REGIONAL MENU & CITY MENU IDEAS - hosted by Shining1

[Shining1]

HanS,

Not too complex, but a little vague. You obviously have some good ideas here, along the lines of progressive regionalization, some more details would be nice, however, for me to include your suggestions in the 1.2 list.

Otherwise, chalk up another hit for progressive regions.

[EnochF]

The gist of this thread seems to be that regions are going to be nothing more than "groupings" of cities which can be collectively controlled.

In my mind, this is scarcely an improvement over the current state of things.

For there to be a real improvement, regional management must transcend cities. There must be an acknowledgement that individual city management is something that cannot be dictated by the supreme leader of a nation, and so we must, in a sense, limit the control of the nation to regions.

Here is how regions could be made a superior alternative to cities: Regions can be any shape and can include a number of tiles up to 60 (or some other number, based upon play-testing, maybe 75). This can include ocean no more than 2 tiles from shore. Every one of the tiles in a region can be worked by a member of its collective population. Improvements are built by the region in a "region screen" which resembles the current city screen. Each region must contain at least 3 former cities and no more than 10. The largest of these former cities becomes the "capital" of the region. This city becomes marked by a star with a circle around it, and clicking on the capital gives one access to the region screen. Terrain improvements are built via a public works system, and can be built on any tile in the region.

Any members of the cities' excess population (who are probably automatically designated entertainers or other specialists) can be transferred to work tiles outside the city radii but inside the region. Eventually every tile in the region may be worked, including large mountain ranges, expansive deserts and tundra, and there will still be excess population to provide entertainment, taxes and science.
Also, every tile within the region can be engineered or terraformed, meaning those large deserts can be made verdant again. (In the interests of realism, I might also suggest a longer time-span for radical land engineering changes, such as glacier-to-tundra, tundra-to-desert, etc.) With such control over large patches of the Earth's surface, it would make much more sense to preserve forest and jungle squares for environmental reasons.

The geographical mode of management is determined by a civilization's government. Anarchies, tyrannies, dictatorships, monarchies and republics are governed city-by-city. Democracies, communist states, fascist states, fundamentalist states, technocracies and other such higher forms of government manage by regions.

The difficulty then becomes how to manage the "transitions" from city management to regional management. If you wish to form a region that includes the city radii of six cities, and only three of the cities have a temple, should the region have the equivalent of a temple in every city? I believe this can be managed behind the scenes by the computer simply pooling all the resources of each individual city, then adding in all the extra resources of regional tiles and government bonuses. Thus, a region would ultimately have the collective equivalent of three temples working upon a combined population. You would then have the option of building a "regional church system" which would provide the equivalent of a temple in every city, and the cost of such a system would be diminished due to the presence of the three preexisting temples. From the computer's point of view, the cities would still exist as independent entities, but from the point of view of the interface, they would not.

There are probably a number of unforeseen difficulties that will crop up in the system I've described, so I'd like to hear people's reactions.

[EnochF]

Er, another point. Let's put this in Alpha Centauri terms for a second. Effectively, your civilization would encompass every tile within your borders.

Now, at any time, the borders of your regions may become disputed, if another nation claims a tile currently being worked by a citizen outside of a city radius but within your borders. This would be an act of war. In order to claim a tile, you would have to position a military unit there and then make a claim, then position a citizen of your region on that tile.

Building cities within your regions would not be impossible in this system. Settlers can still be produced on a region-by-region basis. As long as that part of the region currently contains enough tiles not part of any other former city radius, then a new city will appear. It will effectively be a part of the region and can be managed as such. As soon as you build this new city, you will then have to rebuild your region-wide improvements (but in a streamlined manner and much faster than the city could build those improvements on its own). Effectively, this would build improvements in the small city, but with the collective building power of the entire region. A temple in one turn (called "regional church system"), a marketplace in another turn (called perhaps "regional business network"), a harbor in the next, etc. Or perhaps giving each improvement an equivalent "region name" is silly and pointless, so you would simply build a "regional marketplace."

The extent of regions could not exceed the current borders of the civilization. One could not, for example, claim a tile which is ten tiles distant from your nearest city because it has a tempting resource on it. In Alpha Centauri, I believe borders effectively reach 3 or 4 tiles beyond your city radii, or less if a foreign civilization is near. Claiming regional land would be limited to squares within your borders. The only way to expand your borders will remain building cities, but individual city management will still disappear.

Whew. Anyway, I'll check here in the morning to see what people think of all this...

[ember]

My idea had all production control striped away from cities to the region.
Cities act as military and population centres
It saves you from having to capture EVERY square in a region, you just capture the cities.

I had an idea that region sizes grow over the course of the game (city size in ancien, medium in medeaval, national in modern)

It would be nice to have a more flexable city radius. Maybe you can relocate any overlapping city squares to a unused but adjastet square no more than 4 squares away?
then you don't have to worry about the awkward shpe of the city radii as much...

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

[Shining1]

Interesting. EnochF, Ember, you both seem to answer each other's questions. Ember's idea for capturing cities negates the need to steal individual tiles. And Enoch's idea for working within your own borders already includes the expanded city limits. Or rather, regional borders, since it seems there will still need to be more than one region.

A question for everyone:

* What is the optium level of mircomanagement per turn, say in terms of cities. I find 8 cities are no problem to manage, 12 is okay, 20 starts to cause problems, and 30+ just gets tedious.

[ember]

Yes, I also find 8 -12 cities is good. FOr regions we probably would want to have 4 - 6, because they will take more micromanaging than an induvidual city.

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

[ember]

THis thread seems to be going into decline.
DOn't let the ideas get lost!

Resources are a funny concept in civ.
A shield can represent either a resource or labour depending on what is in you city.
Maybe this should be split up.
Resources come from the terrain. Wood from forests, metals from hills/mountains, oil and coal from resource squares in desserts/swamps the ocean or wherever. More advanced mines/lumberyards give more per turn. Depending on play balnce issues this could be just one abstract type, or subdivided into the different classes of materials.

Labour comes from your population.
Each pop. point produces a certain amount of labour, modified by government, tech and improvments (like factories). Pop points not devoded to gathering produce double or more labour.

Resources are freely shiped throughout you empire (or within a region), and can be shiped between regions on trade routes of some type. Resources are stored for when they are needed, but reserves decay over time, maybe ~5% a turn. Resources can be sold to other empires or abstractly like capitalization. Resources can also be bought abstractly at a hefty premium, or from other civs.

Labour cannot be moved from it's city/region, and cannot be saved.
All units/structures require a certain amount of each component.
Ancient units tend to require a higher ratio of resorces/labour than modern units.
( a legion and a musketter unit might have the same amount of iron in tehm, but much more workmanship is required to make the muskets)
Infantry are less resource intensive than other unit types. Ships are the most resource intensive.
This, combined with the regional sharing of resouces will allow people to develop production centers seperate from the mining areas.
Food from agricultural cities (all pop devoted to resource gathering) is sent to the bigger cities to support industry (only the best squares are gathered, or could have lots of overlap with the resource gathering centers, most pop is devoted to labour) and mining comunities (all pop devoted to resource gathering, but in forested/hilled areas) Production from the industrail centers is used to build infrastructure for all areas, and military units.

This could lead to different war strategies, such as a civ with only one major mountain and hill chain. Attampt to capture their resource producing area and force them to devote lots of their money to try and aquaire resouces from elsewhere.
Or siexe their oil cities and dissalow them from building tanks and ships cheaply.

In Canada, for example, most mining is in the north, on the shield and norhtern alberta, but the bulk of the industrial production is in southern ontario, which is basically grassland. The bulk food production is in the plains, and some in southern ontario/quebec.



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

[Gregurabi]

I like ember's suggestions, to a certain degree. Micromanagement can become a chore in Civ2 and other games -- it's better in CTP, but it can still use some improvement.

I don't really like the idea of regions as a game concept. If there need to be regions, then they should NOT be defined by the computer, and they should not be static. If regions are to be useful, then the player must decide what set of cities and/or tiles constitutes a region.

Production still has to occur at a city level as long as the Civ1/Civ2/CTP paradigm of city improvements is retained. (I have some conceptual and game play issues with city improvements, but I'll save them for later.) You can't build temples at the regional level, for example -- if the region has 7 cities, which one gets the temple's benefit?

I also don't see any advantage of letting the player make cities into carbon copies of each other. Why would I want to build the same thing in all of my cities, or even a large number of them which happen to be close together? Assuming a Civ1/Civ2/CTP-style production model, each city would have a dramatically different production rate, and the benefits of city improvements would be different between them. (City A might be large and would require an Aqueduct (either to overcome a Civ2-style size ceiling or to negate CTP-style overcrowding penalties), whereas City B might be just fine with its happiness/size, but might have enough trade income to justify a Bank. I treat my cities as individuals.) So, making regions into a "mass change" feature would not please me.

However, I do like the concept of differentiating resources (and separating resources from labor). And I add this idea: like CTP's public works, let resources and food be put into a national pool. If the mines of City C produce 9 units of iron per turn, and a cannon requires 3 units of iron and 30 units of labor (just to make up some numbers), then the mines of City C would supply enough raw material to produce 3 cannons per turn in the factories of Cities D, E and F -- if I can supply the labor. Meanwhile, the farms of Cities G and H can produce, say, 32 units of food per turn, which might be enough to feed all of my empire (Cities A through H). Of course, Cities A-C, G-H might also be building things with their own labor even as they supply food and resources to Cities D-F, depending on how closely we continue to follow the Civ1/Civ2 model.

This would change how food is handled. Instead of having a local food surplus, the nation's food would be averaged out over all cities. This would generally eliminate starvation in all cities (but in the event of global disaster such as global warming, could mean your whole empire starves). In terms of game-play, this seems desirable, and in later years (after discovering refrigeration, railroads) it makes great sense. In earlier years, it may be slightly unrealistic -- food handling and storage and transportation technologies are inadequate and would mean some food would rot before getting to its destination. But this could be rationalized in game terms by giving a bonus upon the discovery of certain techs (e.g., refrigeration) -- similar to what Civ2 does.

On a related note, I don't believe that the birth rate (or better, population growth rate) should be a function of excess food. The United States produces more food than we need to feed ourselves, but we don't have a skyrocketing population. The excess food is either sold to other countries or goes to waste. The population growth rate should be determined by health factors (contraception or the lack thereof, longevity due to medical care), social factors (overcrowding, women's rights, religious tenets), economic factors, etc. But this touches on the whole concept of "population points" which the Civ games rely on so heavily, so really belongs in another thread....

[Gregurabi]

There absolutely, positively MUST be a build queue in Civ3. Look at CTP (especially after the 1.1 patch which allows items to be inserted into arbitrary points in the queue) for the proper design. (But let Capitalization and Infrastructure, if they're retained, be put into the queue just like other items. Duh!)

The other CTP interface improvement that Civ3 will need is the interactive City Report. (This is what you get when you press F1.) I use this feature more than any of the other game reports because it's so flexible -- you can click a column header to sort the list by that column (and it is, or should be, a stable sort, so the list remains sorted by your previous selection if any, in the event of a tie), and click again to reverse the sort.

The biggest headache of Civ2 (after getting nuked by the AI) is when cities require attention. At the beginning of every turn I have to go to any city that's causing trouble (or which has finished something, because there's no queue), in whatever order the game decides I must go to them. I can decline to visit a city at that particular moment, but then I have to try to remember to go back there -- and I can't sort the city report by happiness or whatever to quickly find the cities I need to visit. In CTP, I can postpone city management until whenever I am ready for it, and I can quickly do what needs to be done, because I can see all my cities in one report, rather than zooming in to one city at a time and then trying to figure out how it fits in to the global picture.

However, there is still room for improvement in the city report of CTP. For instance, I can't tell at a glance how many specialists (entertainers, especially) my cities have -- for that, I still have to visit cities sequentially. No matter how much Firaxis improves the city report, in fact, it will always have such drawbacks -- some player somewhere will want to see information which isn't there.

Therefore, I would dearly love to be able to build custom report screens with a REAL scripting language (or even a shared object compiled with a C compiler and linked against a Civ3 library if it comes to that -- just make sure you don't use the Win32 API, because when we Linux users (or the Mac users, etc.) get the game ported we won't have that API). I want to be able to produce a custom report, covering any conceivable bit of information the game is willing to divulge to me (where every one of my units is located, the top 5-10 cities of the world, how many temples I have and where they're located, my relative demographic rating in years of military service, EVERYTHING). I want to be able to bind this to an arbitrary keystroke sequence and/or mouse selection/button. I want to be able to put usable widgets on it (with callback functions that can perform any legal game action, such as generating another report, changing production orders, changing unit orders, changing empire settings, performing diplomatic actions, sending profane messages to other players -- ANYTHING the client program is legally allowed to do). And of course this should be a full-powered programming language, with both local and global variables, recursive functions, arrays, user-definable "struct"-like data types, dynamic memory allocation, etc. Garbage collection and object-oriented features are optional, since I can get by just fine without them.

Basically, I want what SLIC should have been, not what it turned out to be. But if I can't have that, then I'll settle for being able to add new columns to the city report, and being able to find my Lawyer units when I need them.

[ember]

I agree that regions should be hand selected. In the early game only a couple cities could form a region, in the mid game 5-10 cities, and in the late game whole continetns - your whole empire.

I think you have a misunderstanding of what I have in mind for a region.
I would focus all production on the region, but the various structures would still have a physical location.

In your example, when you finsih a temple, (and various other things, not liminted to one per turn) a deployment list comes up, and you choose which city you want your temple in.

Regions would allow cites to be LESS cookie cutter like than before, by allowing them to specialize without crippiling them.
(a farming center could have virtually no production, but the region would build it's granary, temple, supermarket, etc for it.)

A production centre might not even harvest in a single square, like NYC, or Tokyo

Some improvments, like a stock exchange would only be needed in one city per region.

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

[ember]

Divorcing growth from food.

Growth should depend on happiness, government, tech, infrastructure and location.

Food has a strong influence on happiness.
All food is pooled and distributed to a nuetral happiness level automatically. (losses to to bad transport can happen)

The happiness neutral level of food corresponds to current slow groth, maybe 2.2 food / person.
Having more than this much food slightly increases happines and hence growth.
having less decreases happines. At a certain level (~1.5 food/ person) starvation begins. Happiness penalties are SEVERE and pop losses are inevitable.

Inventions like contraception will slow growth rate slightly, but they will also allow you to slow it dramatically where popultion has started to outstrip food supply.

This idea allows the modern phenomina of overcrowding. The population will grow well past the point of sustinablility and then begin to collapse, but with riots and probably revolts in long term starving cities.

Aquatducts/ hospitals increase growth
Cities near oceans and on rivers have bosted growth.
cities by mountains and desserts are reduced.

Other ideas:

Surplus food (over 2 / person) is stored in the grannary. The number of turns of spare food gives the happines bonus (and the minimum time for a full siege) Food decays at a rate of 10-20% a turn, to prevent near infanite stores. Modern refrigiration techs/ canning might slow this.

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

[Shining1]

Another idea: Moving whole cities.

Suggest including it as a build option, like infrastructure, etc, based on the population of the city. With a geometric increase in cost, because you can't honestly move New York away anytime (say set a limit to the population of around 8 - before you need infrastructure to support extra population).

Call this construction "Exodus", a similar option to Capitalisation. An Exodus will allow your entire city to be moved anywhere within the current limits of that city on the turn it is built. The reasons for using such a feature are obvious to anyone who has played CivII, but include:
* Obvious overlap with another city (esp on arcipeligos)
* "Blind" placement, where you find a much better spot after doing some exploring.
* Accidental placement, like the above, but where a better option is obvious, you just missed it (thus it should be very cheap for size 1 cities, and relatively affordable for size 2-4 ones (say 10 shields per population).

Finally, an exodus should give you the option of joining two cities together, when they are within each other's city limits.

NOTE: The next version of this thread will simply be called 'CITIES AND REGIONS 1.2 - etc', and will include issues such as the resource model, founding cities, ICS, etc, hopefully overlapping with other threads where these also occur. Thus, these issues can be discussed generally and with specific regard for citys themselves.

Shining1

[ember]

moving cities is good.
Myabe the it should take not production but time.
say 5 turns/pop to move 1 square. this prepresents the city council forcing all new construction to be in the new area, while old buildings (granaries are only going to last ~50 years at most, even if you don't specifically build a new one, that's what maint. cost represents)

What about moving the city radius. Move up to 4 squares that overlap on other city radii into an area adjastent to the normal city radii, that no other city can gather from... requires RR advance)

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

[Theben]

*BUMP*

[Theben]

This is the 1st time I've posted here, not including the bump, so please forgive if I cover old ground.

Specialists:

I must mention that I oppose citizen specialists as they are now because to switch them in reality takes much longer. I have another proposal.
1) Slider bars that represent the total pop of the city; with worker, merchant, scientist, and clergy as the only citizens types. Clergy replace the "elvii".
2) The structures you have in the city will both determine how many of the people can become these "specialists", as a percentage, and the rate that they will switch. These include marketplaces, banks, etc. for merchants; libraries, universities, for scientists, and temples, you get the idea. Technology may also be a factor. Writing & Literacy for scientists, FE. SE choices may also affect this. Workers are considered the standard and have no structures.
3) You move the slider bar to the percent citizen makeup you wish your "specialists" to be, up to the current limit. The level stays put for that turn. Each following turn, the % of citizens employed in that field increases, based on your buildings, tech, and SE choices.
4) Workers are exempt from the above. When increasing workers, the shift is immediate. This is because their jobs often require minimal training. You can switch back w/o penalty until you end turn. Then their new jobs are set.
5) Workers are also split into 2 types: rural & urban. Urban workers add labor to production, while rural workers are on the tiles outside the city square and bring in the food, resources, and raw trade goods (this is loosely based on the "village" idea).
6) These originally only affect their respective areas(labor, money, science). Later techs & SEs may give them other areas of influence (like SMAC) and greater influence in their own areas. Note that rural workers may also get later benefits.
2 questions:
Should non-workers cost the city more money (IMHO no; the extra cost is paid for by the populace)?
Should more non-workers add to the city's happiness level (more well-fed well-paid middle class types. I can go either way on this one)?

My thoughts on the city menu:

You have your standard window. Like civ2 and unlike SMAC (and like any normal MS window) it can be moved aside to view the map beneath.

TOP EDGE:
At the very left is a toggle with 3 choices: food, production, and trade. This tells the AI where to put your people in the event of sudden growth or decline in city pop. Each can have it's own priority level, or none or only one can (food is the default). In the event of a tie the AI will choose the tile that gives you the greatest overall resources, if all are equal it's the one closest to your city (due to supply loss from distance). The AI will also switch if your settlers/public works alter a tile to increase or otherwise change the output.
In the middle you have the standard citizen icons. You will be able to tell their culture by their race & dress (this image should include a face and upper torso) based on the various civs. Over their heads there will be a symbol denoting each citizen's religion, which are not always the same as their culture (after mingling for a while).
Just to the right of these will be the city's HAPPINESS indicator, the importance of which I described in the SE threads (Aug. 9 or thereabouts). This gets rid of the necessity of happy/content/unhappy citizens, and reduces the amount of citizen icons.
On the far right is the necessary outside info, such as turn/year, total money in treasury, City name, etc.

TOP:
On the far left is the big 3: Growth (not food, food is now a factor of growth), production, and trade. Above these there will be the % modifiers currently affecting each category. The growth indicators can be smiling little baby heads instead of bushels of wheat. With negative growth the heads are frowning with x's for eyes.
In the middle, is the city radius, showing which squares are worked. Instead of counters (civ2) each square has a number (like SMAC). This number will be x10 of the number's used in civ2/SMAC but costs will also be about x10(kudos to Maniac). This allows fine-tuning of modifiers to these resources. The city radius will not be used if villages are used. Maybe a small city view instead.
Far right has the city's stores. This includes saved food, money, the city's total unused research points, and production. Food & production will be subject to deterioration over time. If the city is captured, this food, money and production is also captured, and the research is lost. A little of each may escape to a nearby city of the same civ, or to an allied city if there are no available cities of that civ nearby. Next turn the civ will return the supplies, with deterioration & distance reductions, subject to piracy, etc. If a city is under siege and cut off from the capital, it may only use what are in it's stores if it needs extras, and the research isn't applied until the siege ends. Note that an empire split in half may combine the resources of the connected cities only, the SUPPLY grid will determine if cities are connected. However, only the research points connected with the capital are counted towards actual research, until re-connected. In the event of a successful rebellion, part of the research is lost but most of it goes to the new civilization, which may give it more techs if enough research has been saved.

THE MIDDLE:
On the left is support like we all know, with the exception that all have varying food, production, and money costs. Also any modifiers to support will be shown here.
The center shows the growth rate of the city, and # of turns until it will grow. The total food allocated to growth will be displayed; also everything that affects growth will be broken down here.
Right side shows all the items under construction. These will be shown as small windows with only the unit/building name in it, turns until completion, and another button in it to increase the production rate (see below). a 2nd button will allow you to set the production in this button to auto; this will set it to produce what is in your queue for that button only. If no queue has been built then it will default to your auto preferences that would be selected in the PREFERENCES screen or in a .txt file. There should be several types of auto-queues; the "governor" selections in SMAC are a good start. Now, if you click on the name of the item it will enlarge the window to show the picture of the item, actual # of production already allocated to production and the amount needed to complete it, as well as a unit workshop button and another "increase production rate" button. It will also show if this item is under your control or being built by your people (under strong FREE MARKET SE's). There will be an option to "purchase" the construction points back from your people, in an emergency (i.e. you need them for war units). The smaller windows allow for several items to be under construction at the same time.
The increase production rate is done by buying "extra" shields. The max you can buy is based on the amount of production normally allocated per turn. FE, an item has 7 shields added to it per turn. At a cost of, say, 2 coins each you can increase it to 14/turn. The max you can multiply it by is x3/turn. To increase production from x2 to x3 costs even more from x1 to x2. If enough money is allocated then the additional purchasing power will carry over until next turn. This means that x3 is assumed with enough money, and the extra is applied as x2 next turn until that is maxed, then x3, then the next turn, etc. In addition there would be no difference in cost buying units or buildings. This cost isn't affected by tech (tech adds production instead, so tech does affect this but not directly) but IS affected by SE choices. The more totalitarian a civ is the lower the increased costs. This will eliminate sudden purchases (which IMHO are unrealistic) & add to the benefits of having some large cities instead of several small ones.

BOTTOM:
At left are all the structures that the city has built. Next to these are the buttons to sell the structures, and the damage indicators to each set of buildings. Now I envision a system similar to Birth of the Federation, where planets(cities) had multiple buildings each, with added effects. "Damage indicators" I've explained in other threads such as CITY IMPROVEMENTS & OTHER. Above the damage I's will be the city's free repair rate, also explained in those threads.
The middle has all the units in the city, which I feel needs no explanation.
Far right bottom corner has the change city name, maps, view city (if used), etc. ala civ2. The happiness button breaks down how your city is affected by the various modifiers.

Done!

<font size=1 face=Arial color=444444>[This message has been edited by Theben (edited August 11, 1999).]</font>