While I was posting in this (http://forums.civfanatics.com/showthread.php?t=111140) thread about razing cities (yeah, I go off on tangents alot :lol: ), I came up with an idea for migration. The way it works is this: when your citizens become unhappy, there is a chance that they will leave the city they are in and join others.

Migration Within your Civilization
When your cities grow too large, and your citizens become unhappy, they might move to less populated cities that you have, after a time. This would, of course, be good. You could have a city with lots of flood plains in it, which produces citizens, which then migrate to other cities. This would be exactly like producing workers from flood plain cities to increase smaller ones, except without the micromanagement, or production cost. It's realistic too.

Migration to other Civilizations
Personally, I hate the way culture flipping works in Civ3. It's too "all or nothing," too instantly occuring, for me. Also, it forces you to do ridiculous things, like making all of the enemy citizens into tax collectors to starve the city down when you capture an enemy city. The way I think it should work is, if your culture is more dominant than a neighboring Civs, then the citizens of your opponent would start leaving their cities to join yours. Their sentiment towards your civilization would also affect this, but I will discuss that later.

I believe that they should completely remove culture flipping, and instead replace it with migration and revolutions which would form new Civs. If the new civilization declared its independence because it sympathized with you more than their former owners, they might allow you to annex them. Think Texas here. Ah, but I am straying from my topic :)

Quarantine
By placing a city under Quarantine, you would prevent any migration in or out of the city. It would lower the happiness level, but they couldn't be sucked up by another more powerful culture.

Picture this: two cities are right next to each other. The one in the west is fabulously rich, with a vibrant economy, and skyscrapers going up. To the east of it is a grey desolate city, with empty shops and starving people. A few people move into the west city. The trickle quickly turns into a flood, and thousands of people cross from east to west every day. But then, the Government in the East city throws up a wall, and shoots anyone who trys to cross it.

I am, of course, referring to the "brain drain" of Berlin, and the Berlin Wall. Incidentally, I think that a Quarantine action should only be able to be used by Communist Governments. Many people have rejected the idea of Communist Gov'ts building Temples and Cathedrals, and I agree. If this were added in, then Communist gov'ts simply wouldn't need religious buildings, especially if they have enough military police. A few tweaks like this, making culture have little importance under Communism, would fix this issue.

Evacuation
Evacuation would be like a controlled migration. If one of your cities was about to fall, then you could start to evacuate its citizens. This idea has been proposed before, which would create "refugee" units to go join your other cities, lowering the city size to one. I don't think like idea because 1) it seems abusive and 2) it seems clunky.

My proposed method of evacuation would be as follows: you give an evacuation order (probably by right clicking the city). All production and commerce would halt in that city. Each turn, 1 citizen would migrate to a nearby city. They could not migrate into a city that is currently evacuating. The city could evacuate all the way down to size 0 (where there us no production / commerce / food made), and no citizens would migrate back into it until the evacuation order was lifted.

This model has several implications:
1) You could not instantly evacuate all of your citizens in one turn. This makes sense, both realistically, and for gameplay. You would have to use some forsight as to when to begin evacuation in advance.

2) Bigger cities take longer to evacuate. This also makes sense, and gives the player more to think about strategically.

3) A neighbor could declare war, and start taking cities before you have a chance to evacuate them, or you could do the same to your neighbor. This is also realistic.

Deportation
Another random idea popped into my head while I was writing this: Deportation. Only available to Fascism, Communism, and Despotism, you could force a citizen to go to a different city, although the rest of the citizens in their previous city would become unhappy (like drafting and pop-rushing).

Also, whenever one of these Gov't types took an enemy city, they would have the option of mass deportation, which would remove ALL of the foreigners to select cities, and then you could either let your people migrate into the size 0 city, or abandon it.

What do you guys think of these ideas? :)

Interesting ideas. Moo3 has a migration system but its strictly under the hood. It just happens and players have little direct control over it.

Great idea!!! :thumbsup:

It's like the immigration and emegration in Lords of the Realm. :cool:

I agree, the migration idea is better than the refugee unit I proposed. I also think that (and this is based on info from the other thread), that some modification of migration would probably work better for populace enslavement when you capture an enemy town.

In terms of the evacuation, should those who flee the cities and join another automatically be unhappy for a certain period of time? This would reflect the unhappiness caused by having to flee the city and unhappiness at the government for not protecting its citizens.

I like the ideas! As dexters said, MOO3 tried to implement this, but it was so abstract that it didn't really work that well. I think in the spirit of Civ, having this be something more controlled by the player would be best, rather than an automatic something.

But, then again, I am a control freak when it comes to Civ. :D

this is a very good series of ideas, it would give you much more control over population and would allow you to create, for example, industrial cities in the mountains with large populations where the food is transported in from agrian towns in grass land areas (if they implemented food sharing abilites). But I dont agree with this bit:-

If this were added in, then Communist gov'ts simply wouldn't need religious buildings, especially if they have enough military police. A few tweaks like this, making culture have little importance under Communism, would fix this issue.

although I think that the ability to build religious improvements under communism is absurd, i think these should be replaced by secular entertainment/leisure improvements instead (and for all gov types in the modern age). the idea that culture was non-existent or unimportant under communism is just as unrealistic as building churches for the people. communist governments, especially in eastern europe and the ussr, spent vast sums on culture (far more than democracies) especially on 'high' culture such as theatra, ballet etc. this was to keep people happy of course but was also important in helping them try to legitmise their regimes. they also tried to prevent the erosion of traditional cultural activities in their respective nations. this can be seen in the number of cultural buildings in even small cities in eastern europe and by the cheapness and high quality of their cultural events, even now. this might be viewed as unnecessary nit-picking by me but there is no point in taking something out of civ because it is unrealistic only to replace it with something just as unrealistic.

ive finished my rant now!

I don't think Communist regimes should be disallowed building religious structures, but it should cost a heckuva lot more. Such gov'ts still have religion, it's just not as emphasized or encouraged.

Good ideas, dexterj, on the 'entertainment' structures.

cheers, I have previously grumbled about the idea of religion providing happiness boost, which in the modern age is laughable. cinemas should surely be the modern equivilant of temples/cathedrals and they should be cheaper under communism (they turned churches into cinemas and requisitioned any valuables in the church). under communism you should be able to clamp down on religion if you wish which might not be popular but should give you further control over the cultural direction of your nation.
there should be a tech (secularisation) which gives you a science boost but reduces the affect of religion. thus requiring new happiness buildings. this tech should not be available to the american civ. :)

@DexterJ - no kidding about the tech not being available to America. Ugh.

On Topic: I like the idea of ciniplexes, and maybe after discovering Internet, you could build Cyber-Cafes. These would produce happiness AND commerce.

Of course, if your gov't is very religious, then you wouldn't get as much benefit from those things, but your temples/cathedrals would provide greater benefit.

It's hard to postulate though, since we have absolutely NO idea how they plan on implementing religion into cIV.

Yeah, my point is that Communism would have other options for culture. If Communist Gov'ts simply weren't allowed to build the structures, then people would temporarily switch Governments to build them, or try to build them all in advance, which would be cheesy. Quarantine would be a more "soft fix" - one that discourages players from doing something, as opposed to a "hard fix" - one that removes the option. I generally prefer soft solutions over hard ones.

Dexter your points are good ones, and perhaps Communist Gov'ts shouldn't rely less on culture. If that were the case, then Quarantine would be available to any gov't. Perhaps, under representative Govt's, the people would be more unhappy than if you enforced quarantine under totalitarian govt's.

The idea of not being able to directly control migration has bothered me too. Especially when you are micromanaging the beginning. Of course, you could control it indirectly by keeping your people happy in the cities you want to keep large...but then, people might find themselves trying to manipulate where they go, using methods just as cheesy as building workers and merging them. (For instance, "I want my citizens to leave this city so I will destroy happiness improvements.")

Perhaps you could have options for cities like "Encourage Emigration" (out) and "Encourage Immigration" (in).Although the words have opposite meanings, this could be really confusing to some people since they sound so alike.

Also, evacuation hurting happiness would be a good idea. I thought I included that :lol Deportation would hurt worse of course. Here's an interesting issue: should representative governments be allowed to deport? We did it in the U.S. during WW2, although to less of an extent as the other powers. Perhaps you could make deportation severely hurt happiness under representative gov'ts, which would be a soft solution for this.

I just had a new idea. (Sorry for the double post.)

If provinces were used, then you could manipulate people to migrate out of a province or into a province, by using luxuries. I think that luxuries and resources should be more common in cIV, but that you could only use each to support a province. (That would fix the "my one source of oil supplies all 100 of my cities" problem.)

So, if you wanted to encourage immgration into a province, you could supply that province with lots of luxuries. If you wanted people to emigrate out of it, you could remove the supply of luxuries. Using provinces, instead of individual cities, would make this alot less micromanagey.

Evacuation
Evacuation would be like a controlled migration. If one of your cities was about to fall, then you could start to evacuate its citizens. This idea has been proposed before, which would create "refugee" units to go join your other cities, lowering the city size to one. I don't think like idea because 1) it seems abusive and 2) it seems clunky.

My proposed method of evacuation would be as follows: you give an evacuation order (probably by right clicking the city). All production and commerce would halt in that city. Each turn, 1 citizen would migrate to a nearby city. They could not migrate into a city that is currently evacuating. The city could evacuate all the way down to size 0 (where there us no production / commerce / food made), and no citizens would migrate back into it until the evacuation order was lifted.

This model has several implications:
1) You could not instantly evacuate all of your citizens in one turn. This makes sense, both realistically, and for gameplay. You would have to use some forsight as to when to begin evacuation in advance.

2) Bigger cities take longer to evacuate. This also makes sense, and gives the player more to think about strategically.

3) A neighbor could declare war, and start taking cities before you have a chance to evacuate them, or you could do the same to your neighbor. This is also realistic.



i would really like to add something to this great thread..

when u evacuate people, and lets say per turn u are allowed to draft 3 refugees, and ur evacuating a whole eastern front. u now have 20 refugee units or possibly more. the problem is that ur other cities are full as it is. what do u do?

solution:

u establish one refugee per square outside your cities and in the country side. a special task they have is creating a short term displacement camp for them until relocation is possible. once a camp is established, it should take a military unit to unestablish them as if they were barbarian camps, generally converting the camps back to refugees, or sometimes if a camp has been boon docked and neglected to long, they could turn into rebels as u try to relocate them.

u establish one refugee per square outside your cities and in the country side. a special task they have is creating a short term displacement camp for them until relocation is possible. once a camp is established, it should take a military unit to unestablish them as if they were barbarian camps, generally converting the camps back to refugees, or sometimes if a camp has been boon docked and neglected to long, they could turn into rebels as u try to relocate them.

Alternatively, you could pile the refugees into a "camp" (within a city radius) and it would not be able to produce anything (but would consume food from the city (or take surplus food from your empire, either way!). When you needed to disband the refugee camp, all you would have to do would be 'right-click' and select 'disband' .

I fully support increased complexity in cIV, as long as it is somewhat subtle and doesn't add too much more to MM. I'm not a bean counter, dagnabbit!!

if u disbanded them, by the geneva convention that would be considered genocide. so whats to say they wouldnt attempt to revolt and turn into a rebel unit? or uncle america dosent attack u for doing such.

in most cases its the goverment that sets up and creates camps. it is also the goverment that removes camps. so since a military unit is owned by the goverment i think it is most realistic to have military units disband, or when ordered to possible create refugee camps, the same way a crusader could create a fortress.

a refugee camp would have to be outside the city because if it was in a city radius its more likely to consume food and possible cause a shortage. refugee camps should be independant and not allowed to be built on city radiuses

Thanks for the complement about this being a great thread :) You bring up a good point about full cities.

But I don't really like the refugee unit idea because it just seems clunky :(

You could evacuate an entire front with the system I proposed. You would just evacuate each city (or province) that might be attacked. So, if someone on your eastern side declares war, you could start evacuating all the cities on your eastern border. The citizens would never migrate to a city that is under evacuation, so they would all move inward. Of course, you would sacrifice all production and commerce in those cities.

Here's one way to solve the full cities problem: Perhaps you could build a Shelter improvement in your cities, which would store extra population, but that extra population couldn't work. (and the Shelter would require gold upkeep). A city like this might have a blue population number, so you could quickly see which cities had refugees that needed to be dispersed. To release them, you could do something like right click the city and there would be an option to do so.

If your cities are full, and you don't have shelters available, then that should just be tough luck. You would have to rush them and then start evacuating next turn. If you don't build shelters in advance, you will be taking a risk. On the other hand, you would be saving money, and you could simply not bulid shelters and depend on your units to not lose your cities. Like I said, riskier, but if it's calculated risk, it would be worth it.

Perhaps you could build a refugee camp with workers too, but that also feels clunky.

Also, perhaps Shelters could only be built in provincial capitals. Just something to throw out there.

The stuff in your first post sounds great! :cool:
I like the idea of refugee camps, too, but how about it takes 2 or 3 workers to build one?
For migrating ...
What if towns automatically sprung up around cities that were overflowing with population. Most cities were not started because the government said "go and build a city over at ...", people moved to areas that had what they wanted (forests, plains for crops, ect.).
Maybe you could encourage migration with a gpt cost.

That's an interesting idea, but the players would lose too much control over what goes on, I think...

Perhaps you could create a shield-less settler with for or five citizens. Although that wouldn't fix the realism problem you are talking about :\

It'd be kind of like MAJESTY, where you influence people to do things for you instead of telling them to do it with benefits and rewards.

On the commute home I thought of another idea to make this more realistic. If you begin evacuating a city, but then an enemy completely surrounds it, shouldn't that halt the evacuation? Also, could this migration only take place when there are roads, railroads, harbours, or airports linking that city to another? And if so, if the enemy cuts off those trade routes migration would be cut off too. In terms of cutting off an air route, an enemy with a mobile SAM unit next to your city would cause that air route to be cut off maybe.

Just a thought.

Your workers should be able to build certain types of 'camps' for various purposes:

Refugee Camps - These can hold up to four refugee citiznes that were evacuated from your city or even a neighbors cities(think UN).
Slave Camps - These can hold up to six slaves from forced relocation. They generate some kind of labor and require less food.
Death Camps - These can hold up to four citizens and manage to kill one per turn. Useful only for genocide.

Well, thescaryworker, I haven't played majesty. I don't like the concept too much, but perhaps it works better than I would think. It would depend on how many methods you could use to get them to do what you want. In any case, the more ideas the better, no matter who agrees with them (I even mention ideas that I come up with that I don't like, in my threads :lol: ). :goodjob:

I really like the idea of using traderoutes as migration routes, Arturus. This adds a fair amount of depth and realism to this idea, and is extremely simple to understand. :)

It would probably be more practical to simply pillage roads surrounding the city, rather than surround it with military ;)

As for harbors and airports, you gave me a new idea. I think that air and sea units should have a "Blockade" command. Sea units would have to be directly next to the city to issue it. When a naval unit was issued the blockade command, it would be as if it were fortified, except it would have no defensive bonus. Instead, it would prevent luxuries, strategic resources, and evacuation of citizens by sea. Note: you wouldn't have to fully surround a city with naval units to do this, just have one on blockade mode. Air units would be able to execute blockade missions (within some sort of operational range), preventing evacuation and transfer of resources by air. (The mobile SAM is a good idea too)

While I was typing the above paragraph, I thought of something else. The problem that I saw would be that if a city had roads, sea, and air routes, it would be too much trouble to fully blockade the city. Then I thought, the more migration routes a city had, the faster people could evacuate! So, if a city had roads and an airport, it could evacuate 2 citizens per turn. Perhaps railroads should add an evacuation bonus as well. So, if a city had Railroads, a Harbor, and an Airport, you could evacuate 4 people per turn. This would mean that even if an attacking player doesn't have any air units nearby, it would still be worth using a ship to blockade simply to reduce the rate of evacuation. Each individual blockade method would be useful even if you can't fully blockade a city.

This also makes airports more useful. Who on earth uses airports to transport resources on Civ3? I never have. Why would I leave a city roadless and rely on an airport? Using airports to evacuate would give them an awesome side effect. (in addition to building veteran air units)

Also, perhaps certain land units should be able to blockade a city. If the city had railroads, you would have to use two to fully blockade it (if you used one, it would reduce evacuation rate by 1). I'm not sure which land units should be able to do this. This could be a useful add-on for Guerillas, or something.

On a random note: I don't currently like the way you set up roads and railroads in Civ3. Seeing every square linked to all 8 adjacent squares looks pretty stupid to me :crazyeye:

I really like this idea, I would love to see it in civ IV. What I like most is what would happen during a war when you capture a bunch of enemy cities. Rather than having culture flipping, you'd see the captured cities decrease in population as their citizens flee to their old civilization (and surrounding civilizations). This creates the feeling of refugees without having to build any external mechanism for it.

I would completely drop any sort of flipping like the Texas scenario you mentioned though. I would rather say that if a city gets all the way to zero population, it should cease to exist, and the borders should change accordingly.

One question I have is should citizens still starve if they have the option of moving to another city? If you don't allow them to starve, you end up with an exploitable situation, where you can purposely starve citizens to get them to leave. If you do let them starve you end up with an annoying situation where people move to a city, and then starve, only to have more people move in to replace them. Such a city would really annoy me because it drains citizens from the cities which can support a larger population. Maybe you should allow citizens to starve, but also provide a way to prevent any migration into a city.

Heh, the Texas thing actually had nothing to do with migration. The idea was, if an enemy province went into anarchy, and did not rejoin their civ, then it would be like it's own nation. If they revolted because they like you better than their former owners, you could annex them. I don't know why I mentioned it in this thread though ;)

You bring up a good point about starvation. I think what would fix it would be if migration happened at slow rates. Like, 1 citizen would migrated every 4-6 turns. So, if a a city was starving, people would still die, but every five turns or so one would leave instead. I actually intended it to be this way from the start, but I don't think my point came across that way ;) Only evacuations and deportations would be faster methods, natural migration would happen very slowly.

There would also be some exceptions to slow migration: if a city is maxed (size 12 before hospitals, for example) and its food storage box filled, it would instantly migrate a citizen out and get back to size 12. This would replace building workers and merging them into other cities (a method which adds micromanagement and also feels ridiculous).

As for the zero size city thing, I kind of like the idea, since it's just an empty city with a bunch of military units in it. I like the re-orienting of culture though. Perhaps it would just have zero culture, and if the enemy border swallowed it, well that's that. It would still exist, and your military could hold the city and any walls / other bonuses. But if the size zero city lies in your enemy's border, your citizens couldn't migrate to it yet, perhaps?

I really like the idea of migration and deportation, since it bring a more dynamic game. So in general I agree with it.
I support the idea of a city who cannot have a large population due haven't aquedut, hospital or when a city are in starvation. To prevent a city purposely be in starvation, but don't eliminate only after 4, 5 turns build automatically a migrate. Then is send it to other city or we could automate the process to find a city who hostage it.
The evacuation I think it really only works from industrial age, due that the civs are not modernize sufficientlly to do a thing like that before. Until that could be an automatic process like migration, but it happens when a city is under attack or close to that.