Villages/Towns/Conurbations

[Grier]

This idea comes from Ajbera and I thought that I would repost it here for further disscussion:

"A tile improvement I would like to see, introduced in late industrial or early modern times, is the 'town', an adjunct to the city that eases population stress due to overcrowding, and brings in extra money, and perhaps a production bonus too. Graphic-wise, it would look like a little town next to your city, and would let modern maps look a little more realistic. Perhaps in the future, with even greater populations and technologies, they can be upgraded to proto- or mini-cities."

I think this is a great idea, what about everyone else?

[ember]

There is some extensive discussion on villages and cities in the list 2 forums, should be under regions and resource management.
I can repost my ideas here if you are interested

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"Any technology, sufficiently advanced,
is indistinguishable from magic"
-Arthur C. Clark

[Stuff2]

Considering the actual size of the map squares there should be room for at least one village in every square.

[OrangeSfwr]

With proper growth, villages become towns, towns become cities? With poor growth or negative growth (migration) villages become ghost towns?

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~~~I am who I am, who I am - but who am I?~~~

[Grier]

Ember if you have time to repost some of your ideas then please do.

[ember]

This is big so bear with me, This covers a lot of areas that arn't stricktly village related, but are neccisary for my system.


This system encompasses villages, regions, split labour and resources, fractional pop growth, and CLAS-D combat.

CITIES

Cities represent the industrial, economic, population and military centres in a nation.

All citizens in cities are some form of specialist, even if it is "serf."
All economy and labour are produced in cities. All population growth occurs in cities.

All food and resources are produced in villages. Villages are population points that have been moved from the cites to surrounding tiles. Villages use some food to support themselves, and send the rest of the food and all resources to the region, to be distributed among the cities.

Labour is the work needed to build things. It must be used immediately.
Resources are what things are built out of. They can be stored. Stores of resources and surluss food "decay" at a rate governed by SE and structures and tech. 5 to 20 % a turn, to prevent loopholes that would alow people to stave off sieges indefinatly. You can only stave off a siege as long as your food and resources hold out.

Cities would get a happyness bonus depending on how many turns worth of food are stored. If there is a shortfall happiness takes a big penalty. In a siege a city surrenders when it would have food riots. Cities under siege are considered a region of one city and no villages.

This is the "village system model." It requires approximately 2 times as many population points as normal. You set a ratio of village to city for each region, and the new population is divided between the two areas. You can set "flags" to tell where you want new villages to form, or let the AI do it.

REGIONS

A region is a area that can easily share resources...

In ancient times a region would be approximately the size of a current city.
As time progresses the size increases in both number of cities and land area allowed.
A city sized region using these rules will be very similiar to a current city.

In a region is based on with cities it includes. Borders are drawn between regions. All villages in the region pool their resources and excess food. Efficiency depends on tranportation infrastructure. The food is distributed to all cities on a need basis, extra is used to increase happiness, (and thereby population growth). Resources are stored in cities, but the actual location only matters when regions are redrawn or cities captured.

Each city has to have its own structures, with a few exceptions (stock exchanges).
In the regional menu there are four catergories where all labour from the region can be divided. All building is done by the regional menu. Details can be found on the layout can be found earlier in this thread. There are some limits based on SE choices. Resources are used for building as needed and available.

Resource uses are:

WONDERS: Only one wonder can be produced at a time. The location is set when building is started.

CAPITALIZATION: The Labour --> Money rate depends on SE and economic structures in the region. Resources can be sold independently of cities, or traded.

UNITS: Labour is used to build units. All new units are placed in reserve, and can be "deployed" the same turn. Explained later.

The units list is a build queue. Items can be directly added or the AI can build a list based on priorities you assign each unit type. The priority of a unit is a ratio of how many of that type to build to how many of each other type. If armour has priority 3 and mech inf 2, then 3 armour will be built for every 2 mech inf, over the long term.

IMROVEMENTS: Similiar to units. When all cities in a region have a structure the priority is counted as 0, so no more are built. The destination city is chosen by the AI, and can be changed by the player.


VILLAGE PLACEMENT

Villages can only be established adjacent to existing ones and within your borders.
Borders only extend into shallow water, usually 1 square, or 2 max.
Coastal villages, while really on land are represented at sea in a coastal square. Ships can only attack coastal villages, only the one that is represented by the square they are on.

MOVING VILLAGES

moving a village takes as long as it does to 'deploy' a unit. In this time no resources are produced, but it feeds itself.

DEPLOYMENT

All new units are placed in the reserves. Other units can be sent there also. Each turn you can deploy units to cities/bases/certain ships in the region. You can also send units to other region's deploy lists. The units cannot defend or be used until the next turn, but can be destroyed. Units in the reserve list cost less to maintain than deployed troops. This is the only way to move air and missile units.

Terraform units can normally only build forts, bases, and other transport and military TI's. When they are placed in the reserves they can build farms, irrigation, mines and other economic, terraforming and transport TI's, anywhere within the region. This prevents players from using their former types anywhere not near their population, except as combat engineers. It also makes them less vulnerable to airstikes. They still can take damage when cities are hit.

POPULATION

The population of cities are recorded as x.xxx. This allows fractional population points. The fraction has no gameplay effect until it reaches the next number. It allows growth rates to be expressed as an increase per turn. Attacks that hit population centers can now do fractional pop. points of damage. maybe 0.1 or 0.05 per hit. To simulate casualties of war, lose 0.001 pop per HP lost by units supported by the region.

The purpose of this proposal is to seperate growth from straight food production.
Growth rates can be expressed as a percentage per turn, (eg 2.5%) to give a familiar sort of look. What this means for gameplay terms is that 0.025 pop points are added every year. This gives a growth of 40 turns.

Population is recorded as fractional points, but it is easy to convert that to a real pop number.
The formula:
Actual population = 5000 x (population points + 0.5)^2 - 1250
This formula follows the civx model exactly for whole numbers, and can give good values for fractional numbers.

Effects on population growth. All numbers are arbitrary and should vary depending on SE choices and tech. This system is desigened to be compatible with the idea of villages.

I have made use of a "happiness rating," which is (#happy - #unhappy) / #total. This gives 0 for all content, 100 for all happy, and -100 for all unhappy. This can be applied to a city, a region, a civ or the entire world.

Base growth: 10%
Happiness : + city happyness / N. N depends on SE.
Villages : + 0.2% per village
Medicine : + 2%
etc.

Immigration: To take into account people moving around in your civ and between civs.
The advantages of including this is that large unhappy cites will tend to slow down growth or shrink, while your smaller cities will pick up the extra people.

In civ immigration = (city happiness - civ happiness) / Y. Y depends on SE and the overall level of transportation available. In cty immigation tends to have larger volume than between civs.

between civs migration = (city happiness - world happiness) / Z. Z depends on SE and transport of all players. For this calculation government types can influence the happiness used. democracy might add 10 points, while communism subtarcts 10 points, to reflect that democracies never have had problems with too many people trying to flee from them.

Wonder: Iron curtain. Prevents all between civ emmigration. (for gameplay all cities count as average happyness level)

TERRAIN

First step is determine the form of the terrain. Form never changes during the course of the game.
These are:
Deep ocean
Ocean shelf
Glacier
Mountain.

Flat
Hills
Major Rivers

Navigable rivers cannot be in hills, so to keep things simple they will be their own landform. Otherwise it is basically the same as flat.
Flat terrain gives a food bonus, hills have a defensive bonus and allow mines.

Vegetation:
Vegetation can only be applied to the last 3 landforms. The first 4 do not support vegetation types.


Plains
Grassland
Taiga (Evergreen Forest)
Boreal Forest
Rain Forest
Tundra
Desert
Swamp

Combinations to note:
hill + grasland = plateau
river + grassland = flood plains, the most fertile standard terrain type.
flat + grassland = no irrigation reguired.
taiga + hills = shield, like the canadian shield or siberia. This is the best resource producing terrain.
swamp + hills, acts as fresh water lakes, these cannot be changed to anything else. (just as a place keeping way of programming it)

Landform cannot be changed by your engineers.
Vegetation can.

Allowable changes:
Grassland <--> Boreal Forest
Taiga <--> plains
Swamp --> Grassland
Jungle --> Plains
Irrigated desert acts like Plains.
Irrigated plains acts like Grassland.
Tundra can't be changed to anything else.

Terraforming model.
Economic TI's are auto built by enginners in cities. A former type unit is fortified in a city. While it is there, it can automatically build farms and mines as well as changes the vegetation in friendly squares. You can change the terrain view mode "T" and click on squares to set their priority and change preffered. If villages are used, can only do squares surrounding friendly villages and cities. Squares do not have to be near the city the engineer is in, just connected by roads, or in the same region.

Engineers outside of cities act like normal civX, but they cannot build farms/mines. (to prevent building away from your pop centres). When acting this way they can build paths (along with most millitary units) as well as Roads, highways and RR, and military TI's

Nothing can be built on deep ocean/glaciers.

military TI's:

Bases act as both fortress and airbase, coastal bases can have ships enter as well. Units can be 'deployed' to bases.
Forts act as a scout unit and stop the first enemy unit to step on it. also offer some defense bonus.
Sonar acts as a fort in the water.

economic TI's:
Farms / modern farms, built on any plains, grassland or desert.
irrigation, built on desert or plains, makes it act as the next stage better, without changing it.
mines / modern mines, built on any hills or mountains. Farms can also be built if it is a grassland/plains square.
fisheries can only be built in continental shelf, which usually only extends one square from land, but sometimes more.

transport TI's:
Paths, built by and most military units as well, MP/2 move
Roads, MP/4 move, and give a trade bonus (and allow resource sharing) when connecting cities.
Highways, modern roads, MP/8 move, more resource sharing.
Rail-roads, MP/8, take 50% longer than highways to build, but enemy units act as if on path (or road?) when using.
Tunnels, connect two squares of land under a shallow ocean square. Allows land units to cross water.
Canal, connect two ocean squares over flat land. Can connect a city on a river to the sea if 1 square away.
When a unit enters a tunnel/canal it uses 1 full MP and goes directly to the other side, units cannot rest in a tunnel/canal. Both can only be used by the owner. Neither can be pillaged by sea units.
A tunnel is built by having an engineer on each end of the desired location. Both then build the tunnel. To use you press a key.

CLAS-D

COMMENTS
The idea behind this is to make the economic model have a more accurate and flexible representation, but mostly invisibly. Regions attampt to reduce micromanagement.
CLAS-D, which this is intended to be used with, attempts to to the same for combat.

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"Any technology, sufficiently advanced,
is indistinguishable from magic"
-Arthur C. Clark

[Grier]

Actually come to think of it we already have a representation of towns and villages, as we set our population to work on a specific tile. All we are lacking is a graohical representation of this.

[S. Kroeze]

I think Ember made some intelligent suggestions. And I disagree with Grier.

As the game is now, there is NO rural population. All people seem to live in cities from the beginning of time. And most of them are commuters(!), working the land, collecting timber, etc. How anachronistic! I think the current system both irrealistic and a bit peculiar.

Realistically all tiles, except some terrain types like mountains and deserts, should be inhabited by people from the start of the game. And in the neighbourhood of towns, people will not wait to exploit a local copper mine -when they have discovered one- deciding to concentrate on farming alone, unless food output is already too low. Realistically a mine can be exploited even when no town in the neighbourhood exists at all. I also think it strange the tiles in CivII are like traffic lights: they are either red or green, but never halfway exploited.

In CivII it is also possible to change the economic occupations of your citizens by one click of your mouse. They seem to be all jack-of-all-trades. Even Stalin and Mao -just to name some terrible dictators- didn't wield that much power. At the same time production per head of population declines as time continues at a terrifying rate.
5,000 people in a small town are able to produce the equivalent of 100,000 people in a fully industrialized city of 2 million inhabitants.(?!?) It seems increasing working power only results in diminished productivity. I'm very happy that in real life things work otherwise.

It has been mentioned an awful number of times, but I can be quite stubborn: Imperialism used a far more intelligent structure, having a primitive 'division of labour', making a distinction between skilled and unskilled workers, needing housing and clothing. Until 1900AD most people lived in the country, tilling the land: the town/city was the exception.
I still hope CivVII (or VIII) will acknowledge this and come with a more realistic solution!

[Par4]

I would like to see cities and the surronding area change through the ages. First many tiny villages and then your city changes and becomes a central hub and larger towns grow near your city exploiting the land near you more. Still many small towns not doing anything except 'being there'(they don't give you shields or food or manufactured goods)Then you city sprawls more and another perimeter of cities pop up exploiting the land 1 tile farther out. Then modern comes, you get some rails for the region, towns become bigger, the closest tiles to your city become suburbs the farther become major industrial areas the central town is for government and comercial where 2/3 of suburb people work. As roads develope small towns pop up exploiting needed resources(observe food coming far away) for the town they came from. Maybe a supply and demand thing. Central town production is decided by a size thing like 50000 people medium production 150000 medium high 200000 high 1000000 subs and industry towns do most production for region, not central town.

Example

Detroit has big car industries Ford doesn't have enough mines near detroit to produce enough cars so some people realize this go to the rocky mountains start a mining town sell the metal back to detroit buy the food from detroits farms needed by the town. The town gives little tax and provides its improvements as they need them(they need 1 school they build it you don't have to, it doesn't cost you money to run but only if there is say 20 of these towns with a school will it affect your national literacy) These towns wouldn't produce science but some luxuries, wouldn't revolt unless the home city did but if the home city is conquered then they become mining city to the next neediest city for mines but if the land they are on is conquered then they become other civs town.

This is kinda stupid but how many big cities actually produce all it's own food. Does Beijing or New York grow its food. No towns far away in the center of the country do. But food might be processed and turned into different food there as an industry.

Just my dumb ideas

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I use this email
(stupid cant use hotmail)
gamma_par4@hotmail.com
Don't ask for golf tips
Your game will get worse

[ember]

Under my system cities would produce no food, or at most only their base tile. They would also produce no resources. THese are all produced by villages, who's output gets pooled for each region and redistributed as needed. Since pop growth depends on having sufficient food, but not excess food, the food distribution is not as important.
All trade arrows and labour (used to turn resources into units and improvments) are produced in cities. Any that would be produced b villages are assumed to be used to support their infastructure.
Villages could have multiple pop points, later in the game, with diminishing returns
(1-pop/5)*base production, as an example, maybe even fractional points, so having 2.500 pop might give you more than 2.300 in a x10 system.

------------------
"Any technology, sufficiently advanced,
is indistinguishable from magic"
-Arthur C. Clark

[Dracon]

I think that Villages should pop up by themselves over time, and if you let them grow large enough without taking control of them, they will eventually become a Barbarian City.
If you take control of a village, you can get resources from it, recruit it's citizens into the armed forces, or help it grow into a proper city. Villages shouldn't just be adjacent to cities, they should be able to pop up anywhere.
I think this idea will make warfare and province management far more interesting and involved.
Also, I think that after a while, as a city grows, it should be able to spread over to other tiles adjacent, to represent suburbs.

[OrangeSfwr]

How about instead of barbarian city - new "minor civ".

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~~~I am who I am, who I am - but who am I?~~~

[Par4]

Minor civs should only happen before the colonial period. Then all cities in your boarders become your civ. Colonial period could come with some the feat of crossing the ocean. How many european countries have dissident cities in there boarders when they have colonies, not many. I mean if your going to expand you better have the homeland tied down too.

------------------
I use this email
(stupid cant use hotmail)
gamma_par4@hotmail.com
Don't ask for golf tips
Your game will get worse

[OrangeSfwr]

I don't quite understand what you're trying to say. What would you define as the colonial period? If it's 1700s than what about India and Pakistan? They claimed independence around 1947. Or the Phillipiens (sp). I think that making it a Minor civ is better than making it a barbarian city. Barbarians attack everyone and Minor civs have the ability to be diplomatic.

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~~~I am who I am, who I am - but who am I?~~~

[This message has been edited by OrangeSfwr (edited May 14, 2000).]

[Grier]

The main thing that I would like to see is a graphical representation of towns and villages. Although I believe that it should be done carefully so as to not overcrowd the map with detail.

The actual in game functions and dynamics of towns and villages do not really concern me as long as it doesnt lead to a ton of extra micromanagement.

I dont think you can compare civ with imperialism as they take a very different approach to the simulation of an empire. Also civ has a much wider scope and time frame than imperialism, so it is no wonder that civ opts for a more simplistic view of certain processes.