How to improve the city model?

[The diplomat]

I would keep the exact same city model in civ2, except for 2 things:


1) No happy and unhappy "heads".
2) "heads" would no longer work the city radius.

Here is how things would work instead:
1) each city would have a happiness number from -10 to +10. negatives numbers would slow down production and there would be a chance of unrest. positive numbers would increase production. (see "important city concepts" thread for more details)

2)"heads" would be in 2 categories:
-"peasant" (produce resources)
-"noble" (work certain city improvements)
The city radius would determine the MAXIMUM amount of food/shield/trade a city could produce. You would add up every tile, as if every tile were worked, to get the max amount of resources. The SE industry factor would modify this maximum.
Each "peasant" head would produce a certain amount of food/shield/trade. (for example, maybe each "head" would produce 3/4/3) Happiness would modify it. Adding up every "peasant" head would determine the ACTUAL amount a city produces.
Some city improvements like bank, temple
, university, stock exchange etc... would require a "noble" head.
City improvements like barracks, granary, aqueduct etc... would not require a "noble".
The computer would automatically convert a "peasant" into a "noble" for each city improvement that requires it. (a city would require at least one "peasant")

This model reduces micromanagement since you no longer have to micromanage the heads in the city radius. And this would also help the AI.
It also addresses ICS: by requiring a "noble" head for certain city improvements it would make large cities better than small ones.

Any thoughts, ideas?


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No permanent enemies, no permanent friends.
[This message has been edited by The diplomat (edited July 13, 2000).]

[Theben]

I agree with no more (un)happy heads. And if you're suggesting something similar to MoM (re:city radius production) then I'll support that too. But I'd also include more changes to the city screen, and possibly go for regional development. One thing I'd like to do is use the heads (actually busts) to denote the religious/cultural/racial makeup of the citizens. Face shows race, symbol over head shows religion, and dress shows how modern the city is and possibly any cultural variation not accounted for by race and religion. Of course these could be shown by % stats in the city window, but too many percentile comparisons and you may lose the flavor of the game, as everything becomes a % battle/management task.

As for "peasant" and "noble", there were older suggestions which basically called for the same thing, dividing between "farmer" (resource gathering outside city) and "worker" (uses resources in city to produce improvements/units/goods). Included were "worker" variants such as merchant, scientist, and clergy (either required for or boosted production in trade, tech, and happiness respectively).

Re: happiness factor, did you ever read my posts on a happiness indicator for SE? It was simialr to what you describe, but w/o any set limits. Each point roughly translated into a 2% bonus/penalty in ALL categories- food, money, mineral production as well as contentment.

[Tiberius]

Didn't you forget something, Diplomat? In your previous posts you talked also about unemployement, which could fit well in your city model.

Peasants and nobles: it's OK, I think. I don't agree however that peasants should produce a fixed amount of food/shields/money; after all, the terrain is really important. You can't just put a village in the top of a mountain and expect to produce the same amount of food like a grassland-village.

I agree with Theben's proposal: peasants for resource gathering outside cities and workers/nobles for production/money/science/happiness boost inside cities. But your idea Diplomat, to convert automatically a peasant in noble for every city improvement you build, is very good. There's only one problem: the number of "heads" in a city must be changed: I sometimes had 3-size cities (surrounded by hills but no grasslands) with temple, marketplace, bank, univercity maybe even more. Now, how can I obtain 4-5 nobles in such a city? Or is this your goal? To avoid small cities to develope great infrastructure? It's not always realistic: for ex, Germany has only 3 or 4 cities over 1 million, but the second or third economy in the world while China, with at least 25 cities over 1 million, isn't in the first 5.

If we don't need to micromanage the heads anymore, then why should we use them anyway? We could use real numbers for pop, and percent stats for peasants/nobles/unemployed, along with some fancy graphics of course.

[Michael Dnes]

The problem with developed cities with high demand for 'nobles' could be solved by 'modernity'. The average percent of population in the EU involved in agriculture today (excluding anomalies like Greece) is around 4%, and in the UK 2%. Now one 'peasant' can feed a whole city, whereas before the agricultural revolution the vast majority of the world was tied to the plow. The 'head' requirement for food could reflect this- at the start only the largest city could contain even one 'noble'. In the 20th century style one or two 'peasants' could feed millions. Although I think you shouldn't need 'nobles' to run basic improvements- marketplaces for example. Perhaps basic temples don't need a 'noble', but major temple complexes and religious centres do. The number could increase as the religion expands.

[Par4]

Each job worked in the cities regional area will have 1 of these groups on it. There would also be factories and commerce this is important. Some tiles could have more than 1 job others cant.

Lower- produces food, mines raw materials, harvests consumables
Middle- works in industry commerce, changing food/consume/rawmater into 2nd generation
Upper- Only works in cities improvements, science entertainment

Food- Produced outside cities
raw materials- produced outside cities
consumable goods- same as above
processing food- in towns
refined materials- same as above
manufactured goods- same as above
commerce- central city, towns
industry- towns
science- central city
entertainment- central city
Improvements-
Unemployed-special

City in the center(probably) of the region is the main center but the suburbs and smaller towns next to the city do much of the production of the region. Then there can be little tiny towns that do nothing just for show.

sssss s-suburbs
ttctt t-towns
ttttt c-main city

These are mainly cosmetic they just show some realism of the factories are in the city and the towns, many people live in the suburbs and go the city to work in commerce etc. The regions lvls are all that really counts.

Economic growth
This is kinda engulfing
theres a scale -10 to +10 + means more commerce industry immigration, more tiles used more middle class. - means emmigration, loss of jobs and general shrinkage of the region and loss of middle and upper class etc. This would also have a global and domestic market, say if theres a city in the middle of the plains producing just enough food for the civ but another big civ is running out of food that city's EG would rise and many people would rush out just to produce food. No industry or low industry, low commerce, improvements are the only main thing other than food in that region because of demand. Food is in demand industry isn't. See realism yay!

Now each region should specialize, if theres a big city in the plains and lots and lots of plains then its region of influence is going to be big so all the people living there can make lots of food. Because food and stuff should be more polarized later in the game to produce the mass amounts needed, you are not going to want to put cities all over the place and make those tiles unusable. So pickyness people arent going to grow food in the forest if they have the advancements to prodcuce 4x as much in the plains with machinery and stuff.

a lot of this rides on making economics a bit better in civ3 and killing ics because you dont want to have those precious tiles unusable to make food later on when you need to feed about a hundred heads or something. It may seem good at first but it'll hurt later. Plus theres all that other stuff in the anti ICS thread so it shouldnt be a problem.

Unemployed. These use up improvements so they have to expand but dont produce anything work, or pay taxes. They are bad and happen if economic growth goes to the negatives.

so if a port city has grown huge but produces nothing and the trade coming in and tariffs and commerce jobs for the trade routes are all gone theres going to be a big dead city if those routes close or go another way or something.

this model is expanded to include more stuff, unemployment no more just shields and food theres advanced lvls of goods and food. There isn't a lot of micromanagement because you the god man or whatever won't trade much of this yourself, unless you set up a police state and even then it can still us the same trade AI, or you can take it by the reigns but I've seen what many games can do to kill micromanagement with multiple goods I'm confident Firaxis can make the AI good enough to do it too.

I hate having just shields!!

If you have questions I'll answer them tomorrow, I see this in my head but it seems complicated but I hate just using shields. Everything that was borrowed from other threads and stuff I can't remember who said what but I give you credit for many of these ideas.

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[This message has been edited by Par4 (edited July 14, 2000).]
[This message has been edited by Par4 (edited July 14, 2000).]

[Tiberius]

Michael, I thought about this sollution, too. You see, the problem is that if the city model works with heads, then how many heads would be 5% of a 5 or 15 city pop? 0,25 or 0,75 ?

On the other side, If you have a 5 size city and 5 improvements that require 5 nobles you would have exactly 0 (zero) peasants, right? The idea is good, but need a few adjustsments. Diplomat?

[The diplomat]

Thanks everybody for your post!

I'll try to answer all your questions:

Theben: Unfortunately, I did not get around to reading your happiness suggestion in SE. There was a lot to read in that SE thread! I will see if I can find it in the archives! But it sounds good!

Tiberius:
The best way to implement unemployment IMHO would be to have "unemployed" heads. Since heads represent 10,000 people, unemployement would have to be serious to get even 1 "unemployed" head. And unemployment would only affect large cities. A city of size 3 or 4 would not be affected.
I did not suggest unemployment in my first post because I wanted to try to present a city model as non-radical as possible. But "unemployed" heads would not too radical, right?

In terms of heads producing a set amount of ressources. My first idea was to have each peasant produce a certain amount of "tools". SE, happiness etc would influence how many "tools" each peasant produced. "tools" would represent the amount of work each peasant is capable of doing. The player would then be able to allocate, with sliders, the total number of "tools" produced, between AGRICULTURE, INDUSTRY and COMMERCE. But then I figured that if a peasant produced a certain amount of each ressource directly, I did not need sliders at all.
Do you think that producing "tools" and allocating them between agriculture, industry and commerce is a better idea?
The issue is I want to get rid of having to manage heads in the city radius!
The amount of food/shields/trade each peasant produces would not be fixed throughout the game. Happiness would influence it. Also, techs would increase the amount of food each peasant can produce as well as the maximum food. This means that as the game progressed, cities would need less and less peasants to feed the entire population. This would implement what Michael Dnes suggested.

In terms of "nobles": not all city improvements would require a "noble". This is done so that small cities could still produce basic improvements without any penalties. But the idea is purposely to prevent small cities to produce "big" city improvements. I believe this would encourage players to grow their cities and hopefully prevent ICS.

A city would always require at least 1 peasant. Therefore, you would never have a situation of 5 nobles and 0 peasants. I believe this is needed to help the player avoid famine. Since 0 peasants means the city would produce no food, the city would be in famine. I want to help the plyer avoid the problem of building city improvement faster than growth and suddenly getting famines in several cities because they have no peasants. So, the game would always require at least 1 peasant. If a city of size 5 has 4 city improvements (the kind that requires nobles), you would have 1 peasant and 4 nobles. Now let's say that you start to build another city improvement that would require a "noble". The player would get a message saying that the city improvement would produce no benefits until the pop grows. You could build the city improvement anyway, but it would be marked and would produce no effects until the pop grows. As soon as the city pop grows, the new "head" would automatically become a "noble" and the city improvement would produce its benefits.
You would have 1 peasant and 5 nobles.

It is true that I much prefer "real pop". I continue to use "heads" because I am guessing that Firaxis will keep "heads". If they switch to real pop, I will be the first to cheer!

Par4: all I can say to your model is WOW!

Did I adress all your questions?

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No permanent enemies, no permanent friends.