Family Size and Military service?

[Kabong]

I noticed when hitting f11 that I am ranked dead last in these two categories, while ranked first in just about everything else... how do I fix these problems?

[Fitz]

Being dead last in these catagories doesn't sound like a bad thing.

Family size: More advanced nations in the real world typically have smaller families, not larger families, past a certain point.

The way it typically works is that cultures with poor medical advances have a high birthrate, but also I high mortality rate for children, so they have smallish - medium families. As medical advances are introduced, the birthrate doesn't automatically adjust, but the infant mortality rate drops, thus large families are common. Eventually, the culture adapts to the low infant mortality rate and the birth rate drops.

I imagine that the Civ programmers just took the reality today, which is step two countries (third world nations) have large families and step three (first world) have smaller famailies, and decided that more advanced cultures have smaller families.

Military Service: If this is indicitive of the amount of drafting you are doing, but not regular military units built, it would be better to have it low. In this case, you are handling your military needs sufficiently without resorting to a draft. Sounds like a good thing to me.

[shayovitz]

I agree with Fitz.

Maybe the designers should change the F11 screen and rank you as number 1 when you have the smallest avg. family size and a short military service, since it is something "better" to have, instead of giving you the last place when you are actually doing well.

Just a thought.

[Veracitas]

In civ terms, a large family size is usually a good thing to have, because this means your cities are expanding faster than everyone else's.

I don't know about family size, but I know I'm almost always last in military service. I noticed this same problem in civ2, even when I was playing as an incredibly aggressive militaristic expansionist civ. Somehow, military service was stilll at its low. I'm guessing that this is a per capita thing, like how many military units do you have per population point?

[MarshalN]

Actually, having a large family size means your Civ's population growth is the fastest if you're ranked #1. If you're last, that means your population is growing at the slowest rate.

Military service is basically a per-capita military unit thing. It's essentially some formula that divides your total number of military units by population points, with some adjustments. I'm not sure what the exact formula is, but that's what it was in Civ2 so that's probably what it still is.

I think in a way it's good to have both as high ranked. For family size, that means you're growing faster, which is always a good thing (more people never hurts, unless you can't keep them happy). Military service, if it's too low, means your military is probably really small in comparison with your enemies (assume same size). As you get more military units while your population stays the same, you'll notice that number will go up.

[sophist]

It probably divides military units by actualy population rather than points. So three cities of size 1 have less people (10,000 * 3) than one city of size 3 (60,000). I'm guessing for the same military size, the latter would have half the length of military service as compared to the former.

It would be nice if you could see where other civs ranked.

[HolyWarrior]

Being first in military service doesn't mean squat without taking into account the size of the civilization. Military service measures military units per capita, related to population or cities. Naturally, a tiny civ fighting for its survival will be first, while a sprawling trans-continental empire will show up last in military service, since they have so many units.
And population growth appears to be broken in Civ3. It ALWAYS says that I have 1 child per family. Anyone who knows anything about demographics knows that it takes at least 2 children just to maintain population growth. Plus I had one city that was growing 9 surplus food a turn, and my Domestic Advisor still said that city was growing slowly.

[vmxa1]

My guess is being rank low on both is good, he latter in the game it is. Military is as was stated, you do not have a lot of troops per capita so what? Low family size is fine by me as it reflects that I do not let later cities have aqueducts or hospital. Why grow them they generate 1 shield either way.