Hey there,
This post is mainly about the inner-state stuff, what you can do within your territory. Not much about warfare.
I played the civilization series for many years. And almost always you end up with the same kind of stuff:
- Many cities with amazingly high populations
- The terrain is just full with railroad/irrigation/mines
- And some other stuff that's annoying in the later stages of the game
Cities layout
In civ it's usually about creating a city to expand your border. So every so many tiles you will create another city. Then you will develop all these cities to contribute to education, economics, producten, culture, etc...
In the end all these cities end up as metropoles.
In 'the real world' you may have a territory with dense population (coastal regions/rivers), and then use an inland area for mainly food production, or mining, or whatever. No or barely any real cities there!
So I think in civ you should be able to organize your land in the same way, and thus to be able to expand your territory (if it's not owned by a competing civilization) without necessarily building cities.
If you create a vast area of foodproduction inland, all the food could be used for the cities in the densely populated area, while in that densely populated area the focus is on production, culture and education.
Then you can choose to either have many medium-big cities in that populated area (china model), or just 1 or 2 mega cities (france / england model).
As for economics/industry, you can see it like this: An area you designate for raw materials (food, timber, metals, etc...), and an area (populated/industrial area) for creating more 'expensive' products out of these, such as military stuff, luxury products (for happiness and export too), buildings within the cities, etc... The balance is then about how much industrial capacity/population do you have (per city) versus how many raw materials do you produce/import. (in total territory).
In raw material areas you can then let settles/engineers setup farmland, irrigation, mines, forrest maintenance, and maybe some storage structures (warehouses), and in the populated areas you can let those engineers setup industrial areas. The more industry a city has around it, while having enough materials coming in (including food) the bigger a city can grow.
A city can also be limited by its location. A city with river/coastal tile next to it, should have more export capacities than an inland city.
Infrastructure issues
Of course all these raw material areas have to be connected to the cities with roads/rail, etc... As for increasing the amount of stuff you can send to your cities, and for movement of units.
I think roads and rails should not give +1 production or anything, so it becomes useless to build a road in every tile, but purely use the roads for what they are intended: transport.
Then I also think you should be able to move your sea-units over rivers, and let engineers create canals if needed.
As for pollution and happiness, you could say forrests planted could lower pollution, and maybe be a form of recreation. So also the nature can be useful. Otherwise you still end up with 100% industrial/producing land.
Provincial approach
I also think it would be cool and useful to create provinces within your territory. Then you can assign a province to 1 goal at once, so you dont need to update every city when you have a new priority. Also you could maybe have different tax levels per province, to stimulate a specific area economically.
Ah well, just some ideas. I wonder what you think about it. It changes the nature of civ quite a bit, but I think it could be the next step to more realism and variety, and more possible ways to organize your territory.
This post is mainly about the inner-state stuff, what you can do within your territory. Not much about warfare.
I played the civilization series for many years. And almost always you end up with the same kind of stuff:
- Many cities with amazingly high populations
- The terrain is just full with railroad/irrigation/mines
- And some other stuff that's annoying in the later stages of the game
Cities layout
In civ it's usually about creating a city to expand your border. So every so many tiles you will create another city. Then you will develop all these cities to contribute to education, economics, producten, culture, etc...
In the end all these cities end up as metropoles.
In 'the real world' you may have a territory with dense population (coastal regions/rivers), and then use an inland area for mainly food production, or mining, or whatever. No or barely any real cities there!
So I think in civ you should be able to organize your land in the same way, and thus to be able to expand your territory (if it's not owned by a competing civilization) without necessarily building cities.
If you create a vast area of foodproduction inland, all the food could be used for the cities in the densely populated area, while in that densely populated area the focus is on production, culture and education.
Then you can choose to either have many medium-big cities in that populated area (china model), or just 1 or 2 mega cities (france / england model).
As for economics/industry, you can see it like this: An area you designate for raw materials (food, timber, metals, etc...), and an area (populated/industrial area) for creating more 'expensive' products out of these, such as military stuff, luxury products (for happiness and export too), buildings within the cities, etc... The balance is then about how much industrial capacity/population do you have (per city) versus how many raw materials do you produce/import. (in total territory).
In raw material areas you can then let settles/engineers setup farmland, irrigation, mines, forrest maintenance, and maybe some storage structures (warehouses), and in the populated areas you can let those engineers setup industrial areas. The more industry a city has around it, while having enough materials coming in (including food) the bigger a city can grow.
A city can also be limited by its location. A city with river/coastal tile next to it, should have more export capacities than an inland city.
Infrastructure issues
Of course all these raw material areas have to be connected to the cities with roads/rail, etc... As for increasing the amount of stuff you can send to your cities, and for movement of units.
I think roads and rails should not give +1 production or anything, so it becomes useless to build a road in every tile, but purely use the roads for what they are intended: transport.
Then I also think you should be able to move your sea-units over rivers, and let engineers create canals if needed.
As for pollution and happiness, you could say forrests planted could lower pollution, and maybe be a form of recreation. So also the nature can be useful. Otherwise you still end up with 100% industrial/producing land.
Provincial approach
I also think it would be cool and useful to create provinces within your territory. Then you can assign a province to 1 goal at once, so you dont need to update every city when you have a new priority. Also you could maybe have different tax levels per province, to stimulate a specific area economically.
Ah well, just some ideas. I wonder what you think about it. It changes the nature of civ quite a bit, but I think it could be the next step to more realism and variety, and more possible ways to organize your territory.
