Changing Tile Production Assumptions

In every version of Civilization to date, unless I'm forgetting or simply missed something somewhere, including knock-offs (Call to Power I and II), Mods and every official edition, each and every tile produces Food, Production and Commerce points - why? Specifically, why not vary that formula up somewhat?

Leaving aside the obvious answer of "if it ain't broke, don't fix it" and realizing that we all love Civilization as a game and for that game to grow and prosper, it must change and innovate with each new edition - what changes could you imagine to that basic structure? That's what this thread is for, to discuss possible changes and any ramifications of said changes.

I'll start with a quick and easy one and post more later...
1. Increased Numbers (or the 10x System)
Back when Apolyton sent in a list of suggestions for the development of Civ3, I recall one of the most common suggestions I saw was that tile output get multiplied by 10, so plains produce 10 Food, 20 Production and 10 Commerce points instead of 1/2/1. Call to Power actually implemented this, but unless I'm mistaken, they really didn't do much with it (it's been years since I've played CtP2, maybe I've forgotten something) - and there's so much cool stuff you could do with that besides up the number of food units each population eats!

• First, you could introduce variation to tile output (and this alone is enough to implement this IMHO). So, instead of a grassland plain always producing 20 food units, you could have it produce 17 Food on average, with + or - 3 units (or 14-20). In fact, you don't even have to go 10x to do this, just go 5x (anything less and variation becomes too drastic) and make that 7 Food on average, + or - 3 (or 4-10).
• Second, small bonuses can have meaning (again, on it's own merits, this is enough to implement the idea, IMHO). So go ahead and give a building with 5% or 10% bonus to output and see an effect!
• You could introduce the concept of Waste, which is food that gets thrown away until you get higher levels of technology that allow you to preserve food for longer periods of time.
• There's more, but I'm out for now...

big numbers are harder to perceive thats why civ's yields are in 1-4 range generally

Well, they don't seem afraid of decimals in Civ V, so you do see even the changes. They just seem....small!

you see decimals in totals
not as yields )

Yes, small bonuses can work in Civ5 or Civ4 even, as they both use decimals, but it's not highly visible like it would be in a 5x or 10x system. Besides, psychology has shown that higher numbers are perceived by the human mind to be better - why produce only 1 or 2 units of food when you can produce 5 or 10, or even 10 or 20 instead?

I also don't buy the 'harder to perceive' thing. Civ4 gives us a graphical solution to tell that we've gone above a certain number (grain bunch icon to bread icon). A new version of Civ could take this further. It could simply change the icons that represent food output as that increases, so for example, use a grain seed icon for 1-5 units produced, then switch to an icon of a bunch of grain stalks from 6-10, then to grain bushel icons from 11-15, then bread slices from 16-20, then bread loaf icons from 21-25, etc. You only ever need display 5 graphical icons to represent output at any time this way.

Of course, you could simply show the easiest of all things - numerical values. So it's just a matter of showing the right thing to to player to overcome those perceived limitations.

2. Drop Commerce
Producing food on a tile is a real, tangible thing - in the real world, people use land to produce food. The same goes for building materials (or Production in Civ terms) - they come from the land in various forms (clay, wood, metal, stone, etc.). Commerce on the other hand is a totally abstract concept, so it could be argued that it does not belong with these other two.

Of course, the game purpose of commerce amounts to a thing to be converted to Science and Gold output for a civilization, which a player can tweak with a slider, so those things would have to be produced by some other system if it wasn't done by commerce and without actually developing and displaying what that system is or those system are (if it took more than one), we can't say for sure if they'd be superior or even just equally fun, but for the sake of discussion, let's assume that can be managed, so even if you don't like the solutions I present below, simply replace them with something you would like. I just provide what's below as one example of how it could work without Commerce being produced by tiles.

For me, it would seem obvious and far more logical to derive Science output directly from population and civilization development rather than commerce, so that your initial output may be 1 unit of Science per population unit, which then gets increased by buildings, so that a temple may give a 20% boost, a library a 100% boost, etc. Having farms inside a city's area could give boosts when developing farm related techs, or mines could work similarly when developing mine or metal related techs. Certain techs themselves could even boost Science output throughout the entire Civilization, such as Philosophy giving a 15% boost and Literacy giving a 25% boost. Exact details to be worked out, but again, it seems a far more intuitive system that way to me than producing Commerce from the land to produce Science.

As for Gold output, I don't see why we couldn't or shouldn't reuse what I just described above, except replacing the boosting buildings with things like Banks (+25% boost), Harbors (+25% boost), etc. Again, this is far more logical and intuitive to me than Commerce being produced by the land you own and being converted to Gold (wealth). Science and Gold (wealth) are abstract concepts that come from people, not the land, so I say start from the people (population).

As for how a slider would work in this system, I'm less certain about how to handle that. It could just be a 100% boosting mechanism so that if you set it to 100% Science you get a 100% boost on Science output, but nothing on Gold. If you set the sliders to 50% Gold and 50% Science, on the other hand, you'd get a 50% boost to the output of each. There's no real correlation between the two, again, it's just 100% of boost you can apply however you like. Then again, you have such a total control over Science/Gold output already in this system I describe by directing city growth and buildings that boost output, etc., would you even need/want a slider anymore? Civ would feel weird without one, I admit.

the simplier the game's interface the better
single thing (say, hammer) is easily distinguishible from the pair (of hammers)
while comparing two hammers and three anvils with three hammers and two anvils (and maybe some other objects as you've proposed) is a whole different story. currently the game is designed the way you wont see those anvils too often, they're an exception. which can give you good feeling of the tile's exceptional productivity, and it can be motivating.
what do you propose is to make yields hardly comparable visually (moreover fluctuating from turn to turn) plaguing interface with icons of many different types... and why not to use digits in place of icons in this case? as icons self-descriptiveness will be lost anyway.

epicivfreak said:

For me, it would seem obvious and far more logical to derive Science output directly from population and civilization development rather than commerce.

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did you play civ5? i think you did not


the whole commerce, or gold thing is quite farfetched i think
IRL theres only production created by economy, no immaterial "gold" substance. markets facilitate exchange and banks choose whom to credit society's material resources, they are not creating any "gold".

killmeplease said:

the simplier the game's interface the better

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True, I can get behind that...

killmeplease said:

what do you propose is to make yields hardly comparable visually (moreover fluctuating from turn to turn) plaguing interface with icons of many different types... and why not to use digits in place of icons in this case? as icons self-descriptiveness will be lost anyway.

Click to expand...

I think you misunderstand the variation idea, or I did not explain it well enough - it's not variation turn-by-turn, but variation at game setup so that not all grassland tiles (for example) are identical. One may produce the average 7, while another produces 8, another produces 10, etc. But this does not fluctuate every turn.

As for interface, I wish I had the talent to draw it because a picture would be worth 1000 words here, but my preference would to simply be similar to showing:
x10
...directly on the tile, I just tried to offer an alternative to that if someone insisted on using icons instead of numbers.

killmeplease said:

did you play civ5? i think you did not

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I did play it, once or twice when it was a free weekend, but am primarily waiting for the Complete edition to come out before I bother with buying it. That's my plan since Civ3, only Complete editions for me from now on.

killmeplease said:

the whole commerce, or gold thing is quite farfetched i think
IRL theres only production created by economy, no immaterial "gold" substance. markets facilitate exchange and banks choose whom to credit society's material resources, they are not creating any "gold".

Click to expand...

Well, you've got to abstract wealth somehow, as even before coinage was invented you had wealth and even if people don't pull gold out of the ground from every tile, they do create wealth in every tile. That could be one argument for keeping commerce, but I prefer to start with the people, not the tile, like I said before.

epicivfreak said:

Well, you've got to abstract wealth somehow

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do you mean consumer goods?
consumer goods are 'made of' production too, that is created from raw materials by labour

I don't see any point in larger numbers for the sake of it, or range random tile yields, or waste.

(I always thought the Granary gave more food because it stored it, leaving less to go to waste.)


I assume that comes from things that are valuable in trade, while relates more to building materials.

The two overlap, but they aren't the same thing. Food, trading potential, and means of production all factor into "Wealth".

By wealth, I mean anything that one trades for the things they want, be it goods, money or services. Food in civ is specialized resources only used for food, same for production, being resources only used for building, so I always thought of commerce as "everything else".