Proposed new Mechanic: Food Slider

So a big proposal doesn't probably belong here on this forum very much, but I only post here so...

I got this since there's much talk about "population goals" and "City-sizes" never reaching historical proportions ect. ect.

Food Slider:
in mechanic, this would basically work the same as Cultural/Espionage/Technology sliders, investing percentage of the players GDP into producing extra food, at expense of the other 3.
I just thought of this, so I don't know what exact number would be good, but:

- 1+ food in all legitimate Cities for each 10% invested.

- Requires traded resources with at least 3 Civs

- City must have Granary and a Market

- Requires Currency


This seems OP at first, but when you think this is money that could go into Culture/Tech/Spies or hoarded as gold, it would mainly be for specialized situations like plagues, Cities facing besieging armies or UHV's.

To prevent abuse, and to keep City placement essential, the bonuses would only apply to Cities above size 5, scaling up in size in later eras.

Thoughts?

Honestly, I think that sounds like a bad idea. It would be limited to very specific situations that don't pop up much, and there wouldn't even be much incentive to use them then. Should we also add a production slider? In any case, I agree that there needs to be a better way to simulate population growth than just food production in the immediate vicinity, but a food slider is not the way to do it.

Locutus_Morti said:

Honestly, I think that sounds like a bad idea. It would be limited to very specific situations that don't pop up much, and there wouldn't even be much incentive to use them then. Should we also add a production slider? In any case, I agree that there needs to be a better way to simulate population growth than just food production in the immediate vicinity, but a food slider is not the way to do it.

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I think it would be cool if we could improve resources in neutral territory (commercial fishing anyone?) and ship them back home. Or a national unit with 5 or so uses that allows you to plant wheat or corn. Or maybe just give another biology type food bonus with genetics.

Maybe a Tech that adds food to Towns?

That's a good idea imo. Refrigeration perhaps.

Imo the food slider should only come in late in the game, poss with refrigeration. It would be too open to abuse early in the game, running high levels of food and culture to get loads of GPs or whip wonders very quickly due to massive populations. It's also a bit unrealistic imo - how does commerce turn into food, and why does a large population require you to sacrifice learning and money?

Perhaps a more effective way to do it would be to edit the supermarket to add one food to every tile (and possibly one food per specialist as well tho that would stack with CS). That would better represent the growth of modern cities, which is only really possible thanks to the supermarket model of bringing food from all over the world to feed massive amounts of people in one location.

If you do that, and make the supermarket cost more (I'd suggest a base of 500-600 hammers) then you could more accurately model current supercities. The idea would be that only some cities would be able to build supermarkets due to the hammer requirements, and thus you'd have some super cities with the others being normal sized. An alternative would be to make the supermarket similar to the cathedral - you can build one for every four grocers, so it can only go in a quarter of the cities.

Swarbs said:

how does commerce turn into food, and why does a large population require you to sacrifice learning and money?

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Commerce turns into food by buying food from elsewhere/paying farmers to grow more/subsidies. And, see every over-populated state ever.

How does Commerce translate to food?
It's meant to represent importation of Food, for countries like Saudi Arabia supporting populations massively outstripping any natural support.

Adding one food to every tile is dull though, would be massively OP, and harvesting 1 food-Desert/Tundra tiles wouldn't make gameplay or realistic sense.
It's all about Soren Johnsons "Interesting Decisions", sacrificing technology/culture/espionage to have bigger Cities wouldn't be abuse.
You really couldn't abuse it early game because you'd still have to deal with happiness, so you'd be putting the other half on culture and fall far behind in tech; or build a massive garrison army, have no infrastructure and probably also run out of money.

The sliders represent investing money into an area. Because you are suggesting moving a food slider in with these sliders, it means that you are suggesting that money is meant to be invested into food.

I believe that something should be done to increase population in late game, but not city size. Thee thing I support in this area is to scale the population curve by era, such that a size 16 city in Classical to Medieval would equal 1,000,000 inhabitants whereas a size 16 city in modern times may be closer to 8-10 million, the number representing all of the land the city possesses and works.

I actually like the general concept very much, as it would better represent the mechanics that led to the really huge cities throughout civilization.

How to implement it though - I am not sure. You would not necessarily want to import food for all cities, so I am not sure about the slider. Also the food has to come from somewhere, so maybe a food "market" trading surplus, like resources. I suppose this would mean micro managing each cities food exports and imports, which could be tedious to some. I also worry about the AI's ability to value the exchange rate.

Considering the main concern of the OP, that there are certain "city-size" and "population goal" difficulties, I once again bring up my previous suggestion, that regardless of any food slider, I still think is a good idea. There should be a wonder [probably national, perhaps world], that gives a certain amount of food per a certain amount of commerce that the city receives via trade. This is based entirely off of the Milanese UP from RFCE++, by the way. This wonder would help centralize a civilization's city growth around their trade hub, which actually makes sense.

I know that I'm not explaining this well enough, so I hope that someone gets an idea of what I'm talking about.

Don't certain Corporations already do this? Or am getting this wrong.

Pavel Chichikov said:

Don't certain Corporations already do this? Or am getting this wrong.

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Yeah, some indeed do, but I just feel like it'd be nice to have an earlier version to help with some pop goals, and to emulate the prowess of trade centers.

Pavel Chichikov said:

How does Commerce translate to food?
It's meant to represent importation of Food, for countries like Saudi Arabia supporting populations massively outstripping any natural support.

Click to expand...

Surely a better way to do that would be to allow food to be traded for resources or gold? Which you can already do by trading the food corporation resources. Maybe a good solution would be to scale up the effects of corporations with regards to imported resources, so imported food gives you quadruple the corporate bonus effect?

I understand the food import mechanic, but large scale food imports were impossible until refrigeration, so if you want realism then the food slider should only become feasible with refrigeration, not currency.

Pavel Chichikov said:

Adding one food to every tile is dull though, would be massively OP, and harvesting 1 food-Desert/Tundra tiles wouldn't make gameplay or realistic sense.

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It wouldn't be all that OP imo - the max bonus would be 20 food per city which is only an additional 10 population. Realistically it would reflect the spread of technologies such as hydroponics, which are already being used in countries like Saudi to grow food in the desert (http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/business/8614207.stm).

Also, if you can only build one supermarket per four grocers then you wouldn't build them in a desert city, you'd build them in existing large population centres to make them into super cities, which is in line with current population trends. If you have a food slider, then all cities will grow when you use it, which is not realistic. In most modern countries you have just a few super cities, or even only one really large city, with the regional cities still being relatively small.

Pavel Chichikov said:

It's all about Soren Johnsons "Interesting Decisions", sacrificing technology/culture/espionage to have bigger Cities wouldn't be abuse.
You really couldn't abuse it early game because you'd still have to deal with happiness, so you'd be putting the other half on culture and fall far behind in tech; or build a massive garrison army, have no infrastructure and probably also run out of money.

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I think it could and would be abused for certain civs. India, for example, as it would stack with the existing UP and make the 1200AD population target ridiculously easy - unhappiness wouldn't matter if you have a load of towns on floodplain filling the already large cities with people - run 40% food, 40% culture, 20% gold and loads of mercs and India's third UHV wins itself. Likewise with Indonesia - once you have calender happiness is no problem, and you only have the Dutch to deal with militarily. Also China, as you could use the bonus to have cities full of specialists but only working a few land tiles to get GPs unrealistically quickly. Tho' for other civs I think it would be underused - why would you choose to sacrifice technology or culture for more people, when the additional people won't actually give you any benefit?

Maybe a compromise solution would be best? Use the supermarket mechanic, but make the bonus 25% of commerce converted into food? Again, only one supermarket per four grocers so you have to choose which cities to make into mega cities?