A different pop model for civ games

[korn469]

Ok so this idea just came to me today. The basic premise is what if civ pops could age and die?

So imagine this. You found your civ like normal. The food box ala civ 4 starts filling up, but when it fills up and a new pop appears, it isn't an adult pop, it is a child pop point. The pop will remain a child for 10 turns counting the first turn. On turn 11 it will transform into an adult, and will remain an adult for 50 turns. On turn 61 it will turn into an elder and will remain an elder for 20 turns. On turn 81 the pop will die of natural causes.

Children pops can work the land, but they cannot be specialists pops, except for students (which requires either a school or a an adult tutor pop). Children pops will produce less resources than an adult pop. Children that become adult pops with an being a student are considered uneducated, and this will reduce their effectiveness as specialists and prevent them from becoming tutors, scientists or other technical pops.

Elders also produce less than adults. Neither elders or children can produce pop growth, even with an adequate food surplus.

There would be a health system, which I'm still working out. However, if any pops are unhealthy enough, it would first lower, then completely stop all of their production. Also, with enough unhealthy points, pops could die. Adult pops would have more resistance than either children or elderly pops to unhealthiness. So during a famine or plague it would be children and the elderly which die first.

How does that sound?

[ZEE]

WTF is civ?

[AAAAAAAAH!]

That seems like a much more complicated and difficult to understand system that doesn't really improve gameplay in any way.

[SlowwHand]

The concept is sound. I would suggest a weighed approach on things though. While academics are certainly important, have trades generate a. different set of values so as to balance. A physics instructor is glad to see a plumber arrive.

[Decimatus]

Too complicated. Also doesn't make much sense when your civ pop is a child for 200 years.

Aging and death is perhaps under utilized in Civ games, but no one really wants to micromanage those things in Civ.

Using the current pop system you build a hospital in a city which either raises the growth rate or decrease the amount of food needed to grow, which basically does the same thing. Using food to simulate all aspects of growth keeps things simple and reduces micromanagement. I think we do have room to make things a little more complicated though.


Here is how I might create a new pop system for a Civ game:

1. De-link food from outright population growth and use food as a growth-cap instead of being the main driver. If you have 40 food, you can feed a size 20 city, however long it takes to get to 20 based on other growth factors.

2. Set a baseline growth number, such as 1 pop per 5 turns, that all cities start with, but which each modifies in it's own way using the advantages and disadvantages(buildings, food, luxuries, swamps, etc) at hand.

3. Bring back Health, similar to what is seen in Civ 4. Health would act as a growth modifier that could both increase growth, and drag growth into the negative if too low. Health would essentially simulate life expectancy and general well being.

4. Happiness would act as a growth modifier. The happier your city is, the more likely people are to stay and the more likely people are to immigrate to that city as well.

5. Bonus modifiers. A few other factors that could be used to determine the growth rate could be employment, commerce, slavery, refugee crisis in neighbor cities, etc, etc. Personally I would attempt to roll many of those factors into happiness for the sake of simplicity.

[Ben Kenobi]

the pop system as is is fantastic. Don't change it.

[Felch]

So imagine this. You found your civ like normal. The food box ala civ 4 starts filling up, but when it fills up and a new pop appears, it isn't an adult pop, it is a child pop point. The pop will remain a child for 10 turns counting the first turn. On turn 11 it will transform into an adult, and will remain an adult for 50 turns. On turn 61 it will turn into an elder and will remain an elder for 20 turns. On turn 81 the pop will die of natural causes.

This sounds a lot like Banished, which is fun in its own way, but not played on the same scale as Civ. I agree that this would make micromanagement too big of a factor.

[ricketyclik]

I like it Korn. I also like Sloww's point - experience should increase productivity. Decimatus also raises good points.

It reminds me of when I used to think about a better tile management system - irrigation leading to salinity/desertification without mediating measures, so allowing sub-improvements on tiles and incorporating micro and macro environmental factors - i.e., the tiles' outcomes are affected by the management of the tiles around them, and to some degree by the overall global balance. Hell, maybe even incorporate a global circulation model.

[Dinner]

Yeah, that system really does sound more complicated especially since the abstract system already seems to handle children in that the time it takes between pop increases could be conceptualized as the time it takes children to grow up.

[N35t0r]

I remember talking with someone in the Civ 5 forum about revamping food/happiness (turning them around, so that happiness made cities grow and was city-specific, and food was required for people to work effectively and was empire-wide). Decimatus'system takes this one step forward in a good way IMHO.

[onodera]

I had some ideas about removing the way current pop is actually a logarithm of the real pop, but this requires rescaling so many other variables it's not fun. I'm also worried if this won't increase micromanagement as well.