Do away with the settler

Was going to reply to another thread, but this is too long for a reply...

I have an idea that goes along the lines of the OP.

http://forums.civfanatics.com/showthread.php?t=345938



Basically, do away with the settler. I know, I know, it is practically the core of the franchise.

Think about how population expansion happens in real life, and how it happened throughout history.

When the Oregon trail was in full swing, did we have large settler units that moved out and founded cities in strategic places? Not really. A wagon here or there, maybe even a dozen of them in some cases.

What we really had was vast numbers of unorganized people flowing out of cities and settling where they thought they could make a profitable living. Often they formed near already established trading posts, forts, etc. From which, cities began to emerge. These citizens were up in the mountains looking for gold. Mining towns emerged. They were forming religious conclaves in Utah, cities naturally emerged. They were quickly forming ports(vastly aided by government funding and organizing, which made the cities appear and grow that much faster) on the west coast that rapidly became some of the US's largest, most prosperous cities.

The same is generally true for most other civlizations. No one goes out with a flag, and says here is a city. They say, I could put a house and farm here, and other people eventually settle near them. Eventually, they go from farm, to village, and finally a city.

Vast numbers of people simply don't venture out in unison to found new cities. That is alpha centauri stuff.

Populations flow out to economically viable regions. And the cities form from the chaos so to speak.

So, how do we replicate this in Civ 5?

Basically, we make the worker into the dynamic for city building. Lets call them citizen units. They start out as normal worker/citizens but over history they can become specialists. I will discuss that later.

You start out in your capital. Lets say it starts as a level 1-3 with 2 citizen units. A city's population is all contained inside the original square and any that it expands into over time(multi-tile cities to make for metropolises and megalopolises at certain population densities later in the game). Anytime you have more than 1 population, you can spend a couple turns to push out a citizen unit which lowers the city population by 1.

This citizen unit can basically set down on a workable tile, anywhere it can walk to. When it does, that tile has an effective population of 1, or more if it turns into a village/town. However, the further it is away from your city, the less your empire benefits from it's product, be that food, resources, etc. Tech/road dependant of course. No upper range limit, but basically a scaling softcap.

So you spend the first bit of the game developing your capital and harvesting the resources near to it.

Culture doesn't limit where your citizen units can plant, but it does factor into claiming land for your citizens which is vital. It isn't a hard barrier to growth, but it will largely determine whether or not you go to war over a small piece of land. IE most civs won't war over a tile that has been in your culture for centuries, but if your citizens go outside the borders, they might be more likely to claim it for themselves or dispute it.

Ok, so you have a couple citizen units planted near your capital, either as farmers, or miners, or whatever. They learn quick and in flows their output. What about new cities?

Outside of a certain area, lets call it a soft city radius, your citizen units will try and band together to form cities once they reach a critical mass. Or, you can subsidize it with forts(major contributor to city creation in the ancient world since peasants would gather around them for trade and safety), gold, and forced immigration(throwing lots of citizens into an area makes it happen faster).

Once the area of citizens reaches a certain level of commerce or production(maybe even 1 citizen has had enough time alone to turn into a village and now wants to step up), you get an event prompt that asks you which local tile you want to place the city hall for the new city.

Bam, you have a new city that can start growing and furthering your empire. At the same time, you can have citizen units all over the place pouring resources into your empire, however inefficiently(if they are far from a city).

Further along in the game, new tech brings new citizen units. Most citizen units, given enough time on a tile, will get better and better, becoming experts giving bonuses to production of whatever they are doing on that tile(you would have lots of options on any given tile; mine, farm, raise sheep, gather lumber, etc).

New tech however, would let you produce say a miner citizen, whose sole purpose in life is to find a good hill or resource spot and gather as much as possible(more than a basic citizen unit).

You throw enough miners out into the vast wilderness and they will form a mining town(city) sooner or later. The mining town classification would be important because it would boost the production of local mines. Synergies and all that. Same for other towns that are generally focused on one industry. If you have 5 citizens working a coastal area for fish and what not you can pretty much expect the city resulting from that to provide an excellent source of seafood for your empire.

Bonus for specialization.

Once a city forms near your citizens, inefficiencies mostly go away. Now you have inefficiencies getting those products to other cities(again reduced by techs, roads, etc), but everything local is now focused by a local government.

Later in the game, you get access to corporate units that would travel great distances to exploit resources. Company towns form up around those exploited tiles.

You could even have hippy citizens all move out to an area in the wilderness and set up a special hippy commune that might form a city and provide benefits not seen with normal cities.

Engineer citizens building the Hoover damn, out materializes Boulder Colorado from all the furious construction and activity.

If you go out with your warriors and conquer some lands and place a fort(built and garrisoned by your soldiers) in some key, strategic location, then eventually(the more trade passing through the quicker) a city forms on or around that fort.

The possibilities are numerous.


Another thing this does is make those citizen improvements important, because if one gets razed now, you actually loose a population which is going to make the surrounding area unhappy.

Paths come automatically with a basic citizen unit, so if 3 citizen units are farming it up in a line from your capital, you have a worn path. Later units would come equipped with roads. They could build them too, as well as your warriors.

Cities also get a new, important role. Certain city buildings, or lets call some of them projects, are going to be key to the success of your local citizen units.

Build a granary in your city for instance. It doesn't make your city need less food to grow. What it does, is it makes your surrounding citizen units more efficient. More of the food they bring to you is kept good and dry. They make more money, you get more food. Slight commerce bonus, big food income bonus(% based up to a cap perhaps). It would also store food in case of famine or war of course.

Think about all the other improvements. Build roads in your city, and you are basically paving it''s local area. An important project that does more than add 15% hammers to your city, it adds % to every single citizen unit in the area, whatever it is they specialize in, whether that is bringing in iron, food, or what-have-you. They make more money(which you tax) and they provide more of whatever resources or services they provide.

Build entertainment in your city, and not only are you making the people happy, but you are drawing those citizen units in to spend their hard earned money.

A system like this would go a long way to making a lot of things in Civ 5 important, that were kind of under-utilized in past Civs.

You get full tile utilization in your empire(eventually). You get a more dynamic, less boring system for creating cities.

A method better suited to emulating real world economic systems than your standard "hill=2 hammer and a gold" concept. A hill really isn't worth much by itself. It is what you are doing on that hill. When you have a citizen unit go out to a tile, you will get options. Is he going to mine? Is he going to terrace farm? Raise sheep in the highlands? Build and operate a golf course? Beach resort? Observatory? Auto factory?

You can take a lot of buildings out of the city square, and have them placed all over the countryside where they belong.

You can build the great wall, 1 tile at a time.

You can have citizen units build the pyramids out in the desert where they will be viewed for the next 10,000 years as opposed to being a line on a city screen somewhere.

Take the city itself, and make it into the regional financial center they usually turn out to be. Cities form because enough people in a small enough area need a place to do business. This need gathers people and goods from all over, and things like entertainment and science start happening as a result.

Over time, articulate construction moves out city forge, and into the industrial parks around the edges, to be replaced by office towers, banks, shopping centers, etc.

One last point. This system works rather well with colonies. You drop off a few citizens, one builds a port/dock, the others feed resources into that port. Eventually a city forms in that far off land.

No city maintenance bogging down your empire, just pure gain apart from having to protect your citizens 3000 miles away.


Anyway, you probably get it by now.

Civ 4 is a good game, but 5 can be better.

That is a neat idea and would make the founding of cities more realistic. I also liked the capability of changing a citizen's occupation that is used in Colonization, and the way the city management screen was set up so you could move specialists around to make the city more productive.

Another thing that your Great Wall remark made me think of was something I attempt to do once in a while in the existing games: building a fortified line, much like the Sigfried Line in WW II. This would add the element of trench warfare to the game.

*constructive criticism* That's all very well, but, please, remember that the US has less than 250 years of history as a sovereign political entity and, let's say, Egypt, has existed -though not always as a sovereign state- for some five millennia.
Oregon trail? Hoover damn? Hah, those things are new. NEW. If you're going to represent about the whole of world history, then get other comparisons.

Takhisis said:

*constructive criticism* That's all very well, but, please, remember that the US has less than 250 years of history as a sovereign political entity and, let's say, Egypt, has existed -though not always as a sovereign state- for some five millennia.
Oregon trail? Hoover damn? Hah, those things are new. NEW. If you're going to represent about the whole of world history, then get other comparisons.

Click to expand...

True, perhaps I didn't supply enough ancient examples of how it would work. I used oregon trail because those settler wagons in Civ 1 were practicaly copied from that concept.


For an ancient example, think of the pyramids. Did a city get that Q''ed up and just work it for 50 turns?

No, thousands of slaves and settlers went out into the desert and quarries and worked on that for a long long time.

To build such a massive wonder, you would build citizen units, perhaps slave type citizen units which would be cheaper and more productive(less commerce to your empire and food requirement per turn of course) than a normal citizen at such a task, to get more of them on the project quicker. When they arrive on site, depending on the wonder, you would have them begin working components of the wonder.

If you didn't have a quarry, you would need to put some on a hill somewhere(doesn't need a stone resource, just hilly enough to access the bedrock). The further the quarry from the pyramid site, the more inefficiency in transporting it. IE less stone per turn, etc.

The other citizen units would actually build it. Lets say you would need a minimum of 1 ancient engineer citizen to start it, and up to 10 normal citizens or slave citizens that could help with the construction.

The more access to stone, and the closer the sources, combined with more citizens, would get the project done faster. Each normal citizen working on the project provides 1 hammer, each slave maybe 1.5 or 2 per unit of stone per turn.

Slaves reproduce minimally so if you start running out as they die in construction, you acquire more from other civilizations or your own people.

When you build a massive wonder, it takes up a whole city square. The bonus's that square used to provide are gone. Your civilization or local area gains the wonder bonus, and set number of commerce, resources, etc(depending on the wonder) funnel into the nearest city.

The tile bonus's are permanent as long as that wonder remains standing(they can be bombed). The tile bonus should be significant throughout the ages in at least commerce production if not other obsolete ancient bonuses.

Smaller wonders, say like Copernicus' Observatory. Perhaps make it so that you either need 1 great scientist and 1 great engineer, or maybe 10 citizen scientists and 5 citizen engineers to work the hill tile you want to place the observatory. You must have access to the trade items glass and gears(produced in a city or industrial tile improvement).

When the observatory is complete, it stays permanently on the tile and provides increased tile commerce and science output, but simply adds that to the tile's other workable factors(since the observatory is small enough to coexist). The wonder bonus might fade once you build the Hubble Space Telescope Wonder(using space engineer citizen units). The space engineer citizens would get to space using the spaceport built by rocket scientist citizens outside of a city somewhere.

You could possibly cut down on the many different citizen unit types by making the specializations a promotion that they get experience through simply by having certain techs, civics, etc.

You build a citizen unit, and he pops out with 10 experience. You promote him twice from a citizen unit to a Miner citizen, to an industrial mining citizen(or whatever). You could even mix miner and engineer together to get more production and resources from a tile instead of bonus on just one.

As citizens work tiles, they gain experience in their task. If you set a farm citizen on a hill to mine, he gets no bonus, but after enough turns he auto levels and becomes a miner, later moving into advanced mining as he continually mines that tile over the ages.

This works especially well since it makes it possible to retrain citizens, since they would be able to pack up and move somewhere else at a later date. You see this in real life when the industry in a town dries up and everyone has to move on to better places(gold rush towns, auto towns, etc).


The implications from a citizen unit powered system allows for far more flexibility and possibilities than the current settler/worker system, and it would be more realistic and dynamic at the same time.

It could sound like a lot of micromanaging added to the game, but it could all be put on auto(with more options to let you tell the auto units exactly what kind of stuff you want out of them).

I think that some specific functions could be taken away from the settlers and workers... colonies -or factories- could have some attributes, as well as harbours, and some important things like oil rigs, mines, etc. Maybe, inside the city screen, you could assign some of the external buildings (mines, oil rigs, docks, etc.) to certain tiles (you can put mines on more than one tile, of course)
Some of the terrain improvements could be done by the city, some by workers (units) and some by both. Like roads, for example. Colonies/factories and outposts/fortresses could have some separate functions as well, but no terraforming.

Okay, so in reality, cities are not generally formed by organised settling parties. But in reality, more than just cities are populated. So the whole idea of cities is flawed in the same way as that of settlers. So I don't really see a need to change settlers, unless you are also going to change cities. How do you propose to do that, to have a more realistic population distribution over tiles.

Camikaze said:

Okay, so in reality, cities are not generally formed by organised settling parties. But in reality, more than just cities are populated. So the whole idea of cities is flawed in the same way as that of settlers. So I don't really see a need to change settlers, unless you are also going to change cities. How do you propose to do that, to have a more realistic population distribution over tiles.

Click to expand...

When a citizen unit "settles" on a tile, that tile counts for 1 population(basic citizen unit).

In most cases, as a settled tile grows(turns into miner, advanced miner, advanced farmer, etc) the population stays roughly the same. However, if that citizen unit follows a different path, then it gains additional population. IE citizen unit goes from a simple farm/farming village setup to a more urban town function, it gains in population.

So the farm citizen goes from 1 pop to 2 pop when it becomes a town. As a result, you gain more commerce and production from the tile, perhaps more processed resources, and maybe even keep the original level of food production.

The nearby city isn't so much affected by a farm turning into a town, other than the extra commerce and production that gets funneled into it.

The cities will remain the centers of organized production and research. Cities will be the places where people gather to do business.

You might say that it just complicates a simplified process. Right now you go into your city, and tell the citizen which tile to work. Easy.

But with a citizen unit system, you get much much more control over land utilization and a more natural and flowing city foundation system. All of which could be automated to a simplistic level similar to Civ 4, but with the ability to really get into the land utilization telling your citizens where and how to build all the staples of civilization.


The cities in my thought process would change. Quite substantially. At the same time, they stay recognizable to the current civ genre.

Basically, a city is going to be a vast collection of population in a sea of citizen units working their farms, mines, and eventual industrial sectors. It will be where you order final production items to be built(warriors, tanks, ships, citizen units, etc). The city will still build most of the buildings(banks, markets, courthouses, barracks, etc). The population of the city would eventually outgrow the sprawl of the surrounding citizen units and become a real urban center. While for much of the ancient to medieval times your combined citizen unit worked tiles might outweigh your urban populations, eventually food production and transportation to the cities would allow them to grow into huge proportions vastly outweighing all the small farm villages, towns, etc that surround them. As cities get bigger and bigger, you would naturally get bonuses for various things like production and commerce, just for having so many people in one place. Those bonus's could be played upon and enhanced with certain improvements. Of course cities would also get the usual health and crime problems as they grow with size.

Simple bonus's for population density are something that I feel is missing from civ 4. Pollution, unhappiness, and health problems automatically go up with city growth, but you don't see any commerce boosts or production efficiency increases like you would in the real world. Anyway...

Where my system really differs from the old civ system is the vast increase in tile improvement options, the way resources are gathered and flow into cities, and of course the building/wonder like improvements(pyramids, super highway, great wall, damns, industrial parks, windmill farms, solar farms, airports, spaceports, seaports, forts, military bases, supermax prisons, sprawling universities/research organizations, supercolliders, etc, etc) that could all be built on a tile or tiles like your basic farm or mine as opposed to being chained to a city.

Also, many of the buildings/projects in the city would be catering to the citizen unit system in that it would make those outlying citizens more productive having a large city that paves all the surrounding roads, provides bigger markets to sell goods, processing of the raw ores that come in from the countryside, etc.

Do you want a city with 30 windmill farms surrounding it, providing power to your entire civilization? A nuclear plant and a dozen industrial parks? 30 farm villages to feed your vastly overpopulated cities?

Right now, when you found cities, you are worried about overlapping city zones, or having unusable tiles left between cities.

With my system that is all in the past. Every tile in your national border can be used, and it doesn't matter if there are even 2 mega cities just 3 tiles from each other because their base population isn't dependent upon the surrounding 20 squares to feed themselves or for the hammers that the tiles produce. Hills don't produce hammers, citizens do. 10 citizens working in a city square produce 10 citizens worth of hammers. What they need from the countryside is resources, and they would use their inherent hammers to turn those resources into final products.

If you build a factory in the city, it doesn't multiply the hammers coming from the hills. It would multiply the hammers that each individual population in that city can produce. Those citizens then turn the raw resources coming into the city into the final product(a warrior, a building, commerce goods that return handsome profits).

Industrial parks in the surrounding tiles would provide refined resources which the city would combine to create end products. The more industrial parks, the quicker the final assembly in the city itself since they have to do less of the bottom up grunt work turning iron into intermediate parts.

Industrial and economic infrastructure becomes much more important with a citizen unit system.

In civ 4, all cities are essentially the same. Each has 1 factory, 1 forge, 1 bank, 1 power plant, 1 etc.

In Civ 5, cities need to reflect the real world. Think about Detroit, Pittsburgh, Silicon Valley, New York City, or Miami.

Are any of those cities the same? One is/was an auto/industrial capital of the world, one was a steel making, coal mining mecca, one is a high tech center that leads the world in innovation, one is a gargantuan world leading financial center, and the last is a first class tourist paradise.

These cities have similar qualities. They all need lots of food. They all have or had high populations. They all have pieces of what the others possess. Yet none are the same.

The ancient world obviously doesn't have the same quality of differentiation that we have today. But they grew into what we are today. Through war and commerce, technology and population growth; we evolved into this state.

I believe that citizen units and all the options available, combined with realistic trade and resource systems, would go a long way to making Civ 5 like the real world, in a very enjoyable way.

This just came to mind while in the civ 5 discussion thread.

Citizen Ships.

They would basically manage fisheries and the like for those ocean resources.

Later in the game, they would be out whaling, fishing in spots further and further out in the ocean.

Near the end of the game, they would begin to make oil rigs, and eventually industrial mining centers on the ocean floor(which could be very profitable).

Also, Citizen research ships. They would work interesting ocean tiles for boosted science output.

Citizen units could open up vast stretches of ocean to exploitation in addition to the areas between cities.

I like the basic idea, though it might be too complicated.

Maybe add in a new genre of "Expansion" civic? (Nomadic, Tribal territories, Feudalism etc...) for new areas to be opened up?

However, I'm afraid I have to burst your bubble just a little bit. In fact, many, many cities have been founded in history precisely as they are in civ, as pre-meditated colonies, designed from bottom up.

Here's a short list of some I can think of, just off hand:

London
Newcastle
New York
Boston
Quebec
Toronto
Sydney
Brasillia
Sao Paulo
Alexandria
Warsaw
Vancouver
Hong Kong
Helsinki
Madrid

The list goes on and on.....

Fact is, there are many ways for a city to be formed. The biggest problem is that remaking city formation would mean rethinking how cities accessed resources, as access to the best fat-Ts is a key part of civ strategy.

You could perhaps have a blended system, with colonies established, as before, but also the possibility of subject tribes/ outlying areas forming cities either under the player's control, or breaking away and needing to be reconquored (think Germany or Turkey or even Canada and the USA.) Here, the player might have a system like the advanced-start option, where they get to place the city somewhere within a designated area, as rulers often designate which small settlement will become the main city for a region.

Lords of the Realm II had a neat interface, where instead of cities you had "counties" (which could just as easily be states, provinces or regions) which had a capital county town, had citizens who worked resources within it and could be improved. Perhaps a system like this could be adapted to Civ, with areas with high populations offering different options to expand.

Just a thought.

I like this Idea, it is very holistic

PS "Silicon Valley" is not a city, "San Jose" would be a better fit it is basically the capital of the region (it has 1.5 Million people!)

I thought citizens working tiles meant that the people were living in those tiles. Anyway, your proposal seems like unnecessary complication. I'm content with the Settlers being a representation for the inflow of citizens into a tile (considering that each turn isn't always like 1 year. Modern era, sure, but most cities built in the modern era are planned cities anyway.), and Specialists being citizens actually living in a city.

Le1bn1z said:

I like the basic idea, though it might be too complicated.

Maybe add in a new genre of "Expansion" civic? (Nomadic, Tribal territories, Feudalism etc...) for new areas to be opened up?

However, I'm afraid I have to burst your bubble just a little bit. In fact, many, many cities have been founded in history precisely as they are in civ, as pre-meditated colonies, designed from bottom up.

Here's a short list of some I can think of, just off hand:

London
Newcastle
New York
Boston
Quebec
Toronto
Sydney
Brasillia
Sao Paulo
Alexandria
Warsaw
Vancouver
Hong Kong
Helsinki
Madrid

The list goes on and on.....

Fact is, there are many ways for a city to be formed. The biggest problem is that remaking city formation would mean rethinking how cities accessed resources, as access to the best fat-Ts is a key part of civ strategy.

You could perhaps have a blended system, with colonies established, as before, but also the possibility of subject tribes/ outlying areas forming cities either under the player's control, or breaking away and needing to be reconquored (think Germany or Turkey or even Canada and the USA.) Here, the player might have a system like the advanced-start option, where they get to place the city somewhere within a designated area, as rulers often designate which small settlement will become the main city for a region.

Lords of the Realm II had a neat interface, where instead of cities you had "counties" (which could just as easily be states, provinces or regions) which had a capital county town, had citizens who worked resources within it and could be improved. Perhaps a system like this could be adapted to Civ, with areas with high populations offering different options to expand.

Just a thought.

Click to expand...

If you look at my examples it would still be the same.

Having citizen units instead of settlers doesn't take away government planning, and pre-planned city constructions.

It simply makes it more natural. Obviously if you subsidize construction of a city then it will happen in a planned and more rushed fashion.

I provided a few examples of how you would spur city formation along by pouring more citizen units into the area.

In the case of colonization, if you drop 3 citizen units off a boat onto the shores of America, and they settle 2 little farms and a port on the coast, then basically Boston is formed.

Also, as time goes on and more tech is developed, you would gain more and more ability to actually found new cities.

Also, I mentioned the formation of cities around forts which was a big part of the ancient world. Armies conquering vast stretches of land or maintaining those conquests would leave forts behind some of which sprouted as cities as a result of trade and business.

Anyway, the ability for the citizen units to change the game into a more organic system based on population rather than cities would be a good change for the genre.

If someone comes in and burns a farm, you loose more than 5 turns of work, you loose citizens which is how it should be.

And some ideas from civ3 could be reintroduced via your system to civ5,like the radar tower put up on a hill to get line of sight 2 spaces,advanced airfields. Another consideration are wonders.Built via ur system on a tile give ur tile bonuses (money,shields,power etc)+regular wonderbonuses,but the wonder could be bombed\defended by SAMs or u could build it as usual inside a city and get cityprotection and the normal wonder bonuses,but no extra tilebonus. Also add strategic bombing from civ3,like taking out roads please! This idea from decimatus looks and feels like a more organic civ 5 than other civs :=)

I dunno... realism is good and all, but if something doesn't add to the _fun_ of the game it doesn't have a chance of being added in. I personally think that is a good idea, because I don't want to focus on the minutia of empire-building, just the fun parts. I see a lot of good ideas in this thread for increasing realism, but I'm not sure I see the angle where it would add to the fun of playing the game. Besides, Firaxis has a handful of competitors that _do_ strive for a much more realistic approach, and I would venture a guess that they've decided that their franchise will position itself on the fun-loving side rather than the realism-loving side of the 4X audience.

That kind of got me to envision removing "settling" entirely. Just imagine your capital city is like the throne-room of Civs past; it's grandioseness is dependent on how good of a civ-architect you are. But essentially, you may have a slider that is for providing incentives for people to settle nearby land. People then go out of their own accord and just start settling the land, expanding further and further. You could think of it as culture spread, but it will spread much further than a few tiles from your city. It would probably spread rapidly along coasts and rivers and slowly or not at all through deserts and ice.

You'd wind up with very organic-looking borders.

When you've settled an area that's ideal for population to start massing, then it does. It forms a city and your expansion now grows from there too.

At some point, you've got to be able to specify lands to be settled. Think of QE sending out Raleigh to claim vast tracts of NorAm, setting up trading posts and shipping out colonists.

It's just off the top of my head, so no in-depth exploration of the concept was done.

A major problem I can see with that is the computer's inability to choose suitable locations for founding cities (as seen by misleading blue circles), or the computer's inability to adjust to what you are aiming for (are you settling to maximise territory, to block someone, to get a production centre, to have a GP farm, etc.).

Decimatus said:

Think about how population expansion happens in real life, and how it happened throughout history.

When the Oregon trail was in full swing, did we have large settler units that moved out and founded cities in strategic places? Not really. A wagon here or there, maybe even a dozen of them in some cases.

What we really had was vast numbers of unorganized people flowing out of cities and settling where they thought they could make a profitable living.

Click to expand...

That's the Oregon Trail ... not throughout history.

There are lots of examples of the kind of situation you're talking about, and you're right, it isn't really represented in the game (unless you consider that the settler unit *is* these people).

But, it's definately not always how it happened. Look at the colonization of the Americas to begin with: it wasn't private citizens getting on a boat and hopping over to settle wherever they may at first. Instead, you had companies or individuals who were commissioned or sponsored by kings to set up colonies in specific locations, and they gathered a bunch of settlers and settled them all in one spot according to plan.

Even during westward expansion, many of the new towns were "corporations" (had a different meaning at the time) and had been planned and chartered by government (sometimes at the behest of plutocrats).

Outside of the US, there are of course loads of examples of organic settlement. But planned settlement was not rare, either. Many major European cities are situated over the site of Roman colonial settlements, which were meticulously planned and organized. Ancient China shared much the same practice.

A system that ignores organic settlement can be abstracted. The player does move the settler and choose where he goes; but, he might have the Free Market civic and yet move a Great Merchant and choose where he founds a trade route as well. So the settler unit could be seen as actually being organic. The player in civ might not be just the state; he might be the civilization itself.

But a system that ignores planned settlement, cannot really be abstracted to somehow include planned settlement. The player has no control and no capability to plan settlements.

So, a system that features uncontrolled, organic settlement is fine, but it could not replace the settler unit. It would have to exist alongside planned settlement.

I'm not convinced. Settlers are here to stay... forever!

Oh dear, what have we done?

Takhisis said:

Oh dear, what have we done?

Click to expand...

Um, what have we done anyway?