Regions, Population and Improvements - model ver. 0.3

[S. Kroeze]

Originally posted by UberKruX
i concur with you on the idea that urbanized cities should sprout up on their own, but i don't think the player should be able to "build his own", mainly because i see rural and urban areas as completely different "regions".

in real life there usally tend to be highly urbanized areas and highly rural ones. these areas usually form based on the ground conditions and varyign other factors, some of which are man-made factors. therefore a player could influence and not be god and decide which areas become urbanized and which remain farmland.

On the outlines I agree.
Yet I would like to point out that there is no reason whatsoever to invent two sorts of 'regions', operating in different ways.
Regardless of the size of our tiles, even large cities will only partly cover the surface area of one tile.

There should only be one sort of 'region', a rural one.
Many 'regions' will have no towns or cities at all; some will contain one or more towns/cities, which are all situated in one individual, specific tile. Yet a tile with a city/town on it, will still contain also a rural population.
Before industrialisation, the vast majority of the population was always rural. Holland in the seventeenth century was probably the first region, where more people were living in a town than in the countryside.

Population always tends to concentrate in political centres.
So moving your capital is the most effective way to move people!

[Leland]

Cities need large areas of land to support themselves, but on the other hand there's no reason to assume urban regions would be larger than rural ones (i.o.w. there should be a fixed "radius" for given transportation tech available), so it seems like every city would have to be surrounded by a number of rural regions in order to survive. So the rural areas could be simply more numerous than cities, not necessarily larger... or something.

[S. Kroeze]

A long time ago I posted this list:

For Europe I have only listed cities with a population of 40,000 or more inhabitants in 1600AD:
England: London(187,000); the second city of Britain, Edinburgh only had 30,000 inhabitants, Dublin some 26,000
Dutch Republic: Amsterdam
Spanish Netherlands: Antwerpen, Bruxelles
France: Paris(250,000), Lyon, Rouen, Tours, Marseille, Toulouse
Spain and Portugal: Sevilla(144,000), Lisboa(110,000), Granada(110,000), Valencia, Toledo, Madrid, Barcelona, Valladolid, Córdoba, Segovia
Denmark: Köbenhavn
German Empire: Prag(100,000), Augsburg, Nürnberg, Hamburg
Italian states: Venezia(151,000), Roma(109,000), Genova, Firenze, Bologna, Verona, Brescia
Habsburg/Spanish territories in Italy: Napoli(275,000), Milano(119,000), Palermo(105,000), Messina
Poland: Danzig, Wilna
Russia: Moskwa, Smolensk
Walachia: Bucuresti, Tîrgoviste
Ottoman Empire: Istanbul(700,000), Edirne(160,000), Beograd, Üsküb, Saloniki, Sarajevo, Kaffa

I think it shows how cities were realistically spread over the continent. Only Amsterdam, Antwerpen and Bruxelles are really close together.
What also catches the eye is the diference between political centres and other cities. And enormous parts of Europe -Russia, Poland- were predominantly rural.

[Inverse Icarus]

about roads / minor improvements, i believe a public works system (ala Call to Power) would work well (cuts down worker tedium, yet allows the player to build roads where they want them. how would you think this would work with farms and such?