I do know & understand improvements cumulative effect, but when you have scribe +25% science, school +25%, library +25%, university +25%, National University +50% and all these available within a single era - it becomes unclear.
So I tried to focus an attention on the differentiation of the functions & avoid empty doubling of the same functionality improvements, that's all.
The "more" doesn't always mean "better".
Point taken. I'm already trying to plan out the improvements for the remaining eras to make sure that they are evenly distributed and unique. There are some apparent duplicates, but many of them go obsolete or have special requirements. I'll post a list of those later on.
Now, about
populations. I've always wanted to make all units require population. I also wanted to raise food consumption to make irrigation and resources more important. Those rules are competing against each other to prevent your cities from growing. I may have found a good balance though.
First, I made all buildable units require 1 population point. Settlers stay at 2, since I recently read that the AI assumes that and will try to build a Settler in a size 3 city even if it won't grow. That reduces the net growth rate of your cities. I also made most offense units enslave Slaves (workers) which can join cities. So when you win battles, you're effectively converting some of the enemy population to your own.
Then, I upped food consumption to 3 per citizen and raised the food output of most terrain accordingly. Here are the new stats for food output:
Code:
TERR Base W/ Irrigation
Desert 0 2
Plains 1 3
Grassland 3 5
Tundra 1 2
Fl plain 4 6
Hills 2
Forest 2
Jungle 1
Marsh 1
Coast 2
Sea 1
The interesting thing here is that when you combine this with the Standard Tile Penalty, undeveloped grassland no longer supports a whole unit of population (nor do irrigated desert and tundra, making those regions essentially non-viable). This not only makes city placement vital, but also makes early irrigation even in fertile regions. On the other hand, the fact that growing cities now tend to have a larger surplus than before helps to offset the effect of building units.
Finally, I upped the population cap for cities to 8 for level 1 and 16 for level 2 to allow a larger population buffer for building units.*
Now, this is a sweeping set of changes that upsets the whole growth dynamic of the game. I wasn't sure if the AI could handle it, but I just made a quick test run through the first 50 turns and it seems to be coping with the changes fairly well. Almost all of the civs I've encountered on this crowded map have at least 2 cities, and I'm actually falling behind militarily.
It is certainly possible however to start in a location (such as plains with no accessible fresh water) that will not allow you to grow to size 3 and build a settler, which seems to have happened to one civ in this game. I may have to provide a pair of settlers at the start to avoid this, which nicely offsets the fact that you won't be able to build any more for a little while.
*I'm considering raising the latter to 21, so that you can fully utilize the adjacent tiles with a level 1 city and the "fat X" with a level 2. Several "big" late-game improvements require the Sanitation System (Hospital replacement) to limit them to large cities, so there is still an incentive to build it even if you're not in a location to support a population that high. Although, I haven't done the math on this, but the new food numbers may actually make metros more common in the temperate regions, once railroads and bonus resources are factored in.
