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Empire size and density
One realism problem is the sizes of the Civ empires. At it's peak, the British Isles were the HQ of a quarter of the world. The colonies they controled were not exactly 1st world status, so most of the industrial production was done on the Isles themselves. In the game, Great Britain is large enough for a small handful cities. You would never expect a civ that small to amount to anything, yet they did. So the problem becomes one of density. How big, area-wise, should cities be and how much land does it take to support them? In reality, they're pretty damned small, and the land they 'control' is certainly not the size of Montana.
One possible solution would be that cities are not allocated space outside of the city itself. A brand new city with 10k people takes up barely more than a single pixel on the screen, but can grow to huge sizes, even merging with nearby cities. This would allow many more cities per unit area and give empires who developed a tiny little area as much power as those who expanded out (the US, for all its 3 million sq miles of territory, didn't surpass Britain in production until the year 1900 or so). Being able to group them into counties/states/whatever would help aleviate micromanagement problems later in the game. Gathering resources would be done on an empire-wise basis. Resources are taken to the nearest city and distributed from there. Regarding food, the transportation eats part of what it's carrying, so you need them to move as fast as possible. This requires a good road network (figure a square or area or whatever within a certain distance of a road is connected to it). Obviously better tech levels (horse-drawn wagons vs 18-wheel rigs) means better transport devices, to the point where in the modern age transportation costs are a mere fraction of their previous levels.
Another thing, food production per person has increased by ridiculous amounts in recent decades. In the US in 1850, a good two thirds was employed in farming. Today, it's around 2% and we generally have massive surpluses. The amount of food one man can produce has increased by over 3000% in the last 150 years, to say nothing of improvements of earlier centuries. This increase is only minimally reflected in Civ 2, where modern agricultural techniques afford an increase of 50%. Similar increases for mining and construction techniques.
Combine this with the new cities, and a tiny island civ could easily manage an emire that spanned the globe.
Just some food for though.
Jared Lessl
One possible solution would be that cities are not allocated space outside of the city itself. A brand new city with 10k people takes up barely more than a single pixel on the screen, but can grow to huge sizes, even merging with nearby cities. This would allow many more cities per unit area and give empires who developed a tiny little area as much power as those who expanded out (the US, for all its 3 million sq miles of territory, didn't surpass Britain in production until the year 1900 or so). Being able to group them into counties/states/whatever would help aleviate micromanagement problems later in the game. Gathering resources would be done on an empire-wise basis. Resources are taken to the nearest city and distributed from there. Regarding food, the transportation eats part of what it's carrying, so you need them to move as fast as possible. This requires a good road network (figure a square or area or whatever within a certain distance of a road is connected to it). Obviously better tech levels (horse-drawn wagons vs 18-wheel rigs) means better transport devices, to the point where in the modern age transportation costs are a mere fraction of their previous levels.
Another thing, food production per person has increased by ridiculous amounts in recent decades. In the US in 1850, a good two thirds was employed in farming. Today, it's around 2% and we generally have massive surpluses. The amount of food one man can produce has increased by over 3000% in the last 150 years, to say nothing of improvements of earlier centuries. This increase is only minimally reflected in Civ 2, where modern agricultural techniques afford an increase of 50%. Similar increases for mining and construction techniques.
Combine this with the new cities, and a tiny island civ could easily manage an emire that spanned the globe.
Just some food for though.
Jared Lessl
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