Population meaning and adjusting

I think the value of the city and workers should have signifigant meaning. This would ofcourse mean more of an exponetial growth... BUt that would make sence for a few reasons.

ACtually it shouldn't just be the city values and settlers and workers. ALL units should have some population figure. So that way your units (even the basic warrior) is not just a warrior.. But rather a heard of warriors.

In effect all units being built should take some sort of population from the city. Depending on what type of unit they are more or less would be removed and put towards the unit.

Military could then have varying sizes of units. Small units could be built quickly but would like power and deffence. But they could have an added bonus of moving slightly faster (a group can only move as fast as the slowest.. SO if the numbers are high most likely there are some slower guys with the group).

As the ages cahnge these numbers should significantly grow. In early times it was maybe conceivable to send one or two families to start a new colony... But in later ages people travelled in bigger groups with to have people with speacial skills and such.

This change would force people to consider sizes of army units carefully but not to sigificantly. The biggest change would be interaction between civs of different ages. Capturing a worker of a civ in the Industrial Ages while you are still in the Middle ages would add a bigger amount of population.

But I think it would just be interesting to have a more meaninful value on our cities

yeah, this way you could impliment smooth functions for population growth, like the logistics equation where (the change in population with respect to time)=(A*population-B*population^2) and have things like aqueducts, grainaries, hospitals jungle and flood plains just modify the values of A and B, of course they'd also depend on excess food, and a few other things.
you can avoid a lot of nonsensical results you get in the game.

I have long been considering this in my UET thread--the basic idea that every unit must be physically accountable on the map, and therefore require population to build (The UET link is in my signature).

Having various sizes for the units, however, could entail heavy micromanagement. An alternate solution would be to assume 1 "population point" to be a variable amount corresponding to a reasonable number for a particular period, as opposed to defining a population point to be a specific number of people.

I have long been an advocate of a revamped population and population growth model-one removed from the overly abstract 'pop-head' and surplus food model-though I am still at a loss as to how realistically populations and population growth should be modelled. For me, the real problems with pop-heads did not arise until units could start costing population points, and bombardment and plague could kill population. Then this abstractness seemed a major liability (after all, even a whole battery of artillery could not eliminate an entire population point of a size 12 city, for instance, but they ought to be able to kill SOME of that population point-you see the problem.) The same goes for unit costs. A unit built in a size 2 city has a much 'smaller' population cost than a similar one built in a size 16 city, for instance!
Anyway, hope they find a good way to change this!

Yours,
Aussie_Lurker.