Advanced Population Mechanics

[Joij21]

Probably not possible to implement and might require a DLL however I feel compelled to explain anyway. This is something I've had on my mind for a while but the current way population grows in Civ4 is not how populations would historically grow. Populations usually don't grow in perfect synch with the amount of food that is available. Often the amount of people would easily outstrip the current technological capacity to produce food in a civilization. And for several reasons. People don't necessarily plan families based on the availability of food. Secondly throughout history contraceptive methods weren't always effective. Also certain cultures believe in having lots of children either for religious reasons, protecting one's posterity, or to have more family labor for things such as farm work. Throughout history the most effective contraceptives were sickness, famine, and war. So instead of population increasing or decreasing from the food bar a new bar that's pink would be above it. This new bar would be called the fertility bar. The bar advances to the next population number using fertility points. Base fertility points are earned at +0.1 per population number so as the number of people increases the rate at which they increase increases due to more people having children at the same time. So not a lot when your population is tiny but it eventually adds up as your population grows. Additional fertility points are earned at +1 per surplus amount of healthiness you have in your cities from lower population turnover as older generations live longer and the infant mortality rate decreases. You will receive -0.3 per amount of surplus unhealthiness in your cities from all the filth. And you will receive -0.1 per amount of surplus unhappiness as more people vent their frustrations into criminal activity. The food bar simply stores food but no longer empties and adds population when filled up. The amount of food the food bar can store will be increased by certain buildings like the granary (will lose the store food after growth because of the food bar being changed). The abattoir will be changed to produce 25% extra food for having pigs, cows, and sheep (maybe horse meat?). When there is more demand for food then the amount of food produced the food bar will decrease like normal but once it hits zero things get a little crazy. From that point on you will receive -5 fertility points for each piece of food that is demanded and not supplied as your people kill and cannibalize each other. If your fertility bar drops past 0 it will function like the old food bar where your population decreases by 1 and your instability increases within the city. Maybe certain religious tenets could affect the fertility rate. Perhaps a contraceptives tech in the modern era that could allow your population to never grow past your current food production or abortion clinics (maybe with a random event for your leader to decide to legalize abortion or not).

 

[dretnoth]

hmm. But how about poor and overpopulated civilization. Something like Barcelona in Brazil? (Wait no bad explanation)
Okay, how about massive army Building? It consume a real citizen resources.

But maybe you trying avoid the massive population loos on conquered cities.
(And when im on it:
-can conquered cities still on conquered state, had half effect on dissent in main empire?
-can city who decrease in size have something on food bar (like 25% stored food) (i dint see that on conquered cities and they can drop from 20 to 1 pretty fast.)

Back to topic: I agree that the health can have effect on grow speed. (food produced +/- health +/- building +/-techs)
But i will likely see something like "Empire unsettled civilians." When some civilians grow in some part of the empire and due to health, building backups and other stuffs dint decide become the citizens of the city and like go to new city or to city whit high health rate. Or some city will be more attractive due to civic like capital or having wonder w/c/n or having good rate buildings/city size.
But i think this will be scraped due the memory limits and anti-Lag politic.

 

[SpartanU]

Probably not possible to implement and might require a DLL however I feel compelled to explain anyway. This is something I've had on my mind for a while but the current way population grows in Civ4 is not how populations would historically grow. Populations usually don't grow in perfect synch with the amount of food that is available. Often the amount of people would easily outstrip the current technological capacity to produce food in a civilization. And for several reasons. People don't necessarily plan families based on the availability of food. Secondly throughout history contraceptive methods weren't always effective. Also certain cultures believe in having lots of children either for religious reasons, protecting one's posterity, or to have more family labor for things such as farm work. Throughout history the most effective contraceptives were sickness, famine, and war. So instead of population increasing or decreasing from the food bar a new bar that's pink would be above it. This new bar would be called the fertility bar. The bar advances to the next population number using fertility points. Base fertility points are earned at +0.1 per population number so as the number of people increases the rate at which they increase increases due to more people having children at the same time. So not a lot when your population is tiny but it eventually adds up as your population grows. Additional fertility points are earned at +1 per surplus amount of healthiness you have in your cities from lower population turnover as older generations live longer and the infant mortality rate decreases. You will receive -0.3 per amount of surplus unhealthiness in your cities from all the filth. And you will receive -0.1 per amount of surplus unhappiness as more people vent their frustrations into criminal activity. The food bar simply stores food but no longer empties and adds population when filled up. The amount of food the food bar can store will be increased by certain buildings like the granary (will lose the store food after growth because of the food bar being changed). The abattoir will be changed to produce 25% extra food for having pigs, cows, and sheep (maybe horse meat?). When there is more demand for food then the amount of food produced the food bar will decrease like normal but once it hits zero things get a little crazy. From that point on you will receive -5 fertility points for each piece of food that is demanded and not supplied as your people kill and cannibalize each other. If your fertility bar drops past 0 it will function like the old food bar where your population decreases by 1 and your instability increases within the city. Maybe certain religious tenets could affect the fertility rate. Perhaps a contraceptives tech in the modern era that could allow your population to never grow past your current food production or abortion clinics (maybe with a random event for your leader to decide to legalize abortion or not).

Although a lot of the ideas you brought up do play a role in real world population growth, I think adding a fertility bar would be way to complicated even if it could be implemented (and I'm pretty sure the fertility tenet already addresses the religion part). Also I'm pretty sure that food availability does affect real world population growth. For instance if food is more available the price will drop, in turn making it cheaper to raise children. I think this is the idea that the civ creators had in mind when implementing this mechanic. I think where the mechanic breaks down is in later eras where trade should allow cities to consume large quantities of food while producing very little. I'm pretty sure there is a civic that allows food yield to be gained from trade routes, if this kind of bonus was applied to the tech tree instead of a civic it might make population growth more similar to real world population growth. I think it would be cool if trade routes passively became more important as a result of tech and the era of globalization slowly ushered itself in (trade routes could passively affect many yields such as production, food, etc.). I think the role for the civics that utilize the trade routes would then be to determine how these trade routes are utilized (e.g: extra trade routes in 9 biggest cities, , -5 dissent per trade route, less trade routes but a domestic buff (such as a large espionage/military bonus), etc.)

As for the adding food from buildings, I think this would help boost populations later in the game, but if you lose these buildings (e.g. from spies), you'll lose your population really quickly and start racking up a lot of dissent that might end up breaking the dissent mechanic. Currently the only time I have run into these large and abrupt food shortages is when a company like Taiyo leaves my city and a new corporation takes its place and doesn't provide adequate food. Usually this doesn't happen though because healthiness and happiness seems to be the limiting factors for my cities' populations (if you let them go over or near equilibrium dissent tends to get out of hand).

In all, I think the food/population mechanics are pretty good as they stand, but I'd like to see the trade routes play a larger role. I think this makes most sense because your hubs of commerce should have a strong demand for food (being there is a large concentration of wealth there).