dunkleosteus
Roman Pleb
I believe Gazebo is a historian(?) of some kind, so I hope he can appreciate this. It's my understanding that population growth was limited by disease for the majority of human history. Few cities managed to attain massive populations in antiquity, and those that did achieved it (usually without understanding exactly how) with sanitation and/or population controls.
I think a clean system would be to have diseases and/or illnesses that appear under certain conditions. Many sicknesses and illnesses come from animals (tuberculosis, the common cold, whooping cough, etc) so having improved animal tiles can cause disease events to occur where your people contract diseases. I think it's important that diseases don't sprout up "at random" with no explanation. There should be enough diseases that the majority of players or AIs will get different ones. When you trade with a city that has diseases, there are chances that you will contract those diseases. When you first contract a disease, it puts serious pressure on growth, but this will eventually decrease over time (but not disappear completely). With later techs, you start being able to develop cures for diseases. Maybe cures become commodities you can sell to other players? Maybe they don't.
Basically, you'll accrue sicknesses over time. Each new sickness will hurt growth pretty hard but because you get them slowly, you won't be in serious trouble. If you are isolated for a long time however, you may experience serious population death when you get that initial growth penalty all at once (on the flip side, you wouldn't have the build up of growth penalties over time)
So an example: let's say when you first catch a disease, you get an instant -10% gross growth penalty (rather than net because then you would only stagnate). After 10 turns or so, it starts to drop to maybe 2 or 3%. After you catch 5 or 6 diseases, you'll probably stagnate unless you can either seriously increase the amount of food you generate or fix your sanitation/whatever.
I think it's a good idea for diseases to depend on specialists. Specialists mean urban density and that means disease spread. Rural areas were never as heavily affected as urban ones. More specialists = more disease. If you decentralize your cities, you can reduce the spread of disease. Aqueducts reduce the impact that specialists have on disease, as do wells (not watermills though. Maybe being on a river helps in some way? or hurts, if history is anything to go by).
I know unhappiness from specialists tries to allude to the problems associated with big cities but I think this system would cleanly represent the history better.
I think the effect this system would have is that cities would not balloon to massive sizes until later in the game. Isolated civs would receive the research penalty as usual but have a growth surplus compared to other civs which have many more diseases. The downside is the potential for the massive death a la guns, germs, and steel if you wait too long before contacting other civs. (example: upper estimates put the population of Tenochtitlan as high as 300 000 in 1520, while the largest city in contemporary Spain was 30 000).
If I've made mistakes, feel free to correct me.
I think a clean system would be to have diseases and/or illnesses that appear under certain conditions. Many sicknesses and illnesses come from animals (tuberculosis, the common cold, whooping cough, etc) so having improved animal tiles can cause disease events to occur where your people contract diseases. I think it's important that diseases don't sprout up "at random" with no explanation. There should be enough diseases that the majority of players or AIs will get different ones. When you trade with a city that has diseases, there are chances that you will contract those diseases. When you first contract a disease, it puts serious pressure on growth, but this will eventually decrease over time (but not disappear completely). With later techs, you start being able to develop cures for diseases. Maybe cures become commodities you can sell to other players? Maybe they don't.
Basically, you'll accrue sicknesses over time. Each new sickness will hurt growth pretty hard but because you get them slowly, you won't be in serious trouble. If you are isolated for a long time however, you may experience serious population death when you get that initial growth penalty all at once (on the flip side, you wouldn't have the build up of growth penalties over time)
So an example: let's say when you first catch a disease, you get an instant -10% gross growth penalty (rather than net because then you would only stagnate). After 10 turns or so, it starts to drop to maybe 2 or 3%. After you catch 5 or 6 diseases, you'll probably stagnate unless you can either seriously increase the amount of food you generate or fix your sanitation/whatever.
I think it's a good idea for diseases to depend on specialists. Specialists mean urban density and that means disease spread. Rural areas were never as heavily affected as urban ones. More specialists = more disease. If you decentralize your cities, you can reduce the spread of disease. Aqueducts reduce the impact that specialists have on disease, as do wells (not watermills though. Maybe being on a river helps in some way? or hurts, if history is anything to go by).
I know unhappiness from specialists tries to allude to the problems associated with big cities but I think this system would cleanly represent the history better.
I think the effect this system would have is that cities would not balloon to massive sizes until later in the game. Isolated civs would receive the research penalty as usual but have a growth surplus compared to other civs which have many more diseases. The downside is the potential for the massive death a la guns, germs, and steel if you wait too long before contacting other civs. (example: upper estimates put the population of Tenochtitlan as high as 300 000 in 1520, while the largest city in contemporary Spain was 30 000).
If I've made mistakes, feel free to correct me.
