DESIGN: Modeling population

[Locutus]

Originally posted by Gilgamensch
Like Fascist: max 50%
Democracy: max 1%

With such numbers Democracies have no chance whatsoever of defending themselves from Fascists: when attacked they could switch to Fascism themselves and start to pump out units, but when being outnumbered 50:1 they will have been overrun long before they can get a half-decent army going.

I was more thinking along the lines of maybe 10% for ancient governments and 30-50% for modern ones. Exact numbers are meaningless at this point, but something along those lines.

[J Bytheway]

Just something that has sprung to mind: If building units requires population, shouldn't healing them require population too?

[Gilgamensch]

Originally posted by Locutus


With such numbers Democracies have no chance whatsoever of defending themselves from Fascists: when attacked they could switch to Fascism themselves and start to pump out units, but when being outnumbered 50:1 they will have been overrun long before they can get a half-decent army going.

I was more thinking along the lines of maybe 10% for ancient governments and 30-50% for modern ones. Exact numbers are meaningless at this point, but something along those lines.

Yep, numbers are in the moment meaningless, except to think about how it might/shall be implemented.

And as I said, those are just a starting point for discussion.

Together with the support costs, we might find that democracy might be able to support a higher number of units than you estimate in the moment. If we also include some kind of balance with the population growth, it cold work out. But historicaly Dem's have always been outnumbered by non-Dem's-governments. But they were normally able to balance it out with better equipment as well as bigger 'empire'-sizes. Me thinks, this will has to be thoroughly 'analysed'.

Even if a fascist empire would draw 50% of its populace into the Army it would have a hard time 'paying' for it's army as the populace would be in the army and able to contribute to the upkeep. So there is already a balance by itself.


I was taking in the moment the extrem position

[Locutus]

Originally posted by J Bytheway
Just something that has sprung to mind: If building units requires population, shouldn't healing them require population too?

I thought about that: it would make sense in itself, except that healing doesn't cost production either (unmodded anyway) and it wouldn't make sense to have one but not the other.

[LDiCesare]

Locutus, about the game balance problems that removing your pop can cause:
As I said, we do things this way in Clash. It's perfectly possible to lose all your pop if you don't manage properly your units building. This actually makes the game more interesting to me as you must try to wait as much as possible before you actually build units, in order not to penalize growth and economy. But I think the thing you have to playtest and balance is mostly the cost of the units. If you make sure that a unit costs and has an upkeep cost such that it will be difficult to product so many that you're actually ruining your population, you won't run into problems. But it probably becomes important to have units eat food and count against overcrowding when computing city growth, as CtP2's growth model is 'the less pop I have, the more I grow', which is kind of irrealistic.

[Gen.Dragolen]

Locutus,

Have you ever tried to play the game 'The General' ? Some programmers in Russia came up with this purely strategic game and managing your population is the key to your survival.

http://newgame.agava.ru/eng/g_news.html

It offers some interesting ideas about how to manage population and science. It is a fairly detailed game, but needless to say, you have the key elements of arable land, people to work the land, and how many people are going to be assigned to the military and science. I usually wind up getting slaughtered after a while because I run out of people when I get too much land and can't put it all to use.

The concepts of agricultural efficiency, population density, and population growth handle how many people you get each turn. If your casualties are too high, then you need to pull bodies from the farms and science to replace them. It would be easy enough to translate some of this to CtP2: you start off with so much food per square and it requires so many people to harvest it. If you add improvements to the land, the number of people you can support increase, as do the number of people needed to work the land.

If you need units, your efficiency is going to be reduced until the people are replaced by the growth. The same problem works in reverse: disband units and you have surplus bodies so crime might increase, and efficiency decrease.

Now to simplify this into something that isn't total micromanagement (and The General isn't very hard to manage), alot of this can be built into the existing system. Population can be represented exactly as they are now, based on a civ's population density, their agricultural ratings, and the health of the civilization. This way, the growth is affected by tile improvements, agricultural advances, sanitation, and happiness. The last one is essential because you have population increases during different eras for different reasons.

So if you are letting your people get on with the business of living in relative peace, and corruption isn't too bad, then it will be a base line type rate at x% per period to a population density base total of y people per square. If you add improvements to increase agriculture, the rate increases so much for a portion of the population based on how much territory the city influences. Add in an agricultural innovation like a plow, or using oxen to pull the plow, and it increases. Improvements like Mills and Granairies increase the available food which will affect the gold generated by trade and the base number of people that can be supported.

For each improvement, have it pull so many people for the improvement. If you build a bazaar, then you will have a base number of people needed to run the place and would create a a number of merchants. This would be an increase on the base number of merchants trying to keep the populous supplied with the goods and services needed to run the farms and city. Then you can have the number of people needed by a bazaar increase as the city size increases.

It shouldn't be too hard to have the AI test if a given tile improvement or city improvement increase is possible, and if it fits to the model the AI is trying to follow. Not much point to building a granairy if you have only one or two arable squares for a given village. Especially if it was seaside, where fishing tile improvements would be slightly more useful.

Try 'The General' game out a couple of times and you should have a good feel for how it works. And then remember:
'To steal from one is plagerism. To steal from two or three is literary discernment. To steal from many is masterful research."


D.

[Keygen]

Originally posted by Gilgamensch

Sorry if I was sounding harsh, was just lack of time

I can't figure out what is your measurement for considering something being harsh but it surely didn't sound harsh to me

Originally posted by Gilgamensch

Me thinks, he is thinking of different system all complete, but mainly just threw it in for discussion

Let's see what we can come up with then

[Keygen]

For a more realistic population model we could distinguish population according to gender (male, female) and age groups (underage, adult, old). Thus allocating poeple to army could be limited to adult males only, at list under certain government types of the past. I don't think it could be very complicated to implement, a formula could do the job.

[Gen.Dragolen]

Keygen,

Do we know anyone out there who have any knowledge of demographics ?

I think that it would rely on a few formulas to get the people modeled. C3C has a fairly detailed model, but it's not good for much in terms of game play.

The one thing that people forget is that men die when you go to war, and somany women lose or go without husbands. I know this first hand from visiting some of my Grandmother's school friends, all of whom were old maids. The men who should have been their husbands were among the 60,000 Canadian dead in WW I. And that was from a population of around 6 million.

On the Prairies it was especially hard since in many towns, almost all of the adult male population signed up. The churches still have long lists of the ones who didn't return.

Now in ancient times, levied troops were pulled from the farmers and the poor who couldn't afford to pay for someone else to take their place. And the loss could have a severe impact on the population for a couple of generations. If you pull too many men off the fields then food production suffers and population won't recover as fast.

There should be some population models in common usage by those studying demographics that we could use as the model for how the population would react to the changes brought on by combat casualties levels.

The other thing that would be nice to add in is the effect of food and work hours. It's not just the happiness that is affected, but also the health. The more food, usually the healthier the population. The less heavy labour, the longer the life. Most people forget that our ancestors were lucky to live much past 40 years of age. People who lived to 60 or 80 were rare.

D.

[Keygen]

Gen.Dragolen,

I personally don't know anyone arround that is specialist in demographics but people with knowledge in statistics like Dark Cloud or good history skills like some people in this forum could help. Besides we can do a search in the Internet and find many interesting information that will sum up.

I find the last point of yours quite interesting and could be an important aspect to the population model where several factors could have an impact to food production and work hours and altogether along with others lead to famine.

So comming back to a previous comment of mine should we model the population per era with a fabricated formula or should we let factors like the above and others that were common in some eras and not in others, affect the population exclusively?

[child of Thor]

Originally posted by Gen.Dragolen
Locutus,

Have you ever tried to play the game 'The General' ? Some programmers in Russia came up with this purely strategic game and managing your population is the key to your survival.

well i've got it recently, tried it a few times - but get the impression i need to give it a proper try to get into it, its not the easiest game to love straight away

As for the population stuff, we could get very scientific about it - but unless its realitivly easy for a player to understand what is going on, it might not make an improvement in the game.

Still just taking the smallish step of reducing a cities population when an army is built would be an interesting thing to playtest.
Also the possible, and disputed, benefits of having decent disasters/disease's to affect city populations all add pleanty of depth to the standard game as it is.

So from my gaming point of view imho, i would like to see smallish tweaks to the current system, really just to add a little more deapth, rather than have too many fundemental re-writes.
Still these are just my current feelings on the subjects, which may change as we thrash out ideas and suggestions for such things

Its cool - with access to the code , the coders can maybe do whatever they like and is agreed upon in the forums(heck they might just do what they want anyway ) So i guess anything could go?

[Flinx]

Originally posted by child of Thor
As for the population stuff, we could get very scientific about it - but unless its realitivly easy for a player to understand what is going on, it might not make an improvement in the game.

I have been thinking this recently too. The discussion here is becoming very complex.

[child of Thor]

Still i'd rather have the complexity in these discussions, just so we can sort of reverse engineer(and playtest) any actualy implimented improvements

We've had many such discussions over the years - and they've all been good

[Locutus]

Personally I do still believe simplicity is key. Very complex models are being proposed, not just for population but for other models as well. If all of those models are implemented, the game will soon turn into a speadsheet game that most of us probably won't enjoy.

Things like demographics and the like would be nice for statistics, but I don't think they should really affect gameplay.

And no, I didn't play The General, but I'll give it a try sometime when I have time.

[Solver]

Yes, complexity is good to ensure that the game is simple to the point that no thinking is required, I think most of us enjoy the fact that you need to use brains in this game, but very complex structures for every aspect of the game may ruin it. Detailed demographics for cities, as well as detailed supply and ammo factors for units, coupled with land erosion for your farms, and such, it might become just a tad too much.