Expansion and Settlement in Clash

[colorrr]

Well, I carefully read all posts in the thread and these are my compiled thoughts on the subject. They build upon much of what what already been mentioned before. Since I did not post much on this subject it kinda my introduction into it.

I visualize the settling and migration in the following way:
It should be an easy task to do in the game, as it can get quite tedious after a while.
The player select(s) desired city location(s) on the map, and there would be a routine to check it is not to close to another city or imposing any other restrictions. This location then gets added to the city list in the game.
The player then (optionally) allocates some funds to an economic task to help promote migration between cities.

That's it, the player finished his tasks and the migration model takes over.

The migration model is not very well defined but I visualize something like this:
It shuffles people around between the cities, based on many factors that would need more thought to be well defined.
For starters there could be:
- overpopulation in source vs available free room in destination: People desire to move from the large crowded city to the peaceful smaller towns.
- available natural resource in destination: There are a lot of good opportunity for work or making a good business.
- food production vs population in destination: abundant food.
- infrastructure: seeking the diversity of services.
- entertainment/culture: seeking the easy life and to fulfill the need to be entertained or awed by a wonder.
- educational: People move to complete advanced studies.
- the fund allocated to promote migration: Tax reliefs in the less desired areas, commercial campaigns etc.
- the promise of new land: Just started colonies have a special attraction fading with time. People might be given land for free if they move there.
- random events: Gold rush! Closing of the industry that mantained the population of the city.

This model could lead to people leaving a city and people moving to the same city, in the same turn. Just like real life.
The factors might change during the years. Like the abundance of food gets less important when the food can get transported into town in a reasonably fast way.
Some kind of calculation could be done to determine the amount of people moving from one location to another. That would depend upon the attracting factors in the destination site. A migration/immigration total could even be shown for each location in a screen the player can call up if he likes it. Could also help the player to detect any growing problem in a
city (lack of infrastructure, no natural resource, lack of food/farming etc).

Why do I like the migration model to simulate colonizing?
Well, colonizing a new city is basically people who move from one city searching for a better life.
When someone moves from one already settled city to another they are doing the same, searching for a better life.
So I think these processes could be generalized and put under the same control.

If the player feel he needs more control there could be a screen to distribute the migration funding between all available cities, where the player input the porcentage of 'support' he wishes to give to the promotion of one city over another. 0% would mean no special advantages or no commercial campaigns.

I did not give any consideration to a path to the selected city site. I am sure we would find a good solution there.

Actually all this thinking brings up a question. How is the infrastructure of a city built up? Who is in the control, the player or the game?

As for the ideas on nomads and nomadic civs I really like them. The horse thing should be played down though. The Vikings ravaged Europe for quite a while, and maybe their most important weapon was the longboat . . . it allowed them to do the raids they wanted to. And allowing several military units (or better called 'armed nomads with some organization') per nomad unit sounds like a good idea to me.

[Gary Thomas]

Unlike the Civ series, Clashis not city based. In fact the scale is such that, using ancient Greece as a model, there could be many cities in a single square. There can also be developed squares far from any cities.

Cities are used as a focus for production. At present you need a city to produce things, though I disagree with this restriction which prevents Germanic or Hun tribes from raising troops.

However, certain styles of colonization, particularly that practised by the Greeks, didi revolve around cities, provided "cities" is rather loosely understood. Some of Herodotus's accounts imply that colonization was sometimes undertaken by three people. Some city!

The point here is that we require a more flexible system than the Civ "settler builds a city" concept.

Cheers

[colorrr]

Be it cities or provinces, I refer to the concept that is in the last demo. I guess that is what Clash call provinces.

Are we talking about settling cities/provinces or indivual squares on the map, that might someday represent a province?

If the matter is settling indivual squares then more the reason not to built settler units. And more the reason to leave the task to the computer. The player indicate a collection of squares/province that is a desired location to settle, and the computer would take care of settling it depending upon the settings of the user.
I would be turned off by a computer game where I would need to put a settler on each square of the map.

[Mark_Everson]

Hey Gary:

Originally posted by Gary Thomas
Cities are used as a focus for production. At present you need a city to produce things, though I disagree with this restriction which prevents Germanic or Hun tribes from raising troops.

Hmmm, I'm not sure where these ideas came from, but the notion that you need a city to produce things is flat-out wrong. There is nothing to prevent a province without a city from building troops.

Presently production takes place in squares. Any square that has an economy will do. The only thing that happens that could be thought of as being "in cities" is that unit builds throughout the province are aggregated to build them quicker than if each square had to build its own. The aggregated build for now requires a square with a population > 20k to be completed. Now that we have provinces with cities and rural squares, my thought is that this build should move to a city or the most populated square.

Of course if we move the economy up to the province level, then everything will Appear to be built in the city/provincial capital, but that will be mostly for convenience and appearances.

[axi]

This post was written a few hours ago and is a reply to LGJ's comments.

Yes, but right here your post says there is absolutely no advantage to being a nomad...the cost differances will likely overall favor settled people so what are you offering the player as an adavntage?

As for settling dowm, if its only 1-time, then we must make sure it is in a very good spot...your proposal has it that whenever they reach agriculture 100, they automatically settle dowm, reguardless of their location. Anyway i don't like that idea...here's my counterproposal

The huge advantage of being a nomad is flexibility of choosing terrain (without having to deal with people's land connection and refusing to migrate) and great ease for early conquest, because you have population to support your conquest of a region. The Romans conquered Gaul by sending there their best generals and his legions and supposrted that conquest by building fortresses and migrating. The Goths conquered it a few centuries later by just moving in and it was a tad easier for them.

My point with infrastructure is to provide some minimal realism and an incentive for some players NOT to start as nomads. The infrastructure disadvantage can be regulated so that it can provide some balance. The real advantage of nomads, in fact the force that actually made them the only feasible solution for vast expanses of land in north America, north Africa and central Asia, is that they can dodge the problem of scarcity and exhaustion of food and resource sites. This is a very grave factor which unfortunately will be fully developped only once the ecology model is in place.

What I don't understand is how did you infer from my post that once the nomads reach agriculture 100, they will settle down. Nomads will probably never reach a high level in agriculture, because they won't be able to do irrigation, so they will turn their efforts to animal herding. What I said is that eventually the increased productivity that goes with immobile technology will marginalise them. Gunpowder led to their extinction because it connected military effectiveness with weapons that could only be built in metallurgic shops and reduced the effectiveness of cavalry.

What I see in your proposal is a way to help the AI make the settling decision for the nomad tribes and to a point for the nomad AI civs. But that decision in a player nomad civ will probably have to be either ruler only, or political, decided like the Culturally Negotiated Policies.

[Mark_Everson]

Hi Color, I basically agree with your comments. Hooray, another one for automatic migration!

All:

I am beginning to lean strongly back toward my original post on the topic, where I said we should have automatic diffusion of people and then give the player the Option to modify the migration-by-diffusion rather than having to order everything. I think otherwise it will be too tedious, even for the first demo.

I think Axi disagrees with this approach, is there anyone else? I suspect we can do something like the simple gui we've been discussing in the last 15 or so posts for when the player want to speed things up. But players that aren't interested wouldn't need to use it. Axi, we could also put in a switch to shut off diffusion, and see if your approach is fun or dull .

It has also occurred to me that I should state that the province-based econ system that we will move to at some point Automatically has intra-province migration as the population grows. Anything else would require extensive micromanagement. So if part of an outlined Province is empty, it will automatically get people moving in from the econ effects. (method we use to "draw provinces", and determine province detailed square composition still TBD).

The good news for the player is that its really only important to specify Inter-province migration because the rest will happen anyway. And of course the inter-provincial stuff will be done automatically by the people also, if you as a player are content with that, there is no need to do much of anything with respect to migration.

What do people think?


LGJ, I don't think your nomad settling chance proposal can work. The basic reason is that you roll a die every time settling is possible. Well I can tell you right now that no nomads will last a long time with your system, because even if the chance is only 5% after 20 turns on vaguely decent land they are fairly likely to have settled down. I think if people are going to enjoy being a nomad at the start they will need better control than that. The numbers didn't seem that bad, but rolling all the time guarantees the result in fairly short order IMO.

[axi]

Am I misunderstood again?

Do you feel that we can implement the correct algorithms for automatic migration from the beginning? If so, do it. I am the one who earlier said that expansion should be automatic, i.e. no settlers. But of course the player still has to have an interface to help him designate new provinces.

My only qualm is that this might end up like economy, which is a very fine model, lost in it's own interface.

[Mark_Everson]

Re: Am I misunderstood again?

Hi Axi:

Originally posted by axi
Do you feel that we can implement the correct algorithms for automatic migration from the beginning? (snip)
My only qualm is that this might end up like economy, which is a very fine model, lost in it's own interface.

Correct algorithms? I don't think we need anything very good at the start. I think I can do a decent job from an economic perspective fairly quickly. The basis I would use is "If I go here I will make this much, If I stay here I make this much" If the "move" answer is like something like twice as good as the stay answer, discounting travel maybe, then we move.

I think the gui would not be very different from what we've discussed. The only added bit would be saying how many people are expected to move Anyway. Then compare that to the number that would move if the govt throws X CC at them. If we start the demo with pre-defined provinces then everything could be done on a provincial basis.

[axi]

If we start the demo with pre-defined provinces then everything could be done on a provincial basis.

Pre-defined provinces in all of the map, including virgin territory?

[Mark_Everson]

It was probably not a good idea, but could be done. Default provinces could be created using geographic realities like mountain ranges. In the future, the player would always be able to rearrange the default provinces anyway.

[roquijad]

Hi everybody

There're several opinions I agree with , but I don't want to cite them all. Here's a proposal for expansion/migrations (no nomads stuff) based on several things you all have said. Let's see if you like it...

The proposal is based on the following "philosophies":
1) Migrations should be mostly run automatically by the game, w/o the need for player intervention. The player, however, should be allowed to get involved in the project, if he wants to.
2) Clash is a province-oriented game. As such, emphasis must be put in provinces rather than in cities when it comes to expansion.
3) Avoid micromanagement! That's Clash philosophy.
4) The "migrations model" needed for the game to automatically move people representing their own search for better perspectives can be potentially super complex if we care too much about realism. Acknowledging that, we must be very careful designing it. The target should be a simple model just giving the "right feeling".
5) For realism, to avoid micromanagement and to stay in line with the province-oriented philosophy of Clash, the formation of cities should be mostly automatic too, being a result of the natural economic growth in the civ. Probably it's the econ model the one that should take care of that. But, just like migrations, the player should be allowed to create cities in places he feels are needed and/or for strategic reasons.
6) Virgin territories will be rare in Clash because there'll be people and towns all over the place since the beginning of the game. Considering that, expansion/colonization in Clash, unlike Sid Meier's CIV, is more a "Civ vs Minor Civ" type of thing. In other words, your empire is always surrounded by other civs, be they minor or "normal". So, your expansion always happens at the expense of others, as opposed to CIV.
7) Although the civ's expansion/colonization will most of the time be directed by the player/govt, it's important to allow private iniciative to have a role in that too.
8) The player should be able to relocate ethnicities making some "social engineering", reduce chances of rebellions, etc.

Ok, in that context my proposal goes as follows:

SETTLERS
Settlers should exist in Clash to model forced migrations. Creating a settler is something the ruler makes to move people. The ruler commands people to grab their stuff and get ready to do. The player decides the number of persons as well as its ethnic composition (the settler is, then, a mobile set of EGs).

The player indicates where the settler must go (a square, that must be within an existing province). On arrival, there're two options for the settler. The player has to decide if to:
a) found a city in the square.
b) distribute population through out the province.

Settlers would allow you this way to make "social engineering" (by relocating ethnicities) and promote development in low populated provinces.

The action of creating and moving settlers should cost and that cost should be relatively high to encourage a low use of settlers. Using them should be something you do every once in a while for strategic reasons. That's also to keep the realtive importance of forced migrations way below the normal, impulsive movement of people.

You can't send your settlers to a place outside your civ. If you want, as a govt project, colonize land expanding your civ, you first have to create a province. Then you can make a force migration into it. But that's just an option. In general you should simply put some sort of incentive and people themselves decide if they move or not (migrations model).


MINOR CIVS 1
What these civs can and cannot do and their relations with normal civs is a whole other discussion, but at least the following should be true:
- your troops may freely walk thorugh them, taking advantage of the lack of political cohesion there. They also let you do it because they fear upsetting you. The ability to walk through Minor Civs is important because, as said before, you're surrounded by civs and that would be too limiting if you're restrained to your territory.
- your troops can attack the cities within the Minor Civ and pillage them to get some money.


PROVINCES AND MILITARY UNITS
As I said above, the player may put some form of incentive in the provinces he wants to encourage inmigration. Just a sum of money will do. A part of that money is spent in some infra every time people arrives. This should be the main way players have to influence migrations.

But when it comes to expansion/colonization, the most important thing is to determine how new provinces are created. Once created, the migrations model will be itself colonize the place (faster if the ruler puts incentives).

The ability to found new provinces should rest in several military units. By hitting "b" inside a Minor Civ's territory (remember no virgin lands really exist), your troops make an encampment that's at the same time a military base and a rudimentary city (in game terms it's just a city with a large amount of military infra). The city is the center/capital of the new province. That was often the case in history and in the game it'd represent the declaration of soverignity over some territory. Creating the province would cost you money, of course.

In CIV you found cities to expand. In Clash you'll found provinces.

The extension of the new province is determined automatically by the game considering your available transportation and communiaction techs.

Alternatively military units may found the new province in an already existing city. You invade one of the Minor Civ cities and in there you press "b".


MINOR CIVS 2
The creation of provinces is made at the expense of Minor Civs (in general it can be made also at the expense of "normal" civs, but let's concentrate on the no-opponents case for now (a demo1)). This may or may not cause a confrontation with the Minor Civ. FE, a couple guerrilla units can be created at the same time with the province to simulate aborigins reaction. Here more detail is needed to know what's really gonna happen and that depends on the modeling depth we give Minor Civs, but you get the idea.

The most important consequence anyway is land changes hands from the Minor Civ to your civ. Probably your new province will include aborigin EGs and they're probably going to revolt, but that's already modeled in the riots/social model, so there's nothing special to do here about that.


MERCHANTS
Military units founding provinces are govt-directed expansionism tools, but private enterprises could play a role too. Merchants agents will be trading with Minor Civs normally. Under some circumstances, merchants may decide to make a step forward and found a "colony" in a piece of the Minor Civ's land. Given ruler's approval, merchants use their money to create the colony (they create a province, really) and provide a task force for colony's defense.

Like in the province foundation by military units, Minor Civ must be checked for reactions.


COLONY/PROVINCE
As far as I can see, there's no need to found "colonies" in the sense that you're founding something that behaves differently than a regular province. Everything should be provinces. However, I think most players will want the word "colony" explicitly used in the game. My proposal is we handle that at the interface level only. Provinces very far appear in game texts as "colonies" instead of provines.


PROVINCE EXPANSION
As I understand is agreed already, provinces borders will remain fixed for long periods of time. But they can be changed. Every once in a while the player will push the button "reorganize provinces" to update provinces with the current transp. and comm. techs. Usually this will imply a reduction of the number of provinces and an increase in their size. For the latter, it'll be possible (in fact common) adjacent lands of Minor Civs could be potentialy included in the civ. In that moment an advisor would ask the ruler if he agrees to claim those territories as part of the empire in the new province organization. If he agrees, land changes hands and Minor Civs are checked for reactions (just like before).


A MIGRATIONS MODEL
Here's a simple approach for the problem. It's based on the idea that essentially all migrations seek a better economic situation.

We split the model in two: within-civ and civ-to-civ

within-civ:
For each province you compute a very simple index to define its attractiveness. Something like PCI_per_capita*incentives/land_utilization_ratio. You then find the least attractive and create a settler there composed with a fraction of all EGs present. You teleport it to the most attractive province and distribute the population there with a "smart" mechanism.

The number of persons moved is determined by the mobility liberties people have (Civil Rights from the govt model can be used there) and transportation costs between the two selected provinces. In particular those variables may determine a value of zero, in which case no migration takes place.

Only one migration of this type occurs per turn in each civ.

As time passes by PCIs and land utilization change, partly because of migrations, which change local economies, so along the game there're migrations almost in all directions.

civ-to-civ:
We compute an attractiveness for each civ. That attr is simply the highest value, out of all its provinces, of the index described above.

To avoid draining the weakest civ to feed the richest, here each civ must evaluate a migration. So, for each civ you:
- pick the province with lowest index
- compare that value with the attr value of the most attractive known civ. If the destination has lower value, abort. Else, continue with next step.
- create a settler and teleport it to most attractive province of selected destination civ.
- for each EG composing the settler, you determine the discriminations it'd face in the new civ. If it faces discrimination, EG is transformed to an "acceptable" EG (FE, people gives up their religion and adopts the dominant one in destination).
- EGs are added to province.

As before, number of persons moved depends on transportaion costs and liberties. Perhaps in this case also on each civ's migration regulations.

Sure the method has its flaws and doesn't cover all historical scenarios, but it's simple and does the work. At least it's better than handling huge matrixes for origins/destinations.

------------
Hey Gary, am I still on the top of that list of yours after this post? I'm testing my luck here!!

[Mark_Everson]

Rodrigo has landed! With a thud I agree with many things, so I will mostly only bring up things I'm violently opposed to .

Originally posted by roquijad
Settlers should exist in Clash to model forced migrations. Creating a settler is something the ruler makes to move people.

I don't see why this can't be done in a much more automated fashion with the same interface that the player uses for migration.

MINOR CIVS 1
What these civs can and cannot do and their relations with normal civs is a whole other discussion, but at least the following should be true:
- your troops may freely walk thorugh them, taking advantage of the lack of political cohesion there.

Just because they lack centralization doesn't mean they'll let you walk all over them. Because of the lack of central authority most squares should have at least defensive military capability. Unless you negotiate some sort of right of passage, I assume a Minor Civ will take your tromping into thier territory as an attack of the local duchies or whatever, and any local defensive forces will be used to battle with your invading army. How can it be otherwise? Well it can, but I don't think it Should!

The ability to found new provinces should rest in several military units. By hitting "b" inside a Minor Civ's territory (remember no virgin lands really exist), your troops make an encampment that's at the same time a military base and a rudimentary city (in game terms it's just a city with a large amount of military infra). The city is the center/capital of the new province. That was often the case in history and in the game it'd represent the declaration of soverignity over some territory. Creating the province would cost you money, of course.

Seems reasonable. But there should be other ways to create a province.

The extension of the new province is determined automatically by the game considering your available transportation and communiaction techs.

Not sure about this, but we should probably playtest several province-formation mechanisms, and this shoulld be one of them.

Military units founding provinces are govt-directed expansionism tools, but private enterprises could play a role too. Merchants agents will be trading with Minor Civs normally. Under some circumstances, merchants may decide to make a step forward and found a "colony" in a piece of the Minor Civ's land. Given ruler's approval, merchants use their money to create the colony (they create a province, really) and provide a task force for colony's defense.

Interesting, I like the general idea

A MIGRATIONS MODEL
Here's a simple approach for the problem. It's based on the idea that essentially all migrations seek a better economic situation.

This has some reasonable stuff, I'm not up to discussing it in detail yet. I will probably steal some of your ideas for the first simple model. Fortunately this one can be built up slowly with lots of playtesting between each step, because there is a lot of balancing to be done!

[axi]

Just because they lack centralization doesn't mean they'll let you walk all over them. Because of the lack of central authority most squares should have at least defensive military capability. Unless you negotiate some sort of right of passage, I assume a Minor Civ will take your tromping into thier territory as an attack of the local duchies or whatever, and any local defensive forces will be used to battle with your invading army. How can it be otherwise? Well it can, but I don't think it Should!

The best thing to do is have the player at least try to "go in peace" and risk being attacked. A square militia has chances to form and attack depending on the aggressiveness (as in culture) of the square's EGs. Major civs could even do battle inside tribal territory and the natives have the choice to help either side (depending on their relations) or stay neutral, or fight both. Whene there is battle already going on, the natives should have higher chances of engaging. This btw is how EU handles it.

[LDiCesare]

I like much of what Rodrigo said, but not the following:

Only one migration of this type occurs per turn in each civ.

This would prevent a large empire from colonizing new areas faster than small civs. I would find it very frustrating. It can also lead to funny behaviours where 2 provinces are always first in terms of appeal, but the second never gets any population. I also feel that the migration model should allow for rural exodus at modern times, when population leaves teh country en masse to go to cities. This is en masse, and leads to movements from all provinces to a few ones.
I don't think we need matrices. To make computation for every province, there is little additional work: Instead of finding highest and lowest appeal, we have to sort (NLogN instead of N complexity). The rest is computing path and corresponding cost to the highest-appeal city, and checking it remains the highest.
If you don't compute these costs for all provinces, you can get funny situations where people in a miserable far away province move very slowly to a rich province because of the costs, but the a-bit-less-pitiful province next to the rich one has no emigration. If you want to migrate population from the neighbour province, the proposed model doesn't allow it.

[Lord God Jinnai]

Mark:

LGJ, I don't think your nomad settling chance proposal can work. The basic reason is that you roll a die every time settling is possible. Well I can tell you right now that no nomads will last a long time with your system, because even if the chance is only 5% after 20 turns on vaguely decent land they are fairly likely to have settled down. I think if people are going to enjoy being a nomad at the start they will need better control than that. The numbers didn't seem that bad, but rolling all the time guarantees the result in fairly short order IMO.

Hnn well first i had it checking on certain landtypes so they wouldn';t check on mountains covered with glaciers FE. Second, you could just have them check every 10 turns...if they happen to be on non-checkable land, they must wait another 19 tyrns,,,

[quote]SIZE=1] Originally posted by Mark_Everson [/SIZE]
Hi Color, I basically agree with your comments. Hooray, another one for automatic migration!

Rodrigo:

As I understand is agreed already, provinces borders will remain fixed for long periods of time. But they can be changed. Every once in a while the player will push the button "reorganize provinces" to update provinces with the current transp. and comm. techs. Usually this will imply a reduction of the number of provinces and an increase in their size. For the latter, it'll be possible (in fact common) adjacent lands of Minor Civs could be potentialy included in the civ. In that moment an advisor would ask the ruler if he agrees to claim those territories as part of the empire in the new province organization. If he agrees, land changes hands and Minor Civs are checked for reactions (just like before).

Hmm last time i checked (wqhich was a while ago to be honest) it was still under discussion as to wheter the player could arbitrally change the procince sizes for better management do to fedual societies where the procinces might change sizes because of feduakl wars.
In any event, the player should haveto have the political power to change the procinces or the player may attempt to change them every turn.