City/Production Paradigm Shift

What I am proposing is definitely too much of a paradigm shift for Civ 4. It may even be too much of a shift for Civ 5. Besides that warning, I am also avoiding too many specifics to see what problems with the idea exists.

This thread really has two seperate ideas that would really compliment each other. The first is the more important one.

New Production Concept

The current civ production model is Tile->City->Improvement/Unit/Wonder. It leaves no room for non-macro products(such as small commercial and industrial products). This also means the current civ trade generate is Tile->City->Trade.

I am proposing this variation of those chains. Raw Materials->Production Center->Products->Trade. Raw Materials come from tiles, but those tiles do not automatically produce x-shields. Production Centers could be defined as cities now or as the variation I will later propose. Products are the outcome of raw materials to production centers. They include the units and improvements we know and love. They also include ordinary mundane refined materials, industrial supplies, and commerical wares. Trade and trade arrows are now found by selling these products to someone. Tiles no longer inherently produce trade arrows, they must do something useful with the raw materials to generate the trade.

This new chain does not limit itself to just shields. Food is a raw material as well. In many cases the square that produced the excess food(Raw Material) is often the production center as well. The product is food ready to ship out. Its a wierd extrapolation, but means that trading and delivering food is as healthy an industry as any other.

Now the value of roads and infrastructure is when they allow better transportation of goods and services. This also opens up whatever level of complexity, as any part of the chain can be modified without reworking the entire game.

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My next theory post will be about modifying what defines the production center. This model still works with city squares as the production center, but my idea will suggest a new definition.

This is one of my favorite concepts in Civ to contemplate how it could be improved, so I’m glad you’re digging into it. So far, I'm having a hard time picturing exactly what you mean by your proposal here. Will you elaborate in more specific terms or examples how this system would work?

I’m not sure if it’s similar to what you are saying yet, but I picture an environment in which all tiles have some sort of potential resources or commercial value (just as they generate some amount of food or shields now). But these would instead be much more varied. For starters, most terrain but mountains would yield a variety of different food possibilities both in terms of wildlife and farming. Farming of cattle should be possible too to provide a little less food (Cows eat ten times their weight in grain to make beef). but beef is much more profitable.

Hill tiles when searched or examined might yield any or even more than one kind of metal, precious gem, coal, ores, or other resources. This might be enabled by surveyors or simply automatically as your city and culture increases in technology and population. Or maybe you’d have to put a worker to work on again, say a hill, to begin to utilize whatever resources might be found there...like building a mine, but not really altering the landscape with a big ugly blob of a mine...maybe it would appear more like building a tiny infrastructure or outpost or village on a tile, or a farm community on plains and grassland.

Hills could also be used to grow vineyards or create terraced farming perhaps. In actuality, it seems to me that many tiles should be able to yield food and production resources at the same time, which basically the current system under Civ III does (a forest tile yields one food and two shields - lumber and wildlife I suppose). Seas are full of life as well as some various resources like oil to be harvested or processed. I like the picture of building in a city various more specific kinds of processing facilities depending on resources to process (to increase production as well as commerce ultimately). Mills for grain and lumber, blacksmiths, factories, coal plants, smelters, granaries for farm areas, or whatever. Not the same darn things in every town and city everywhere...that is one thing I find very boring about the current setup. Cities really have no diversity or personality internally. They all need the same stuff for the most part in the long run.

I'm still not sure exactly how to translate resources in tiles into shields of production in a non-direct way yet. How are you suggesting it would happen? I know I don't like the generic, one hill can yield from one to three shields and all my hills everywhere wind up with silly ugly mines. Once you run a road to a tile, you should have access in some degree to whatever resources it contains, and most, if not all, should yield something, even if just granite or marble in a hill or mountain, or like I said, could be used as terraced farmland. To really gain production though, facilities would need to be developed in towns or nearby towns on the tiles themselves and connected by roads to the town.

So then, the question is, how to determine exactly at what rate each town or city is able to build things? Population is obviously the first determinant representing possible available workforce. Someone take it from here?

Imagine that hill X produces 2 units of Marble, 1 units of Shale.
These are the raw materials which are shipped to an urban center at Kufhu.
Khufu processes the materials, thus making Khufu the production center. Various industries in Khufu turn the Marble into Statues and the Shale into Tools. Thuse Statues and Tools are products. At this point a few useful things have already happened. First, the tiles the raw materials were from become more desirable and that increases growth there. Second, your industries in Khufu are supplied and viable, increasing desirability there. Finally, the products are sold to locals or other urban or trade centers. The latter provides more trade arrows, whether it be a commerical or industrial(shields) product.

A few notes about this process. First, you did not need to know what particular raw materials or products where in use. You will really only know how much or less shields/trade was produced. It would be possible for the curioius player to find out the rest, but this knowledge could nto be used to MM.

Also, there was actually multiple chains within the original. Here would be a full chain using the prior example.

This is the shields example:
Raw Material(Shale in ground)->Production Center(people in hills)->Products(industrial Shale)->Trade(industrial Shale shipped to Khufu)->Production Center(Khufu workshops)->Products(Tools)->Trade(Tools sold to factory)->Production Center(Khufu factory)->Product(shields)

This is the trade example:
Raw Material(Shale in ground)->Production Center(people in hills)->Products(industrial Shale)->Trade(industrial Shale shipped to Khufu)->Production Center(Khufu workshops)->Products(Tools)->Trade(Tools sold to factory in Memphis)

How is this really different from the present representation of shields on the map? I always envisioned that those shields on the city screen were representations of what you describe. i.e. mining marble at this local means a given # of shields/production in the city and the gold per tile indicates it's trade worth to the city. I'm not sure what you are getting at. Could you explain the difference?

EXCELLENT!

I see so many UET II fundamental concepts of true trade and commerce in here, only implemented somewhat differently, that I would take this version just as much as I would take my own.

I would also like to mention that this "production chain" method does remind me of the game 1602 A.D., and that held a lot of possibilities for in-depth economics (except that it had too much micromanagement). Since this system's actions would largely be automated if implemented, this could potentially be the most dynamic game economic system yet.

Trust me, Sir_Schwick, I have consider very much the same model as the one you are proposing, but what kept pulling me up short was ultimately the amount of detail involved. As much as I DEFINITELY think the shield/food system needs improvement, I think the units for them are neccessarily abstract. What could happen, though, is that WHERE a city gets its shields (or food) from could be valuable for intra and inter national trade. So, for instance, shields from a hill could represent Marble, Shale and the like, wheras shields from a forest would likely represent timber and forest products. The importance of this could be in trading them to a city or nation which lacks THAT specific resource. So a city at an edge of a desert will pay a premium for shields which originated from a forest!
Anyway, though, REALLY good ideas Sir_Schwick-just not sure if they are appropriate for the Civ genre!

Yours,
Aussie_Lurker.

Now that I see people like the system, I will explain where the big paradigm shift is. In previous Civ games it seemed like there was nobody besides barbarians outside cities. The level of urbanization(100%) throughout Civ history is just astounding. Of course I can accept the abstraction that rural areas are the tiles worked outside the city square by citizens. However the city radius is at maximum twenty-one squares. THis also means that locations terrible for transportation of materials often make the highest industry settings, while the big cities are in the middle of farm country. Also, people have complained about how growth of cities is only defined by food. Having combined all these complaints, my system will change how all that is thought of, so do not expect a lucid deposition.

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Here are some building blocks to explain the shift.

A.
Use the theory that in clasic Civ all products, whether they be trade or shields, come about through the process:

Tile Trade(worked by Citizen)->City->Trade Arrows
Tile Shields(worked by Citizen)->City->Shields
Tile Food->City->Population

The new production concept combines all three:

Raw Material(food, mineral, or other)->Production Center(varies)->Products(shields, products, food)->Trade(local, non-local)

B.
All civ maps look rather barren except for the hotspots of cities. We assume the rural areas are not shown and are worked by city citizens. However with a better graphics engine and better computers, lets drop the abstraction and have people actually living in the countryside.

Also, lets lose the free city square. It is a concept that overpowers ICS and is just not intuitive. Instead, in order for a tile to be collecting Raw Materials, it must be inhabited and is worked by the citizen inhabiting it. Any citizens past the first in a tile are taking urban jobs(more detail to come). THis means they are not collecting things from the land but are still using them.

Thus urban centers are defined as tiles with more than one citizen in them. Also, cities are defined as a collection of any urban centers adjacent to each other. Late game cities could take up a dozen or more tiles and have lots of sprawl. EArly cities would probably be two to three squares in size.

A. + B.
All inhabited tiles have raw materials which are locally processed into essentially a useable form of that raw material. Subsistence food is always sold locally, while the rest is sold to a city if possible. Other products are always sold to a city if possible.

So, the raw material that comes into a city is already generating trade. Then it is again a raw material for the cities consumption. Often food is eaten, and other products are traded locally or externally, generating more trade. Based upon transportation tech, especially for food, you can feed cities nowhere near good farming terrain or on crossroads with food from vast plains.

Remmeber, this process will be automatic, although you will be able to adjust the excess food a city tries to buy(to somewhat affect growth).

C.

Growth is another topic that does deserve attention. Food would now only be a limiting rather than determing factor of growth. THe excess food a city gets determines it growth limit. Rural areas also have the same food idea, especially with one food areas.

The main way that cities would grow would be through immigration. Citizens come to cities for a few reasons, of which these are experimental. The first would be jobs generated by buildings. More buildings means more room for citizens to work outside the field. Secondly it would be more desirable if you have active industries that need to be worked. If a lot of products are processed there, it means there are jobs. Thirdly, a high culture naturally will attract some people. Fourth, excess food is attractive.

When cities do not look nice, desirable rural areas might gain an extra citizne(urbanizing it) or immigrate to lightly inhabited squares.

Growth in cities due to births would be greater than rural areas, but much less a factor than immigration. Birth population increase is based upon those demographics we always ignore(disease, sanitation, literacy, etc.). Of course those would need to be reworked.

Remember, this system will definitely be simplified and cleaned up, just tossing out ideas.

D.

Roads/highways/etc. would now be for the purpose designed, to facilitate easier transportation. They would not by themselves provide any bonuses. However, if products that formally would not have been sold externally now can be because of a highway, the highway gained you trade or shields you did not have before. Harbours are the same way.

Here are some specifics on travelling effectiveness of products, very basic. If a tile has a 'local road' system it can send products to any adjacent tiles. These roads only decrease movement cost to 1 MP for all tiles they are on. This local road system is automatic in cities for the first couple squares and can be built in rural areas fairly easily(simply paint a 'local road' flag on the tile and they concentrate on that for a few turns). Also, local roads allow the tile to use any more advanced transportation mediums avaliable in adjacent squares as though it started in the home square.

Major roads, built by workers, would allow the products to travel how many squares woudl be good(2 to three works).

Other road types and such, as well as tech, would increase the product reaching capability. Now it would not be necessary to road or RR every square, just enough so all your tiles were adjacent to one. Cleans up the map a little.

E.

Settlers would still be very important. Firstly, they would allow you to start urban centers in areas that would not have one for a while. They also create an island of your culture to possibly spread out in 'barbarian' land.

F.

Culture would help increase immigration into your cities as well as your farmland. Also, each tile would store the various cultures that influence it. When the tile increased in cultural influence, it would start sending out additional cultural influence in whatever culture-spreading method is agreed upon(another thread). Immigration will occur with people not of your culture, but a strong culture will usually lead to faster assimilation.

That is all for now. Sure I forgot something.

Hey Sir Schwickiness. This is my favorite topic/concept to ponder and play with, so I'm glad to see your fascinating ideas for a new paradigm. A number of your ideas are ones I am thinking about and like too. I have been constructing some paradigm shifts for production and resources and food, etc. and will start yet another thread on that topic merely because they are lengthy and I'm going to post a series of parts to get them in without clogging up an already ongoing thread. I love the immigration idea and populating land between cities and I am right on board with your ideas for what causes cities to grow, adding in terrain and climate considerations as well.

I'm not quite sure I grasp your rural population concept yet, but an idea I was picturing which you may have happened upon elsewhere is the idea of different kinds of communities or settlements. You might have some little farm communities in some places but not a big city. You might have a fishing village on a coast. Fortresses and colonies around highways and resources might represent small population centers of kinds with different properties than cities.

Whichever way, I know I want to see greater diversity in population centers and more minor population indications in farmlands and wilderlands between cities.

I particularly liked the power point presentation from Soren Johnson, he obviously has his head screwed on. Liked the description of Civ fans as an "enormous, rabid fan base" .
I can’t believe I’m this worked up and its still SO far away!!!

oops I posted that in the wrong forum, i have no idea how i did that.....

Actually I meant for most cvilized tiles to be populated by one person(rural) and a few cities in the middle fo these seas of lightly inhabited areas. MOst of the food and raw material would come from these areas, since citizens inside cities do not produce raw materials, they process them.

Urbanization would be a process because agriculture and raw material collection becomes more efficient.

I meant the immigration factor so cities along good transportation routes would grow, because of jobs.

Synergy, make sure you put a link to your new thread here.

Hey Sir Schwick -- this is some tremendous work. To me, the key would be creating a smooth, largely automated interface that would prevent the user from getting overloaded with micromanagement. New population would access additional raw materials from nearby tiles, and would process them according to needs and abilities. It would be up to you to make some of the larger demands, like a new Temple, or to mobilize production for war.

Then you need a way to simplify the sheer number of raw materials that could possibly exist in the game. Civ 3 has several, but not nearly enough for this model. We also don't want to add too much, no?

Cities would still be accessed the old way.
Workers would be improvements that extend beyond local tile use.
Local improvements would just be painted on squares(using a flag tool) and local citizens would do that for a few turns.
You woudl still have just raw materials and products represented as two or three items. What and how they got there are not important to the player. A player can find out if they want, but do not need that knowledge to be effective. Using that level of economic automation, you could have a few or hundreds of potential products. ALso, as the game moves on, more and more products would become raw materials for a second, third, or even fourth iteration of teh cycle. Imagine Iron Ore is turned to Iron is turned to Stell is turned to Building Steel or a few other products. All these could happen in different cities and possibly nations, generating tons of trade.

Hi again,

Here is a link, as requested, to the detailed ideas I was putting together about new modeling for production, food, and resources.

http://forums.civfanatics.com/showthread.php?t=109538

What I wound up putting together here is similar in growth modeling and includes immigration, and also includes more resources, as well as in making roads more for transportation and less for maximizing all tiles. This is especially true for railroads. Eventual city range would extend a lot further than 21 tiles, making all tiles within your nation accessible for use in time. Visually at least, terrain will be more diversely put to use than mining and irrigating, though I didn't really address rural population in the inventive way Schwick here has, and which is intriguing.

Note, I wrote four long segments in my post about different parts of a new game model relating to these topics. I'm a bit surprised and chagrined myself how detailed they became, but I was having fun, so sue me. I do hope our Civ 4 devlopers are considering revamping the basic food/shield/growth model and not assuming that is perfected and sacred territory in Civilization at this point.

Sir Schwick, I think the idea of certain resources being replaced by others is very valuable. The idea that we can take iron "for granted" these days, but steel is absolutely vital, I think that can keep the number of resources managable at any given time.

@sir_schwick. Just a brainstorm for your thoughts. I couldn’t cut your quotes as the board logs me out when I take too long to get my ideas together. So pardon the coherent ness of the whole thing. I tried to do each in order.

A
How do you determine what the city produces as a whole? In civ terms a city currently produces one thing at a time. Even if you allow for multi track production how do you decide what is produced where?
B
If each tile is worked by a citizen that lives on that tile, does this mean that if a raider invades that tile that tile’s population is killed off? Robbed maybe?
How do you specify what square becomes the “urban” one?
A&B
”Remmeber, this process will be automatic, although you will be able to adjust the excess food a city tries to buy(to somewhat affect growth).”

Would this go for each tile in the city or the city as a whole? If as a whole how does it get divided up between tiles?
C
”The main way that cities would grow would be through immigration”

This was not true to a great degree in ancient and medieval times.
D Good idea
E does this mean that tiles could be “pre-inhabited” and are just waiting for your culture to settle nearby?
Later post:
”I meant the immigration factor so cities along good transportation routes would grow, because of jobs.”

Good idea. I think that this would be because food could not be transported to the city either. Then this idea works for the Ancient & Middle ages as well.

To answer the A through A+B questions.

Urban center is a term for any square with two or greater pop points in it. Cities are a collection of adjacent urban centers(or a group of connected ones in megalopolises. Suppose three urban centers were next to each other. They would be one city, lets call New York. New York would be like a classic civ city, except it has some sprawl. Clicking anywhere in the urban centers brings up the New YOrk city screen. Cities only produce one major project, this includes improvements/units/wonders. While multi-tracking might be a future option, for this model each city is assumed to have one major task at any moment. Since a city is a single entity, you just adjust the excess food right next to the current food counter. Raiders could kill or at least disrupt normal industry, effectively cutting that square out of the loop.

Answer to C.

I am not sure whether you are right or not. If you are, then I do not have a good answer except that it does not make sense cities grow faster in ancient than modern times. Something to consider, yes.

To D.

Thank you. I am hoping this cleans up the ugly rail road plight that strikes civ games.

To E.

Yes, that would be central to the rural idea. There would be plenty of simple tribes of farmers or hamlets even in a very modern world. A lot of yoru poeple will not come from the original stock at 4000 BC. Culture would be important to making their assimilation peaceful rather than violent.

"except that it does not make sense cities grow faster in ancient than modern times"

you're ignoring two things there, the turns earlier in teh game are up to 50X late game turns for length, and if you go back enough you can't grow by immigration, there's noone else to move in, there aren't enough people for you to grow by immigration.

Aussie_Lurker said:

for instance, shields from a hill could represent Marble, Shale and the like, wheras shields from a forest would likely represent timber and forest products. The importance of this could be in trading them to a city or nation which lacks THAT specific resource. So a city at an edge of a desert will pay a premium for shields which originated from a forest!
Anyway, though, REALLY good ideas Sir_Schwick-just not sure if they are appropriate for the Civ genre!

Click to expand...

but how is that any different from say introducing two new strategic resources: hardwood and stone, and maybe quantifying resources (Iron 425) insted of the current system (Iron)

have any of you ever played "deadlock"? overall it wasn't a great game, but it did get this part of the economics right, in some ways it was similar to that "stronghold" game but I played much more of it than "stronghold" (stronghold was realtime and much more micro in it's management, the number of steps involved in making troops just got stupid sometimes).

This is what i remember of deadlock.

anyway within a sector, that game's equavalent of a city & it's surrondings, you have something like 10X10 tiles the sector has an overall terrain type, and eachtile has it's own = sector terrain mostly. Every tile had a value for the 4 raw materials, depending on sector and tile terrain types. The 4 raw materials are food, wood, iron, iridium.

you build all the buildings on tiles in the sector, including housing. Every building has a worker capacity, and the worker hours can be divided up between different things, more on that later. buildings do nothing just sitting there, you need poeple inside them working

Resource collection buildings harvest at a rate proportional to manpower and the quality of the terrain for what they're harvesting.

farms can harvest food or wood. mines can harvest iron, and with apropriate tech, iridium. but like i said worker hours are divided with a little slider between options. All buildings have, when available, upgrading the building as one of the slider options. factories divide work between unit production, converting iron to steel and converting iridium to endurium. Universities make research or elecrtonics. Power plants produce energy or antimatter pods. housing produces more people. Meuseums produce 'Art objects'.
in a sense research and labour are resources also just ones that you aren't allowed to stockpile.

all units & buildings take a number of man hours labour & some resources. 1 steel or 1 iridium can replace 5 iron, 1 endurium can replace 10 iron.
resources are always automatically moved around to where they're needed.

ideally aou could automate this on at least the sector level and set the weight values for different resources, or ideal ratios to maximise.

Anyway, it's a game to try out if you're thinking about these things. play it some, see what you think. try stronghold too.
I think even going this complex though would reduce the fanbase some, that's something they're definatly trying to avoid.

i think with all the economics threads floating around this deserves it's own, as an example of games that have tried more detailed economic systyems

oups
double post