Announcement

**amjayee** · January 9, 2001, 03:45

Yes, compromises are indeed needed, but I don't know if this is too much compromising. It is basically civ2, with flexible city radius: that is better than pure civ2 system, but I definitely don't like it in its current form, to say the least. But honestly, I don't know what to think of this population and region issue. I don't like Vet's idea, but I have come to not like the old idea of ours, either.

I'm out of ideas of how to make things sensible, adequately realistic, and so that they also have some gameplay in them. What I hope we will have, is:

1. No one-city regions: this would be bad. I agree that the region should be basically its capital city and the city's "radius", but there could be also other urban areas in the region. Basically I agree with you. Later in this message I will explain my view of this, please check there to see that it doesn't need to be complicated.

2. No settler-hassle: there should be many ways for cities to be created, but I agree spontaneous spawning from population is not necessary. And settlers are not needed, you could just order a city to be built in a location. In addition to this, cities could be formed spontaneously to important locations, but differently from our earlier system.

3. Emigration: I can agree that we could do with only emigration between regions, which would be restricted of course. In addition, there would be emigrations between cities and countryside. All else would be too much and not adding much to the realism.

4. Population: I think we have two options - rural population and urban population, or population of each tile. The latter would have its uses, but if you think it's too complicated, we can drop it. But anyway we should have the real population amount and not heads. Basically I agree.

My vision of the game is, that the player starts with one region. He has got the control of one chiefdom or kingdom, and he has to choose the location for his capital city. For a long time, this one region is his only possession; he tries to strengthen his hold on it, and make its area larger, by building connections and infrastructure, as Vet suggested, and possibly via military control and things like that. The size and power of the capital and the infrastructure and military power combined would decide how large the region could be. Inside the region, there could appear some other, lesser urban areas: mining camps, trade posts, seaport cities etc. that add to the importance and strength of the region.

Usually, close to the player's area would be other players. Usually, most of earth would be covered by players relatively close to each other. The player could enlarge his own region, or find another region in some other place, if sufficient space is needed; in some point, the only way to expand would be to conquer the regions of other players.

So what I think is, that capital cities would be built by player. Also the forming of those lesser urban areas would be mostly in his hands - or totally, if he decides so. Also a region would be conquered by conquering the capital city, though controlling the region would be a completely another matter - it would require subduing or conquering of the smaller urban areas, too, and destroying the remaining military forces and possible civilian revolts in the area. Still, after that the original population might not favor you for a long time, but you could take many kinds of actions to change that, etc...

Managing the region and cities is a completely different thing, but I'm sure we can find lots of interesting things, when we settle this issue first.

So, these are my suggestions to change your ideas, mostly refining them. What do yout think, all? This way, I think, we could preserve most of the fun gameplay of civ2, create some new, and avoid all problems pointed out by Leland. I will come back to this later, when I see how you are disposed towards these new ideas presented by me and VetLegion.

**VetLegion** · January 9, 2001, 15:52

I think civ2 with flexible radius is not all that conservative - we wont have big tiles, so it wont look sterile like in CtP2. And it will have its problems with sharing areas between radiuses and such.

But lets refine more:

Emigration
Can you give examples of functionality for this? How would E between regions look like, how often would it occur and what would player be able to do about it?
I dont think it is a good idea but lets see.

User definable region borders
What would those be for anyway? Leland explained well why are they a bad idea if implemented with emigrations. Without them, they are doable, but I dont see the pupose of them. Region specialization - what is that?

But I do like the compromise you mentioned - at least I managed to push the cities in the game - they were called Capital Tiles by Joker

Building improvements and all is fine.

Borders are problematic. There are either predefined borders, or dynamic ones. Dynamic ones can be changes by player or population.

Anyway, go ahaid and make a new pop model. But adress those questions. Most importantly:

- population spread (I think player controlled)
- region borders (dynamic of predefined)
- miggrations (I d throw that out)

Btw, Joker I think had similar ideas to yours. Best to make new draft so we can be more specific in discussion.

**ElmoTheElk** · January 9, 2001, 18:52

After reading this thread and also the meeting log I want to give my opinion.

It's hard to settle out a decent, good working, fun and original game system. That's why it's very important that we dicuss this troughly and not letting one of us decide how it's going to be.

---
I already read about the 'city system' of VetLegion. I will command of that first.
---

Vet explanes an City system that uses the influence of cities to determine influence over the area like control. It also is the main thing in regions. The problemswith this system are meant by hisself and more.

Area's without population
Area's with no or very little population are not handled by the system. These areas are always there and, espacially in war time, there are so needed. We need to know if an area belongs to you or the enemy if you want to know if a friently unit is safe. I think that that's 1 point why we need to determ the regions on an other way that depending it on the cities.

Migration
He already ointed this out. It is not possible in an city based game system. Since the population is stationary in cities it cannot migrate to other areas or even oter civs. This is not realistic since migration is probablyn one of the bigger things that will couse a conflict to arouse. I think migration is a ststem that should be included. It's very important in the world. Only we should make a system that looks if it is rendable for someone to migrate and if it's possible. Then if both are positive, he will move. The player has no control in the migration issue.

City founding
It's possible to create a city in many ways. This could be done by orders, by sttler or spontanous, but there has to be a really good reason for it to be formed simutanous.

Region creation
I think regions are not player made. The regions should just be calculated by the computer and not that a player will draw the borders of the map. This far too timeconsuming and also not fun and not meant to be the fun thing in our game. We should focus of managing our 'country' rather than drawing borders on the map. Besides: how would we manage to draw new borders each turn in war time?
Of couse the regions are flexible. They should be calculated each turn.

City capitol
I like amjayee's new idea on capitol/official cities in regions. We should really implent that! I like the idea I have to build something on the map. That would be really fun to do and add to the gameplay. It's also not to be seen in other games.

It seems that I summport most of amjayee's ideas in this issue. However I agree with Vet that civ2's system wasn't very bad and we need the same playibality as civ2's was. Also I found out that we have to focuss on design and fun and gamplay now, rather than if it's possible to code.

Hope you can make an new population model!

Just my thoughts...

**amjayee** · January 10, 2001, 01:12

I thought of a new cool idea: what if we have only one "official" city per region - the capital. Players build these. Then, instead of the old city and tile improvements, we would build region improvements! So, we could "build" farming areas, mining posts, harbors and fishing towns, military bases etc. - perhaps you could just build "living areas" at some point. Those could grow to have urban population, and would show like that on map, but wouldn't officially be cities. Also, players would build roads, tradin posts, things like that.

Building would be done mostly by clicking directly on the map - kinda like public works in ctp, but when player clicks those things on map, a building project is started; then it will consume workforce, resources and money (and time of course) until it is ready. Likewise, you could build industrial areas, large structures like universities and cathedrals (you could build many of those in one region) and possibly also wonders and such. Industrial areas would of course automatically be city-like, but their production would be counted for the capital city. So, only one city, but urban population also elsewhere. The whole region would be considered as one large city.

I have been thinking this idea more carefully, and I can quickly refine it and create a model, if these ideas are liked. But all in all, I think it would be a nice compromise for a while, would look mostly the same as our earlier system would have looked, would be simple to handle, and most of all, would give players lots of nice things to do - they could go building stuff on the map quite like in sim city. Or allow advisors do that.
[This message has been edited by amjayee (edited January 09, 2001).]

**amjayee** · January 10, 2001, 07:18

Elmo: there has been no thing that one person has decided yet... that's why we make slow progress. But it's ok, we get a better system this way.

I agree that civ2 system was very playable, working and fun. We just need to refine it a little. So, let's say that borders are not drawn by the player; that wouldn't work very well, and would be lots of work. Instead, they are decided by computer based on area control, transportation and communication etc. Usually the first player to get hold of some tile will have the right to keep it, unless other player conquers it. Units don't conquer terrain automatically, player has to ask them to do it. This might give us a way to allow the player to affect a little the region borders; he could conquer single tiles of terrain if he wants, but the tiles must be "legal" new region tiles; not too far away, and so forth.

Emigration is needed, as Elmo pointed out; otherwise, we end up with completely stationary and isolated regions. As I said, we would have two kinds of immigration; from countryside to cities and between regions.

The first kind is the most usual and also quite easy to do. People without work move to cities, or people could escape war etc... quite easy and simple.

The second kind is trickier, but it is one of the key elements of the game, since all people must be born; otherwise, the population of new regions would grow really slowly. Migration would be most frequent between regions of same civ, but could happen also between civs in some situations. Basically I think that certain small percentage of population would be ready to move to another region every turn. Where they would go, would depend on many things, like economic and employment situations, availability of food and farming land, etc. Wars and famines could be a major factor in causing migration, of course. Quite simple and non-problematic, I think, but adds much to the game. And the player doesn't need to bother much, just keep the people happy with their own country. But of course the player could prohibit immigration either in or out, which would make it smaller, but could not be completely prevented, I think.

About areas without population: I would like most of earth to be inhabited, but it might be difficult to do... perhaps we should just make it so, that areas belonging to no region are no-man's land, with no population, and safe and free for everyone to walk through.

About founding cities, I think that new regions (new capital cities) could be found with "settlers" (but as with other units, they would not be moved tile by tile. Player could decide how much people he wants to transfer to the new area - he could also force his people to move out, but that might mean trouble. No regions would be found spontaneously, I think. Inside regions, new "improvements" and urban areas could be created spontaneously, but player could of course decide, if he wants to allow that or not.

I will try and write everything down as a model; I will combine region, building and population somehow, since they are connected to each other. Let's see then.

[This message has been edited by amjayee (edited January 10, 2001).]

**VetLegion** · January 10, 2001, 08:08

Ok, few more thoughts

Elmo: pretty much agree with you.

Migrations: I think they are doable as you said. The exact percentage of people who are ready to move should be play-balanced, but I think concept is ok.

Borders: It is the question of small tiles. For example Clash starts you in an inhabited world. That is doable, just that it is a design question. We can have populated world with Independant regions which you can conquer, and we can do it so that every inch of the world belongs to a region. A design issue.

Player influence: We have to decide how important factor distance is to see how "legal" is it to annect more land by military force. I think that you should only controll populated land, and only if within radius. Player does not have all that much things to do in the game actually, I may start a thread about it.

**Leland** · January 11, 2001, 17:49

During last meeting it was revealed that it's not exactly clear yet what the cities exactly are in the game. Here's my suggestion:

Cities are basicly improvements like mines, dams, military bases and the like. Amjayee suggested a term "population center" and I find it very fitting. However, I also think that cities should be the centers of trade, and the only centers of trade on the map. I also believe that cities should be the centers of government, so it makes a difference what cities you invade during war. These two factors, trade and governing, have lead me into the following model of intercity relationships.

Cities (and maybe other improvements as well) form the nodes of a network. There will be three kinds of relationship within the network:

1) "control" relationship, which means that a city has direct control over other cities. For example, your civ's capital city has control over the capitals of provinces, which in turn have control over smaller cities. Control means strictly the ability to tell another city what to do; this can be further limited by the form of government.

2) "trade" relationship, which connects two cities and gives them equal benefits (trade surplus, maybe even resources). Trade is limited by laws and regulations, as well as geographical factors.

3) "exploit" (if you have a better word, let me know!) relationship, which is evident between two cities within each other's influence area (the term "radius" seems misleading because the area is not always circular). A larger city will be able to tap into the resources of the smaller city, and possibly vice versa. Larger city should always have the dominant role in this relationship. I am not sure if multiple exploiters should be allowed: having just one exploiter seems sufficient for the game purposes and it simplifies the model.

The point of having separate exploit and control relationships is that you need to be able to rule cities out of the civ capital's influence area. This also provides a nice definition of regions: a region is the area that is both exploted and controlled by a city, and that city is called the region capital. Having this sort of definition also gives room to player defined regions, since the player would be able to alter the control structures without having any effect on exploit relationships. You could, for instance, create reservations for different nationalities you don't want messing with your own people.

The possibilities are endless, but so are the problems. A primitive civilization will have cities with small areas of influence, and as such they could be founded much closer to each other. When the civ grows, the distances between cities must grow as well. I suggest that cities are formed and disbanded automatically. The most elegant solution, I believe, is to design the exploit relationship so that two cities sharing the same area of influence (that is, using same resources) would not be a stable state. In time, the smaller city would diminish and the larger city strive, until the small one is no longer considered a city and would die out.

The player would not have control over cities They would be part of the infrastructure. My vision is that when the game progresses, the management burden of the player should not increase proportionally to the growth of the civilization. If the land area of a civilization grows geometrically, the number of cities should grow only linearly, and the number of regions even more slowly.

This post is supposed to be an opening to the conversation whether such a model can work. There are lots of details to be thougth over: the exact definitions of relationship, the feasibility of this scheme in terms of computing power, how to fit populations into this and so on. Let the discussion begin!

Leland

**Leland** · January 11, 2001, 18:04

Forgot to say one thing:

These relationships might not be exclusive to cities. For instance, a military base might exercise "control" over cities, and vice versa. Maybe some region improvements could be exploited: for instance, a harbor has a larger area of influnce than the regional borders, so by exploiting it you'd gain resources from much wider area.

And about population... that's a tough one. Each exploited area could form the basic population unit, and all the higher levels (actual regions) could be comprised of these basic units. An example:

City A is the region capital, and it controls/exploits cities B and C. Now, there will be three kinds of tiles within this region: the ones within B's range, the ones with C's range and the tiles that are within A's range but not in B's or C's. Each of these would form a population unit. If the player decides to change the region by making B, C or both individual regions, the population units will stay intact. Anyone see any problems with this approach?

(This was a little off-topic to this thread, sorry for the inconvenience)

Leland

**amjayee** · January 12, 2001, 03:50

I don't think this was any off-topic at all.

I have a little inconsistent view of this idea. It sounds basically good, but I don't know if it would give us so much more that it would be good to use; it is a little complicated, and such systems are a little difficult to handle and might not be very good in gameplay terms. But I will have to think this more carefully, when I'm tryig to construct the new population/region model.

Another thing that concerns me is the implementation; there will be quite much cities, and since usually there's only one dominant city for many subordinate cities, plus in most cases the interaction of the cities would form a 3-level tree: the root of the tree would be the national capital, next level would be region capitals, and leaves would be all other cities. Perhaps this would be better? This would be the case for control and exploit relationships. Trade would be another thing, but that should perhaps be done in some other way in any case, to allow international trade.

The idea of control and exploit is good. We just need to add the control of land somehow... perhaps it could be so, that each city has an area of influence, and its own population; the problem in this is, that there will be a stunning amount of cities - thousands perhaps in a large empire - so this might be too much complication, and add too much to micromanagement. Not to speak about the usage of memory.

The good thing in this is, that it gives some emphasize to the smaller cities also. But I thought; could it be done in some other, easier way? And is this emphasize needed? Usually the capital of a region has been really much more significant. But ultimately it's a gameplay issue. If the system adds to it, we can have it. I will think this over. Meanwhile, others, please comment on this, too!

**S. Kroeze** · January 12, 2001, 18:06

Dear Amjayee, Joker and others,

I am not a fellow worker on this project so my opinion will probably not be considered as too important. Yet I have some questions on this issue:

-How important is realism to you; generally and on the issue of cities, regions and their mutual relation?

-How many regions will your game world on average contain?

-How many cities will your game world on average contain?

-How many people should inhabit a town at least to make it 'technically' a city?

-At what time of history will the game start?

-Do you intend to introduce nomadic people(s) to the game?

Sincere regards!

**Leland** · January 12, 2001, 22:03

Good questions. Not all of them are settled at this point, and maybe other folks have different opinions from mine, but anyway here's my attempt at providing answers. These kind of questions are exactly what we need to define the requirements and characteristics of the models we should develop.

quote:

Originally posted by S. Kroeze on 01-12-2001 05:06 PM
-How important is realism to you; generally and on the issue of cities, regions and their mutual relation?

The alst I checked, realism was still one of the primary goals of the project. Cities and regions should be modelled so that they reflect their real-world counterparts, but this doesn't mean every small village and hut should be taken into account. Cities in the game should reflect the trade and government network of a civilization, like they do in the real world. Regions, I believe, should be areas that can be effectively governed and the player should have *some* say in defining the regions (perhaps through grouping).

quote:

-How many regions will your game world on average contain?
-How many cities will your game world on average contain?

At the beginning, just one per civ. Someone once mentioned 20-30 regions per civ should be a maximum; though some player might torture themselves with up to 50. Suppose that one game has, say, 20 players (could be more, but they could not all be large empires so I think my estimates are justified) there number of regions would be around 1000. Yikes.

The number of cities is at least as high as the number of regions, but there may not be a compelling reason to make it higher. If the number of regions can be defined by combining cities, then the city count would be the maximum number of regions: approximately 50 per civ. In multiplayer games there could be thousands of cities... this might become a problem.

Then again, in less ambiguous games of, say, 8 players both the region and city numbers would be kept well under 1000.

quote:

-How many people should inhabit a town at least to make it 'technically' a city?

I think this should depend on tech level and maybe other factors. I don't think towns should be modelled at all, and the formation of cities should be automatical so that if a spot on the map has a need for a city, then a city will form itself. Cities should also die out if they become insignificant; again there should be no absolute population value for the city to be abandoned.

This way, the system would scale up when the civs grow. It should be possible to start out with a civilization of ten thousand people in one city, but when the populations closes to billions not every village with 10 000 people should be on the map. Everything is relative.

quote:

-At what time of history will the game start?

I have no idea. 4000 BC has been suggested. I have no personal opinion on this, but hunter-gatherer societies are out, I believe.

quote:

-Do you intend to introduce nomadic people(s) to the game?

If it were up to me, then yes. Starting out as nomads is not necessarily better than starting out with a city, but I believe that a civilization or a part of it could become nomadic after a war or a natural catastrophy. I'd also like to see refugees.

The answers to your questions have not yet been decided, so if you have any opinions of your own feel free to present them.

---

Now some comments about the city model I suggested. I noticed that it basicly means going back to city populations... awww! Not good. However, the model does seem to solve lots of problems: how to define regions, how to make capitals different from other cities, how to scale the model up when civ's population goes up and how to keep cities more or less realistic. I admit that there are problems as well, mainly having to do with the complexity.

Gameplay:

The player would not handle cities directly, he would see them on the map but could only interact with regions. Regionalizing the civ would happen by choosing appropriate cities from the map: choosing a large city will automatically include all the smaller cities under it's influence, so this will not require as much work from the player as would, for instance, drawing borderlines on the map.

There will be no city screens, and if there are they are purely informational. Cities are more of an underlying structure that is abstracted by regions. I don't think this will cause any trouble to the player, only that he sees the world as a more lively place with cities rising, growing and dying out, and that he would be able to visualize the nuts and bolts of the economy (one city producing minerals, the other one using the minerals to produce commodities and a third city trading the commodities elewhere).

I cannot imagine how to define and handle regions realistically any other way. Whatever model is finally used, it should incorporate following characteristics:

1) When civilization grows, *both* the size and number of regions grow.
2) Neither the number of cities or regions should grow too large due to memory and computing restrictions.
3) Capital cities have to have strategic/political significance.
4) The player should have some power in defining the regions.
5) Player must not be able to affect fundamental regional and population prrperties with his tinkering.

There are probably more requirements, since I made those up with my own model in mind. Feel free to add your own thoughts.

Number of cities:

The model I proposed was very general, and I'm sure it can be applied to a smaller amount of cities as well. The three level structure sounds nice: but what makes a city a regional capital? If some cities are predefined as region capitals, the player would have no power at all over partitioning his empire. On the other hand, if region capitals can be chosen from the set of all cities, there is no way to enforece the three levels. I view it more like a good guideline rather than a rigid rule.

As stated above in answers to S. Kroeze, I think that the average civilization could have maybe fifty cities, and in worst case only hundreds, not thousands. Perhaps 150-200 is a realistic number (yes, I know I said smaller figures above...)? In case there are 30 or so regions, each region would have an average of 5-7 cities, including the capital. Maybe a larger region with ten cities or so can be have some more detailed hierarchy, for instance two subregions with 3 and 7 cities. It may not be feasible to have this many cities: in multiplayer games the total number would soon be several thousands and if every city is a potential region then there will be quite a lot of information stored about them.

On the other hand, most multiplayer games need not be very massive, and even if they are the land area of the map will put limits on how many cities there can be. Maximum amount of cities would be a couple of thousand, approximately.

Trade:

Why should the international trade be done differently from internal trade? I see no reason for trade and exploit relationships not to cross national borders.

Controlling land:

Yes, that would have to be implicit in cities and maybe in some mobile units as well. The area of influence would in essence be the combined control/exploit of land.

Leland

**The Joker** · January 14, 2001, 12:34

quote:

Hexes should only hold terrain type and elevation with perhaps improvements.

Yeah, and population. Each hex would store the amount of people on it.

quote:

I think that when we talk about civs and regions everyone has a picture of his civ with external borders to outer civs and internal borders, between provinces. This is a wrong mindset - because it does not allow us to imagine a "blank" space inside our civ borders, which does not belong to any region.
Secondly, this leads us to the assumption that even tiles that do not belong to any civ can and will have population. That is wrong too.

I think blank space inside a civ would indeed be possible with cities. A civ's area would be that with people on it, controlled by that civ.

Your second assumption about hexes not belonging to a civ would not store population is wrong. By 4000 BC all of the world, except hard to reach areas like Madagascar and some pacific islands were inhabited, although all but a few places were not goverened by any central government.

quote:

Cities do not form themselves spontaneously out of population. Population does not spread indenpendently of your will. You start your game with a settler and that settler is the only people in thousands of miles. Nobody there. You can only spread the population by growing your cities (their radiuses) and building other settlers to found other cities.

Uhh, I really disagree here. I just think this would be way too civish. I would rather want us to stick with the realism concept, and make population something new, in stead of reusing Civ2 mechanisms.

quote:

City has its radious.

NOOOOOOOOOOO! City radiuses are a thing of pure evil, most likely invented by the devil himself. Ancient cities just did not have "radiuses" in the Civ2 sence. Plus, it seems that this will give a result like CTP2 or something. Not good.

quote:

This differentiation has only one effect - the conquering of a city tile is different then conquer of any tile in its radius.

Well, if you replace the city radius with rural hexes then we have a deal. I agree that cities should be different from rural's.

quote:

Percentages for all classes and groups are held at city level – religions, work classes.

This is where I disagree once more. I just think Civ2 cities are way too clumbsy and odd to use. Regions, regions, regions!

quote:

SO THE REGION IS...?
A city and its radius. I think multiple cities per region is a bad idea too.

I disagree once more. Regions means fewer entities to work with, and therefore less micromanagement. Modern USA would have 100s and 100s of Civ2 cities. I don't want to manage 100s of entities. In stead with regions I could manage perhabs 10 or 20 regions.

I have now run out of time, and I have to go. I will return next weekend, where I hope to have more time. Bye!

------------------
"If I sink to the bottom I can run to the shore!"
- Homer J. Simpson

GGS Website

**ElmoTheElk** · January 15, 2001, 03:35

I agree with most of the things Joker descripes here. I see only 1 little problem here: If you are in the beginning of the game, I don't think it's fun to manage only 1 region, or is it? I agree you have several other things to do, but..

Well, I just like the ideas here presented by Joker! This would make a really good game. I see some of them are hard to program though, pop numbers on hex-level for example, but I really think this will become handy.
[This message has been edited by ElmoTheElk (edited January 15, 2001).]

**amjayee** · January 15, 2001, 04:44

I would really like lots of realism in this game, but also I would like the realism implemented in such a way, that it is easy to do and handle, and fun to play.

Having lots of cities with complicated relations might become a little too complex, without adding very much to the game. So I really suggest having improvement - kind of cities, with some spontaneity in them, and making them always subordinate to the region capital. You would build cities, or encourage their spawning spontaneously. There would be some interaction between the cities, but basically you would handle resources region-wise. Trade would be another matter, but basically it benefits would also be handled region-wise. This would be easy to do, and besides, this is how things have been for most of history; strong centralized government.

Having lots of complexity in the model might easily make the game boring and very difficult to implement; we would spend lots of time balancing things, that don't have very much influence the game experience itself. So we should choose a fairly simple system, and try to get the best out of it, instead of over-complicating matters. Besides, our programming capabilities are quite limited, and not only because we are few, but also because we are inexperienced.

About tile population, it would be cool. But I'm not sure if it would be sensible; handling such a large amount of data would take lots of computing power, and lots of memory (4 megabytes with a million hexes and a long for each hex's population). We will see if we can make it - it might be possible. But we shouldn't make it too dear for us, since it is after all quite secondary feature.

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