Units using citizens

[Grrr]

Has anyone ever noticed that you can build 200 fanatics in a city, but the population will not go down. I think that if a unit is built, the city should lose 2500 population or so. And if four units are built, lose a citizen

[The diplomat]

Ahhh, the topic of recruitment comes up again! This was an idea that I brought up many many moons ago.

I suggested that units should require pop to support because, as I see it, pop is the #1 ressource in war. The ratio of citizens to units is highly debatable.

I think a good compromise would be to keep the shield support but to reduce a city's pop if a certain number of units from it, are destroyed. This would represent human loss in war (which is the main reason why I suggested the idea in the first place. It is such an important concept, IMHO). The shield support represents the toll of the military on a city already. it prevents too many units. Moreover, reducing pop when units die will accurately represent human loss and reduce the "infinite war" problem.

Good discussion.

[OreoFuchi]

Doesn't this increase the bigger-always-better problem?

[Tical_2000]

quote: Originally posted by OreoFuchi on 12-12-2000 05:30 PM Doesn't this increase the bigger-always-better problem?

No, it eliminates the immortal-citizens problem.

[OreoFuchi]

quote: Originally posted by Tical_2000 on 12-12-2000 06:39 PM No, it eliminates the immortal-citizens problem.

I think you said it best in the thread about requiring resources to research certain techs when you said "I don't know. It would certainly make the game more realistic but would it make it more fun? I don't know about you but I usually put fun before realism."

[Diablo, Bro. of Mephisto]

I agree completely on this, but some units should be different, for example, the "leader" unit that Firaxis said was going to be in civ3, since its a "leader", it should not take up population.

Heres something else on population, when you build a new city, it is 10,000 population.
I think that when you build a city, it should be at most 500 inhapitants, depending on how long your settler/engineer travels around.

And also, cities should be able to grow much faster, just look at New York City, its pop. is nearly 8 million (im just guessing, so dont jump on me if I am way off), and it was founded around 1700. IN civ2, my largest city by 2000 AD, is at largest 4,000,000 strong. Some cities should have a random huge growth, while others seem grow quite slowly. It should be random, so for example, 1 out of 5 cities would have a huge growth spirt, while 1 out of 10 cities would be very slowly growing.

[airdrik]

In the case of New York, it isn't a question of the city growing fast, but how fast people immigrated there. New York was the coolest city to live in, about a century or two ago, because it was big and it was located in America, the land of the free. Most of New Yorks population came from people immigrating there from Europe. How you could show immigration in Civ 3 is not something to be discussed in this thread, but you could look back, I believe there is at least one thread on the topic.

As per the units using pop. Each unit would require a certain pop. to build. This toll is paid upon completion of the unit. If the unit is disbanded, then the pop. is sent to the city currently supporting it.
Also, different units use different amounts of population, like it doesn't take as many people to man a briggade of tanks or fighter planes as it would the infantry or a fleet of bombers.
This may not be a good suggestion as the difference is not very much, so feel free to say no to different required pop's for different units. I only posted it so it would be out there if anyone happened to agree.

[Stuff2]

I think you are right. It's a well known fact that the industrial countries are more interested in quality than quantity in militaristic matters. In warfare there is clearly a development towards smaller and more specialized units. Thousands of years ago it was clear that the biggest army often had the biggest chance to win. Modern weapons and tactics has made this simple truth becoming obsolete, more advanced weponry decreases need of quantity.

I'm guessing that in far future, much of the 'warfare' will more and more look like todays terrorism, even though mass destruction will countinue to be an overhelming danger it will not happen that often.

[Grumbold]

Civ has not modelled population growth very effectively in the past, so trying to model personnel support for the military couldn't have been done very effectively either. I don't think they should move toward using people to support units unless that has changed. The whole question of how you effectively supply and support units far in the field is largely ignored by the games so far. While cutting units off from their supply would be a good tactic in a PvP game I can't see the AI being too good at it. This would also be likely to dramatically restrict the early explore/expand phase of the game too.