you money, and craftsmen who give luxuries.

Now the farmers would mostly get food, but some tiles could give you extra things (now represented by special resources). I think this is probably the best way to do it, but probably gets away from the Civ system too much.

[dainbramaged13]

First of all, its a game.. second of all, have you heard? its shipping in 2 weeeks!

[Lorizael]

Originally posted by dainbramaged13
First of all, its a game.. second of all, have you heard? its shipping in 2 weeeks!

Whoa, whoa, this game is gonna rock as is! But I doubt it will be perfect. We're just coming up with ideas, Civ III wouldn't be here without ideas...

[CygnusZ]

It's not a bad idea, but then wouldn't the crawler abuse that was utilized in Alpha Centauri become rampant in the Civilizaiton series?