What made the light bulb come on?

Peng Qi said:

No, actually. The limits of most settlers' lumberwork was to cut down a few trees to build a house, then clearcut for farmland. Most hills don't have any "minable" resources, and even if they did, most settlers don't care unless those resources are so valuable that it's worth risking death by starvation to seek those resources rather than farm their own food.

Bottom line: No settlers in history, unless you can show me even a single example otherwise, have ever gone to any land with any intention other than:

1. Farming (modeled by preference for food tiles) or
2. Getting their hands on a valuable resource which is so abundant and obvious that anyone could acquire it, e.g. gold-rushes (modeled by preference for resource tiles).
[Oh, or 3. Fleeing for their life from some unspeakable menace or disaster, but that doesn't really apply.]

Show me a single instance of a group of people saying "HEY GUYS! Let's uproot our entire families and go live on that hill over there, then dig in the dirt and just SEE WHAT WE FIND!!!"

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The (main) flaw in your argument, is that it only applies to the pioneer settlers who first went into uncharted new territory with no towns or civilized areas around for many miles, and were truly 'on their own' to survive. Which in the case of CiV, only truly applies to the initial settler units. Of course food was their first and main priority.

But after a few turns in CiV, it isn't a couple settlers and their wives and kids and two pigs, anymore- it is a village, then it quickly blooms into a town/city. It rapidly morphs from a wild, basic-agriculture-only cluster of farmhuts, into a full-service town with walls, leaders, militia, craftsmen, forges, mills, and a lot of people needing a lot more from the territory around it than just turnips and pork chops. In relatively short order (in the CiV scale of things), minerals and timber are in big demand by the city, and industrious loggers and prospectors and miners should be doing what humans naturally do- extracting needed and profitable resources for the advancement of themselves and society. And they are doing it from the lands immediately surrounding this city, of course.

But no, sorry, the vaporous 'city governor' has deemed only lands with food production potential shall be 'picked' for use by the city, sorry. Farmers get their choice of any lands they want to develop, utterly free! Even epochs after the city has far more food than it could ever possibly use. But miners and loggers don't. Instead of having plenty of empty forest and hill in which to ply their invaluable trades, they have to go out and buy it first in order to work it, for some unfathomable reason. As if farmers have all the rights and privileges, and loggers and miners have none.

The argument isn't about whether settlers in brand new territories shouldn't get a premium on empty farmland wherever they settle, but whether the non-food resource lands around already-settled and bustling towns and cities with multiple different needs, and with the population, technology and will to exploit them, should still remain largely unavailable due to a governor that vastly underrates for acquisition any resource other than food. I don't think so. It is unrealistic, stupid, and far from historically accurate past the stone age.

So you're saying that once Chicago was settled, all territory within Illinois became Chicago proper, and all people in Illinois ceased pursuing their own self-interest and began to work for the collective, and that none of the people anywhere in the area were doing anything one could consider to be "settling."

Peng Qi said:

So you're saying that once Chicago was settled, all territory within Illinois became Chicago proper, and all people in Illinois ceased pursuing their own self-interest and began to work for the collective, and that none of the people anywhere in the area were doing anything one could consider to be "settling."

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Nope. What I'm saying is, beyond the first early days, of farming being mostly the only game in town for a freshly settled wild area during a pioneer era- beyond a certain fairly early stage in most city's development cycle, there are as many entrepreneurial sorts out acquiring and producing the rest of the resources needed for growth and prosperity, as there are farmers. Farms, especially if there were a lot of them already and the price for your food (assuming you aren't just vapidly subsisting and not producing any extra) went down accordingly, didn't look nearly so attractive after a while as some of the other resource opportunities. There's a lot of money and jobs in them thar hills and forests, and it's not human nature to let them go to 'waste', especially after the initial pioneer-subsistence era is well over with. Many of the original settler's descendants, and new immigrants, would be looking to develop those other resources. You think everybody out to make a better life for themselves and their families was a dirt farmer? Or wanted to be? That the only motive for developing new lands, anywhere, ever, at any point in a civ/city's history was purely for farming? Crikey.

What you seem to be saying, is exactly that.

OK, so can you give me an example of some time that some guy, without having any hints or idea that anything valuable was present, just decided to go to some hill and start mining? And bring his whole family to live on the hill, of course. And didn't farm on the hill.

Or some time that someone settled a forest to start a commercial logging camp? I'm not talking about someone deciding "hey I need some wood for my house, gonna go chop a few trees then go back to farming." I'm talking about someone going out into the woods to live there and cut down trees and sell them to other people so he can make a living for himself. Prior to the Industrial-freakin'-revolution of course, by which time your city probably is picking up forest tiles.

You know, lots of people build Workshops without the government intervening too. Isn't this my free workshop argument again?

Peng Qi said:

OK, so can you give me an example of some time that some guy, without having any hints or idea that anything valuable was present, just decided to go to some hill and start mining? And bring his whole family to live on the hill, of course. And didn't farm on the hill.

Or some time that someone settled a forest to start a commercial logging camp? I'm not talking about someone deciding "hey I need some wood for my house, gonna go chop a few trees then go back to farming." I'm talking about someone going out into the woods to live there and cut down trees and sell them to other people so he can make a living for himself. Prior to the Industrial-freakin'-revolution of course, by which time your city probably is picking up forest tiles.

You know, lots of people build Workshops without the government intervening too. Isn't this my free workshop argument again?

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Again, you are making erroneous assumptions. You are assuming all people always wanted to be farmers, and you assume all lands in the immediate vicinity of a settlement/town/city are somehow mysteriously unknown and unexplored. Both are wrong. Once a town is settled, it is a very short time before all lands for a good distance away have been checked our for value, utility and resources. In your very first civ settlement you build in CiV, you have scouts and warriors and more out wandering around scoping out the land. Any yokel in that town can go up on a nearby hill and get a pretty good idea of what there is to do on the nearby lands/tiles, by shading his eyes with his hand and peering off into the distance. Or by taking a dayhike and checking them out before moving his family off to some plot of land. The surrounding land and its resources were not unknown to the people heading out to make use of them.

The lands and resources surrounding a town are not, and were not, some huge unknown mystery that nobody had a clue about. These are all places close enough to a town to be explored and assessed before anybody has to make a clueless dart throw with their family future. Selecting nearby tiles to be worked by citizens of your town, is not the same as 20 families taking a wagon train 1,500 miles across the west to plop down somewhere out yonder in Oregon. Even then, they did have advance scouting reports to go by, and usually one or more guides with knowledge of where they were going and how to get there. The gist of it is, claiming all settlers always just blindly go off into the blue and never had a clue about what they would find at the other end, is silly. Especially if where they are going to is just a stone's throw past the already-settled perimeter of town, in already-explored and scouted areas- which is the case in CiV.

Plenty of towns throughout history have been settled with the express purpose of mining nearby resources, and after sawmills are developed, there were plenty of lumber towns as well. In the area of western Oregon I live in today, far more towns grew and prospered out of the pioneer days due to logging and lumbermills, than anything else. Farming here is very small potatoes (pun intended). Ask the people of West Virginia or Nevada if farming was the biggest draw for new folk moving into those states... and on and on.

Your assumptions are just too narrow and simplistic, sorry. If the ingame governor shifted a bit from its huge food-favoritism bias at some reasonable point in time and city/tech development, like very shortly after mining and lumber mills are both teched- towards a more inclusive and liberal selection of other kinds of tiles as well, I wouldn't care. But even by the year 2050, towns and cities are still stupidly sucking up any crap plains no-water food tile over other truly valuable resource tiles, as if it were still 4000 BC.

And having the stupid city governors pick more hill and forest tiles more often, instead of overwhelmingly food tiles for all of eternity, is not remotely analogous to getting 'free workshops'. Dunno where you came up with that idea. It would simply be them doing their jobs correctly, something they fail utterly at, the way it is now.

So you have no examples of this whatsoever prior to the Industrial revolution, as I asked. You simply continue to persist in your assertion that what you WANT to happen in the game is what history remotely looked like (which it isn't).

So let's get off of history then and back to the game. I assert that the game is specifically designed so that if you want production or commerce boosts, including tiles, which are more valuable for most of the game than food tiles which are primarily valuable early, you need to expend resources in the form of gold or hammers. What is your game-mechanics argument for why things should be otherwise?

You guys should duke it out in an online duel..tiny map. I'd pay to watch!

fatboris said:

You guys should duke it out in an online duel..tiny map. I'd pay to watch!

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Verily, a video game shall decide who is right!

Peng Qi said:

Verily, a video game shall decide who is right!

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LOL! That would no doubt be epic. We both see the issue through different eyes, and I don't see either of us changing the others mind, so on to other things. We beat it up enough already.

Smokeybear said:

LOL! That would no doubt be epic. We both see the issue through different eyes, and I don't see either of us changing the others mind, so on to other things. We beat it up enough already.

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Two thoughts:
1) There is no horse so dead that it can't be beaten one more time.
2) Every time you run over a dead cat, it gets a little bit flatter.

although it seems you guys already spend way more time necessary arguing this issue, i'd have to side with Pen on this one.

Throughout history, agriculture has always been the primary focus for any settlement/town/village. It is only through the aquirement of excess and storable food that any other profession, be it chief/priest/warrior or lumber jack/miner could possibly be considered. As Pen correctly stated, it isn't until quite late (industrial revolution) that non agricultural jobs became an option for lower class/majority of the population.

dashwinner said:

although it seems you guys already spend way more time necessary arguing this issue, i'd have to side with Pen on this one.

Throughout history, agriculture has always been the primary focus for any settlement/town/village. It is only through the aquirement of excess and storable food that any other profession, be it chief/priest/warrior or lumber jack/miner could possibly be considered. As Pen correctly stated, it isn't until quite late (industrial revolution) that non agricultural jobs became an option for lower class/majority of the population.

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Then why are mines, lumber mills, quarries, shipbuilding, great (huge) wonders, etc. readily available within the first several techs in the ancient era? You are expected to heavily use all of these other non-food resources, long before the industrial revolution comes along. The game does not (and could never reasonable claim to) hold anywhere remotely close to the ancient real-world agrarian-centric pattern that Pen's argument wields like some holy scepter of truth. No, it's a game. One in which the very fundamentals of what things you can do, when you can do them, and when you have to do them, do not match that claimed pattern at all- and it makes it a real stretch to try to justify a primarily food-only tile selection criteria for all of the early game, let alone the mid to end game, where it (quite stupidly) still hasn't changed a bit, either.

Based on the actual resource-heavy techs available for early use in this game, and the extensive amount of resources needed to adequately fuel those techs, there is no reason why the governor should largely ignore everything but food tiles, other than because the devs arbitrarily decided to do so, for unrelated reasons of their own (which I disagree with to an extent in this case, although it's of course all academic at this point). For all those reasons, trying to spin in a 'real-world historic reality' justification into this rather humorous abortion of history, only makes me chuckle.

Smokeybear said:

Then why are mines, lumber mills, quarries, shipbuilding, great (huge) wonders, etc. readily available within the first several techs in the ancient era?

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Because nation states frequently subsidized individuals or groups to go into such industries.

Peng Qi said:

Because nation states frequently subsidized individuals or groups to go into such industries.

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And I'm sure you have lots of detailed proof that that was the only way any such resource extraction was ever done throughout history, and that it was never done by families of entrerprising tradesmen and other groups of industrious people without having to acquire government funding first...

dashwinner said:

Throughout history, agriculture has always been the primary focus for any settlement/town/village. It is only through the aquirement of excess and storable food that any other profession, be it chief/priest/warrior or lumber jack/miner could possibly be considered. As Pen correctly stated, it isn't until quite late (industrial revolution) that non agricultural jobs became an option for lower class/majority of the population.

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I'd call a town/settlement/village 3 pop? Maybe? Cities on the other hand are a different story. Governors by nature were greedy oligarchs who were well fed. Once sustenance was achieved, focus was shifted to the acquisition of bling. Once people had enough to eat they suddenly longed for a better place to lay there head than a shack made from straw and dung. Given the choice of farm land or wealth they almost universally chose wealth. Were the pyramids built of vegetables? Did kings wear necklaces made of braided wheat? Did Genghis Khan raid villages and steal the rice leaving behind molten piles of gold as casualties of pillaging? The goal of kings, politicians, bureaucrats, oligarchs, etc... is the pursuit of wealth and power. It always has been and always will be. To put it in Civ perspective. If a city was +5 food after pop growth and a governor had a choice between annexing territory rich with gold or a sweet pasture with 3 cows...I'm guessing gold.

Non-agriculture jobs were always an option because there was always a need for goods other than food. All the industrial revolution did was consolidate production into large urban centers where they had a much larger labor pool to draw from.

I think it'd be a cool option to have a pop-up when your borders expand to let you choose your tile. If you wanted to automate it the way you can with workers....fire up.

That's just my 2 cents (2 carrots pre-industrial revolution)

fatboris said:

I'd call a town/settlement/village 3 pop? Maybe? Cities on the other hand are a different story. Governors by nature were greedy oligarchs who were well fed. Once sustenance was achieved, focus was shifted to the acquisition of bling. Once people had enough to eat they suddenly longed for a better place to lay there head than a shack made from straw and dung. Given the choice of farm land or wealth they almost universally chose wealth. Were the pyramids built of vegetables? Did kings wear necklaces made of braided wheat? Did Genghis Khan raid villages and steal the rice leaving behind molten piles of gold as casualties of pillaging? The goal of kings, politicians, bureaucrats, oligarchs, etc... is the pursuit of wealth and power. It always has been and always will be. To put it in Civ perspective. If a city was +5 food after pop growth and a governor had a choice between annexing territory rich with gold or a sweet pasture with 3 cows...I'm guessing gold.

Non-agriculture jobs were always an option because there was always a need for goods other than food. All the industrial revolution did was consolidate production into large urban centers where they had a much larger labor pool to draw from.

I think it'd be a cool option to have a pop-up when your borders expand to let you choose your tile. If you wanted to automate it the way you can with workers....fire up.

That's just my 2 cents (2 carrots pre-industrial revolution)

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It's good to see someone else here besides myself can look at this issue without the 'all they ever wanted to be was cow farmers' blinders on. Very well said. And your suggestion- very much needed.

Smokeybear said:

And I'm sure you have lots of detailed proof that that was the only way any such resource extraction was ever done throughout history, and that it was never done by families of entrerprising tradesmen and other groups of industrious people without having to acquire government funding first...

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Sure do: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slavery_in_ancient_Rome
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slavery_in_ancient_Rome#Types_of_work
As you can see, mining was not work done by settlers in Ancient Rome; it was done by slaves who were forced to work that territory. In fact, only the very dregs of Roman slavery were forced by the Empire to work in mines and, as you can see, were not expected to survive the experience.

I could get you entire lists of such information but hopefully you will concede at this point so I don't have to spam the thread.

fatboris said:

I'd call a town/settlement/village 3 pop? Maybe? Cities on the other hand are a different story. Governors by nature were greedy oligarchs who were well fed. Once sustenance was achieved, focus was shifted to the acquisition of bling.

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And how did they get this "bling?" Was it by the natural migration of the "greedy governor's" subjects, or did he typically force them to do such work, or pay contractors, the cost of which could be very well simulated by the current system? Hint: it's the latter.

Non-agriculture jobs were always an option because there was always a need for goods other than food. All the industrial revolution did was consolidate production into large urban centers where they had a much larger labor pool to draw from.

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Again, evidence please.

Peng, regardless of the merits of either of our arguments on how RL historical peoples ended up choosing which types of resource areas to settle on and work- please justify to me why the game automatically forces the agrarian-favoritist choice upon you in every city and in every era- whether you like it or want it or not... against the fact that it does this whether your city has a citizen available to work that tile or not? If there aren't enough citizens to work the newly chosen food tile, then how exactly are there citizens available to go 'settle' it? I view the acquisition of new tiles into your cityscape more as 'planting the flag', claiming them for your city, than as immediately filling them up with citizens to produce something. This view fits more into the reality of your control over your limited citizenry within the CiV gameworld.

And justify it against the fact that in the city screen, you can assign your citizens to work any tiles that you want anyway? It never takes into consideration the fact you don't have half as many citizens as it would take to work the over-abundance of food tiles already acquired; the fact that your city already has way more food than it needs at this point and is in desperate need of resource tiles other than food; the fact that your city probably_never_will need or want that 27th no-water plains tile it chose to grab instead of a juicy, hammer-and-gold hill tile which was desperately needed 15 selections back. Even in the modern era, centuries after the industrial revolution, it's still pulling the same unjustifiable BS. Every other aspect of the game allows you to choose what YOU want to do, how YOU want to play the game- every_other_single_aspect. But not this.

Want to assign all of your available citizens to be miners and loggers instead of cow farmers? You can do it. So much for a city's people choosing what they want to do, as you erroneously suggest- not in this game. It is CiV, and you are The King. Want to manually choose to assign your citizens to favor working primarily gold-producing tiles? You're The King, baby. Want to assign them to favor working production tiles? No problem- yep, again- you're The King, man. Want to lock those citizens into only the exact tiles you want them to work, for fracking eternity? No problemo, signor. Thou art Your Excellency, and your choice is the law of the land, which no worker/citizen/peasant can disobey.

But... want your empire to favor acquiring that nice phat hammer and gold-heavy tile right next to one of your cities? Oops, sorry dude, in CiV, where you are The King and can make your citizens work exactly where YOU want them to work once tiles are chosen, you still have no control whatsoever over how your citizens choose where to 'settle'.

Within the framework of the gameplay within CiV, and its constant and blatant disregard for historical accuracy and reality throughout- what is wrong with this picture? In a word- everything. Not allowing the player to choose, or even just have some modicum of influence over which tiles are chosen to add next to a city's perimeter- is completely bogus and does not jibe with the control you have over every other aspect of automated citizen/tile usage throughout the game. It is an arbitrary dev decision, one that makes no game-sense at all in my opinion. In CiV, your attempt to shoehorn 'real life' explanations as justifications for it just don't cut the mustard, sorry. They are totally irrelevant here, in this game which makes a travesty of any historical accuracy. You are The King, with complete control of your citizens and your empire- oh, except for this one, single, extremely important part...

Actually, the Virginia Company had the settlers of Virginia digging for gold - until it became obvious that there was no gold in Virginia this was the primary form of work in the colony - food was farmed sure, but the Virginia settlers also traded for food from British merchant vessels and the Powhattan Indians. Further, a number of settlements were founded to foster trade with Native Americans. I can also think of a few European coastal settlements on the west African coast focused exclusively on trade - food was purchased or brought in from elsewhere.

Smokeybear said:

Peng,

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So now you guys are on a first name basis?