Civ 6 vs. Civ 5 in regards to future 7

[Boris Gudenuf]

Have a 'human' resource that works like Strategic Resources.

Except that human resources have always been Mobile: they move from country to town, from city to city, from country to country, as individuals, families, occasionally as Masses. A trait which can be used to the game's benefit.

By representing that kind of movement Implicitly instead of Explicitly, the acquisition of more human resources doesn't have to be tied to some long, slow, 'birth-related' process. City populations, which is how Civ has always measured populations in general, could rise (or fall) much faster than they have in-game in the past.

And many of the mechanics that affect population movements are already in place in the game. People move to cities for some pretty specific reasons:
1. Amenities - the city is a Nice Place to live: with cultural, entertainment facilities not available in the country or village.
2. Jobs. Even unskilled labor could, historically, find work in a city. And skilled labor could find people with the money to pay very, very well for their skills.
3. Power. Specifically, the Palace was source of well-paid jobs, patronage, and potential advancement socially, economically, and politically.
4. Protection. Wall = City in many of the oldest languages, and the city was where you could find better protection than a palisade around your village.

So, building Entertainment and Cultural venues, structures with Specialist Slots (Jobs - which should be just about every structure in a city), Walls and fortifications - all that should not only increase your other 'currencies' like Gold, Religion, and Production, but also the Human Resources of the city

 

[Lonecat Nekophrodite]

Since we've spent X million years developing a Big Brain (well, some of us) with which to make Decisions, it behooves the game to give us Big Decisions to make. Shoving dozens of units around the map one by one may keep us busy, but not likely Engaged. Deciding whether to improve a tile may be a decision, but in a 10 city Civilization with 90 population points working 85 tiles, it's a long way from being a Big Decision.

The Late Game needs more Macro, not Micro in decision making and management, and it should be relatively easy given that all the systems affecting your Civ in the late game should be bigger, more complex, with more different game mechanics interacting in them. To keep making decisions about single tiles or units from the time you have only 6 tiles and 3 units at the Near Start of Game to the time you have 200 tiles and 50 units in the late Eras is astoundingly bad game design, yet we accept it as 'normal' in the games.

this because franchise arrogance maybe?

Except that human resources have always been Mobile: they move from country to town, from city to city, from country to country, as individuals, families, occasionally as Masses. A trait which can be used to the game's benefit.

By representing that kind of movement Implicitly instead of Explicitly, the acquisition of more human resources doesn't have to be tied to some long, slow, 'birth-related' process. City populations, which is how Civ has always measured populations in general, could rise (or fall) much faster than they have in-game in the past.

And many of the mechanics that affect population movements are already in place in the game. People move to cities for some pretty specific reasons:
1. Amenities - the city is a Nice Place to live: with cultural, entertainment facilities not available in the country or village.
2. Jobs. Even unskilled labor could, historically, find work in a city. And skilled labor could find people with the money to pay very, very well for their skills.
3. Power. Specifically, the Palace was source of well-paid jobs, patronage, and potential advancement socially, economically, and politically.
4. Protection. Wall = City in many of the oldest languages, and the city was where you could find better protection than a palisade around your village.

So, building Entertainment and Cultural venues, structures with Specialist Slots (Jobs - which should be just about every structure in a city), Walls and fortifications - all that should not only increase your other 'currencies' like Gold, Religion, and Production, but also the Human Resources of the city

but even so. city defense became very different once steel barrel rifled artillery (+ballistic calculus, stable smokeless propellants and telecommunications, which IMAO should be Late Industrial tech, and what's in Info era that represent Telecom should be renamed, IMAO didn't telegrams and telephones 'telecommunications' in any sense or changing warfare so much? IMAO it did.. ALOT. especially with 'modern Artillery' made a full manifest in Russo-Japanese War of 1905, something Japanese flicks occasionally represented. since it was the first time artillery is directed by FOs with telephones. (particularly with IJA being the first to do so.)

^ Japannese fortress guns repurposed to do offensive jobs.
With this cities after 1900s (or after 1870 AD Even.) abandoned their ages old walls. no matter now recent these walls were built, they were dismantled by the government and big gun positions built some kilometers away from key cities (or even modern military bases) are built instead. even so these fortresses as well as doctrines holding up these things didn't even last a century. i couldnt even make it out how the new gen fortress could looks like by Cold War and even by our times if one is being built seriously. or it might even looks similiar to German Atlantic Walls? or Iraqi border forts? or Firebases in 'Nam which were pioneered by South Korean Marines and copied (and perfected or kept perfecting) by US military as well as their respective allies. (do you count Firebases as 'Fortress' too?)
In Millennia. there's Flakturm and later SAM Battery building. i didn't try these either too bad.

A discussions on an FB group, when I asked whether did Bangkok have the same walls and towers as Ayutthaya? members replied Bangkok was once surrounded with walls similiar to Ayutthaya. wiht additional of fortresses connected with brick walls. additional fortifications however were also directed to outlying cities throughout the Early Rattanakosin Empire (before it got official name of Siam), and even isolated forts equipped with cannon batteries similiar to European powers were also built especially near the eastern cities to protect against Dai Viet encroachments. (A big threat since the founding of 'Bangkok Empire (begun with Thonburi, which lasted 15 years and later Rattakosin which the seat of power moved to east bank)', effectively replaced Inwa (Burmese) Empire some 20 years after the founding of Rattanakosin Empire)) , these Bangkok walls and castles were reinforced with 20 riverine (and coastal) defense batteries built in the first 30 years. unfortunately these early defensive measures had never been tested due to the chanages in defensive tactics shifted towards meeting engagements outside city limits. or at least sieges occured in remote cities far away from the capitol, either Siamese laid siege to others, or besieged. none of these happened within sights of the capitol.

By the King Chulalongkorn era (some said, King Mongkut's era, which preceeded him). however, these walls and forts became obsolete with aforemented artillery advances. (News of ACW rifled artillery did reach Bangkok within 5 years after the ACW is over). so the King ordered these walls dismantled, and a couple of new style artillery forts built (likely copied British Palmerston Forts, but i'm yet to visit the site) but these new forts are several kilometers away and built by key positions and no walls linking two forts or positions together). this happened in every cities with walls, and new cities are built as 'open city'. not a single wall surrounded (it was in vogue at that time. especially with railroads involved. and also with some military bases in key cities (not every provinces).

Defense mechanism should be remodelled. while Steel gave free defenses and terminated all walls constructed prior. I don't think there ain't no defensive buildings existed afterwards. sure these are no walls but it will be different. maybe gun emplacements? Flakturm? or what else??

 

[ezzlar]

I agree 100 %. I felt it was futile to throw more radical ideas into this tread that is already chaotic, but I would favor a system basically exactly like that. I also think that producing a unit should consume a population from the city - or alternatively lock up a citizen like when they are assigned as specialist or on working a tile - in order to limit endless unit spam.

I would prefer that the draft/training system would consider city size instead. A 3 pop city "producing" soldiers would give a small contribution to the soldier pool while a 25 pop city would give a larger contribution. A warrior band unit would require few soldier points while a Line Infantry army would require a substanstially larger amount of points.

This would encourage big cities and would increase huge war efforts connected to changes in civics/techs allowing much bigger cities.

I don't mind having some form of long-term upgrade. Even just as a nominal like "this is the Princess Patricia Light Infantry unit" which gets "upgraded" over time for different conflicts. Even just for some game-play role-playing, it's always cool to know that this level 5 machine gun basically came from that early slinger of yours.

But for balance, I don't mind if that's like expensive, or limited in how you assign them. It shouldn't be cheap to take your old army and magically equip them all with tanks.

The professional trained soldiers would remain with promotions. That would be the trade off. Large standing professional would be expensive to raise and maintain but would give an instant edge in battle due to experience. Drafted would start less experienced.

Humankind though, allows you to work every tile around the city automatically, regardless of the city population. The population figures in that game (and in its predecessor, Endless Legends) are more like Civ's Specialists than 'raw' population points in the way they act.
For a population limitation on Infinite Unit Spam, though, Specialists or any other sub-set of basic population can work as well as basic Population Points. IF, as in Humankind, the 'specialists' are the source of much of the city Production, Gold, Culture, etc., then losing them to unit production is as a major a cost as losing basic population.

I would like tile usage be tied to techs/civics. At game start one pop uses one tile. At some point in time almost all farming/pastures tiles would be used automatically due to mechanization. Then pops would be shared among mines as workers and building specialists. Further into the timeline all mines are automatically in use. Pops are then only specialists in cities and potential draftes. Techs could be Feudalism/Industrialization/Robotics or something. Or combined with pop tresholds like "Town"+Feudalism enabling use of all farm tiles, "City"+Industrialization all farms and mines etc.

This would create rapid expansion in output and drafting capabilities. But then we could also change equipment cost and soldier count´s relative increase to reflect this change. Spearman would be 20 shields/10 soldiers. Tank unit would be 1200 shields/150 soldiers. Carrier 8000 shields/1000 soldiers. (please dont quote exact numbers ).

 

[pokiehl]

The problem with using citizens outside of cities is that they are not a set unit of a quantity of something. A citizen can cost 10 Food or 100, so not all citizens are equal. It would make more sense for units to just cost Food. A big city might be able to produce four units without losing a citizen while a small city might lose a citizen right away when producing just a single unit. But even that might still not scale well, making the cost too prohibitive early and too neglible late. Also, there's the issue of maintenance. Do they still consume 2 Food per turn? If so, from where? Is there a global stockpile of Food for your military, maybe that's what you build Granaries for?

Games that have military units based on population seem to either use large numbers instead of discrete units on the map (think of how an army in Victoria can scale from 500 to 50000 on a single territory, and military pops likewise can just grow in size with high granularity) or end up having each unit cost the same but have to enforce an overall unit limit like in AoE to avoid exponential economic growth overwhelming both the engine and the player. Humankind does neither but it's population economy is completely out of balance and a major pain point in its core gameplay loop since the open beta.

In Civ, making all citizens cost the same means much larger late-game cities, and the idea of one citizen = one tile worked can no longer really be sustained, you'd need to have a way to assign citizens in stacks of 10 or so to specialist jobs in cities. But that's risking a lot of damage to the game's long-held traditional identity of its worker placement system for uncertain and possibly too niche gains.

Small detour: IRL, a unit taking so much damage it loses all its fighting capacity happens long before 100% of it are dead. Especially before artillery became significant, battlefield death rates were a lot lower. Moreover, families may remain otherwise intact and widow of a fallen soldier might still raise their kids and as many of them as otherwise, meaning that long-term population development isn't affected. So having a unit cost citizens/food or not having them do so - both is "realistic" and "unrealistic" simultaneously, just different ways to abstract things.

So I'd look at it more from a gameplay side which abstraction is more helpful. Limiting the number of units a civ can field beyond their productive output is reasonable, but I don't think citizens are the mechanic to hook this limit into. A separate military capacity *based on* (but not taking away from) population, government, cities, and infrastructure seems the most straightforward.

This is basically the only suggestion here that thoughtfully considers how to integrate these ideas into the game in a realistic and feasible manner.

The part of the post that I bolded is forgotten far too often. Wanting new ideas that sound cool because they’re complex or more “historical” is an easy trap to fall into.

 

[Bonyduck Campersang]

This is basically the only suggestion here that thoughtfully considers how to integrate these ideas into the game in a realistic and feasible manner.

The part of the post that I bolded is forgotten far too often. Wanting new ideas that sound cool because they’re complex or more “historical” is an easy trap to fall into.

The "new idea" I was referring to is already actually implemented and integrated in a game

 

[pokiehl]

The "new idea" I was referring to is already actually implemented and integrated in a game

It sure is, in a game that works very differently than Civ as Boris already clarified.

 

[kaspergm]

The problem with using citizens outside of cities is that they are not a set unit of a quantity of something. A citizen can cost 10 Food or 100, so not all citizens are equal.

Maybe I'm daft here, but can you do a ELI5 on me here: Why is that really a big issue?

I mean, we literally already have the 1 unit = 1 population feature in Civ6 both with Setlers and with the Ottoman unique unit. I'm not saying that implementing such a feature on a larger scale wouldn't have to be coupled with a balancing on how city growth works, but I don't really understand the major issue wrt. big vs. small cities.

When that's said, I'd probably favor the solution where the military unit "occupies" a citizen (similar to assigning a citizen as specialist) rather than removing them completely, but I'm not sure that solution is easier for the casual player to understand or manage.

 

[Marla_Singer]

It sure is, in a game that works very differently than Civ as Boris already clarified.

Which Civ iteration do you have in mind? In Civ3 for instance, nationalism triggered the ability to draft a citizen as a rifleman.

In Colonization (1994) and Civ4Col (2008) all "human" military units (melee, mounted) are citizens equipped with swords, guns or horses. Only cannons and ships are built through production. That actually worked great in those games. The most epic fight I ever had in any game of the genre was actually the war for independence in Civ4Col with RAR mod.

 

[vorlon_mi]

The problem with using citizens outside of cities is that they are not a set unit of a quantity of something. A citizen can cost 10 Food or 100, so not all citizens are equal. It would make more sense for units to just cost Food. A big city might be able to produce four units without losing a citizen while a small city might lose a citizen right away when producing just a single unit. But even that might still not scale well, making the cost too prohibitive early and too neglible late. Also, there's the issue of maintenance. Do they still consume 2 Food per turn? If so, from where? Is there a global stockpile of Food for your military, maybe that's what you build Granaries for?

Games that have military units based on population seem to either use large numbers instead of discrete units on the map (think of how an army in Victoria can scale from 500 to 50000 on a single territory, and military pops likewise can just grow in size with high granularity) or end up having each unit cost the same but have to enforce an overall unit limit like in AoE to avoid exponential economic growth overwhelming both the engine and the player. Humankind does neither but it's population economy is completely out of balance and a major pain point in its core gameplay loop since the open beta.

In Civ, making all citizens cost the same means much larger late-game cities, and the idea of one citizen = one tile worked can no longer really be sustained, you'd need to have a way to assign citizens in stacks of 10 or so to specialist jobs in cities. But that's risking a lot of damage to the game's long-held traditional identity of its worker placement system for uncertain and possibly too niche gains.

Small detour: IRL, a unit taking so much damage it loses all its fighting capacity happens long before 100% of it are dead. Especially before artillery became significant, battlefield death rates were a lot lower. Moreover, families may remain otherwise intact and widow of a fallen soldier might still raise their kids and as many of them as otherwise, meaning that long-term population development isn't affected. So having a unit cost citizens/food or not having them do so - both is "realistic" and "unrealistic" simultaneously, just different ways to abstract things.

So I'd look at it more from a gameplay side which abstraction is more helpful. Limiting the number of units a civ can field beyond their productive output is reasonable, but I don't think citizens are the mechanic to hook this limit into. A separate military capacity *based on* (but not taking away from) population, government, cities, and infrastructure seems the most straightforward.

Thank you for the thoughtful post.

Different games in the franchise have approached military support with different abstractions. Civ2 linked support of a unit to the city that produced it. Back when I played it regularly, I often found my production-rich cities being charged with supporting 4 units each; re-homing a unit was definitly a thing for Civ2. Civ3 had an overall unit support number for each size city, that varied with the government type. If I produced more units than the total supported, I got a gold-per-turn tax across my whole empire. IIRC, Civ4 had different support costs (gold) for units that were inside home territory and those outside the borders. BERT had a overall unit support limit similar to Civ3; if I exceeded the limit, I suffered a tax on production and gold/energy. Overall, except for Civ5, the answer to the challenge of "my army costs too much" is to either found or conquer another city.

 

[Boris Gudenuf]

The problem with using citizens outside of cities is that they are not a set unit of a quantity of something. A citizen can cost 10 Food or 100, so not all citizens are equal. It would make more sense for units to just cost Food. A big city might be able to produce four units without losing a citizen while a small city might lose a citizen right away when producing just a single unit. But even that might still not scale well, making the cost too prohibitive early and too neglible late. Also, there's the issue of maintenance. Do they still consume 2 Food per turn? If so, from where? Is there a global stockpile of Food for your military, maybe that's what you build Granaries for?

Games that have military units based on population seem to either use large numbers instead of discrete units on the map (think of how an army in Victoria can scale from 500 to 50000 on a single territory, and military pops likewise can just grow in size with high granularity) or end up having each unit cost the same but have to enforce an overall unit limit like in AoE to avoid exponential economic growth overwhelming both the engine and the player. Humankind does neither but it's population economy is completely out of balance and a major pain point in its core gameplay loop since the open beta.

In Civ, making all citizens cost the same means much larger late-game cities, and the idea of one citizen = one tile worked can no longer really be sustained, you'd need to have a way to assign citizens in stacks of 10 or so to specialist jobs in cities. But that's risking a lot of damage to the game's long-held traditional identity of its worker placement system for uncertain and possibly too niche gains.

Small detour: IRL, a unit taking so much damage it loses all its fighting capacity happens long before 100% of it are dead. Especially before artillery became significant, battlefield death rates were a lot lower. Moreover, families may remain otherwise intact and widow of a fallen soldier might still raise their kids and as many of them as otherwise, meaning that long-term population development isn't affected. So having a unit cost citizens/food or not having them do so - both is "realistic" and "unrealistic" simultaneously, just different ways to abstract things.

So I'd look at it more from a gameplay side which abstraction is more helpful. Limiting the number of units a civ can field beyond their productive output is reasonable, but I don't think citizens are the mechanic to hook this limit into. A separate military capacity *based on* (but not taking away from) population, government, cities, and infrastructure seems the most straightforward.

Just a few comments on a very good statement of the Problem:

I would argue that the "problem with using citizens outside of cities" in Civ at least, is that there is no in-game measurement of citizens or population outside of cities. The only population measure is the number of Pops in each city, and the Civ total is the total of all the cities. All population 'working' tiles outside of the city have always (as far as I am aware) been related directly to the pop of the city: want to work another tile, either move someone or add someone to the city.

I've posted on this long ago, but in a game spanning 6000 years there simply cannot be a fixed ratio of population to unit. The largest organized permanent or semi-permanent (between wars) unit in ancient Egypt and Mesopotamia seems to have been between 600 and 1200 men, and anything larger was indicated by words that all translate as "host" or Whoever Shows Up. By the Industrial Era, 1200 men is barely a Regiment of infantry, and European powers like Britain, France, Prussia, Russia and Austria in the Napoleonic Wars fielded 100s of regiments each. To avoid trying to manipulate units by the hundreds in the mid-game, the unit to population ratio has to be on a sliding scale - and that suggests that the population Point to City population measure also has to be a sliding scale to accommodate the earliest cities at >20,000 and 20th century cities at <10,000,000.

At least in the mid-20th century, the US Army's Maneuver Control manual of the mid-1950s assumed that a unit that lost 10% of its personnel within a few minutes was ineffective for the rest of the day, but that was for units of platoon or company size - less than 100 men. During WWII the German and Soviet armies both kept divisions in the line and fighting when they had lost up to 75% of their combat strength, but the Germans, at least, didn't expect those units to mount a sustained attack successfully. How much and what kind of losses a unit can sustain and continue to function is, frankly, more a matter of the morale and leadership - 'soft' factors - than numbers and equipment, which makes it difficult to put hard numbers to them.

To your summary on gameplay and abstractions required I would simply add that whether or not some kind of citizen/population figure is used, that cannot be the sole criteria. Societies (and in game terms, that means Religions and their tenets, Governments, Civics, Social Policies) may have more effect than 'raw' population numbers on military capacity, no matter how the population numbers are divided into tile, city, or Specialist workers.

 

[Marla_Singer]

Just a few comments on a very good statement of the Problem:

I would argue that the "problem with using citizens outside of cities" in Civ at least, is that there is no in-game measurement of citizens or population outside of cities. The only population measure is the number of Pops in each city, and the Civ total is the total of all the cities. All population 'working' tiles outside of the city have always (as far as I am aware) been related directly to the pop of the city: want to work another tile, either move someone or add someone to the city.

I've posted on this long ago, but in a game spanning 6000 years there simply cannot be a fixed ratio of population to unit. The largest organized permanent or semi-permanent (between wars) unit in ancient Egypt and Mesopotamia seems to have been between 600 and 1200 men, and anything larger was indicated by words that all translate as "host" or Whoever Shows Up. By the Industrial Era, 1200 men is barely a Regiment of infantry, and European powers like Britain, France, Prussia, Russia and Austria in the Napoleonic Wars fielded 100s of regiments each. To avoid trying to manipulate units by the hundreds in the mid-game, the unit to population ratio has to be on a sliding scale - and that suggests that the population Point to City population measure also has to be a sliding scale to accommodate the earliest cities at >20,000 and 20th century cities at <10,000,000.

At least in the mid-20th century, the US Army's Maneuver Control manual of the mid-1950s assumed that a unit that lost 10% of its personnel within a few minutes was ineffective for the rest of the day, but that was for units of platoon or company size - less than 100 men. During WWII the German and Soviet armies both kept divisions in the line and fighting when they had lost up to 75% of their combat strength, but the Germans, at least, didn't expect those units to mount a sustained attack successfully. How much and what kind of losses a unit can sustain and continue to function is, frankly, more a matter of the morale and leadership - 'soft' factors - than numbers and equipment, which makes it difficult to put hard numbers to them.

To your summary on gameplay and abstractions required I would simply add that whether or not some kind of citizen/population figure is used, that cannot be the sole criteria. Societies (and in game terms, that means Religions and their tenets, Governments, Civics, Social Policies) may have more effect than 'raw' population numbers on military capacity, no matter how the population numbers are divided into tile, city, or Specialist workers.

Sorry but the scaling issue you're trying to point isn't limited to military, but is pretty much the same for every population aspects of the game. "1" population always eats 2 food and can only work 1 tile, no matter how late you are in the game and how many people there are in your city. This has never been a problem in Civilization and has no reason to be. As long as the scale makes sense in terms of gameplay, you're ready to accept it.

 

[Boris Gudenuf]

Sorry but the scaling issue you're trying to point isn't limited to military, but is pretty much the same for every population aspects of the game. "1" population always eats 2 food and can only work 1 tile, no matter how late you are in the game and how many people there are in your city. This has never been a problem in Civilization and has no reason to be. As long as the scale makes sense in terms of gameplay, you're ready to accept it.

My comments were in the context of the discussion concerning relating military units to population. I am well aware that average city size is also not related in any straight-line scaling to in-game population numbers, and alluded to that in the third paragraph.​

​

I don't think there is any problem with notional population figures for the cities, since the city populations are simply related to How Many notional workers does the city produce to work tiles and other structures and the output from those is also notional: as mentioned, 1 - 2 'Food' feeds however many people 1 Population Point represents. Any modifications are not to population, but to yields of tiles, improvements, buildings, etc.​

​

The question is, how to relate the notional civilian population to the population available for military Units, while still modeling (IF we want to) the relationship between workers for civilian Production and available military manpower. - And, unfortunately for clean and simple game mechanics, that relationship changes throughout the game's timeframe due to changes in Civics, Social Policies, Governments, Ideologies, etc.​

 

[The_goggles_do_nothing]

The question is, how to relate the notional civilian population to the population available for military Units, while still modeling (IF we want to) the relationship between workers for civilian Production and available military manpower. - And, unfortunately for clean and simple game mechanics, that relationship changes throughout the game's timeframe due to changes in Civics, Social Policies, Governments, Ideologies, etc.

I think Civ 6 has solved a similar problem already: In the same way an Iron mine produces 2 iron a turn a city can produce some number of human resources a turn. It's not a perfect implementation in 6 (why do you get 5 iron and 1 coal?) but it's one that most people understand how works.

 

[Boris Gudenuf]

I think Civ 6 has solved a similar problem already: In the same way an Iron mine produces 2 iron a turn a city can produce some number of human resources a turn. It's not a perfect implementation in 6 (why do you get 5 iron and 1 coal?) but it's one that most people understand how works.

I'm not so sure we can call it 'solved' when there is still a discussion of how to relate population to military units.

On the other hand, I think you put your finger on something by indicating that what a city produces from a given Resource could change dramatically due to other developments in the game.

To take your instance, an Iron Mine at Tech: Iron-Working or maybe Early Metallurgy might represent a shallow mine producing 2 Iron per turn. Develop deep mines with sophisticated timber shoring and early pumps and that same deposit can produce 4 - 5 Iron per turn - but shortly after that you enter the Industrial Era with its railroads, steam railroads, ironclads, heavy artillery, and you are going to need every bit of Iron you can squeeze out of every deposit!

As to the human resource requirements for Units, assume that 1 population point allows you to build 1 Unit in the early game.
Conscription, a Tech or Civic, might allow you to build 2 - 4 Units per population point, but for every X number of units you lose in battle, you lose a population point from a city or the city population stops growing for X turns - because with conscription you aren't just taking a few, you are pulling a large percentage of your young men into the military and if they don't come back it affects your population statistics for the next generation: No Fathers = No Children.

The actual output/Resource or Population could vary enormously based on technological or civic/social changes throughout the game. Having Dynamic outputs would also place a greater burden on the gamer to optimize his Resources, when what the gamer does potentially makes a 100 - 300% difference in what they get from the game map.

 

[aieeegrunt]

Civ2 had a pretty simple and elegant way of encorporating size limits into militaries based on both how productive the society was and the type of government by having units cost hammers to maintain.

Depending on the type of government you got a certain amount of units “for free”. The less authoritarian a government type was typically the more productive it was, but often maintaining a military was very punishing. Often as a democracy or republic there was a strong incentive for a “peace dividend” as soon as possible

It was also a great anti snowball technique since maintaining a large military drastically reduced your ability to do anything else.

It worked great, simple, clean and effective

 

[Boris Gudenuf]

Civ2 had a pretty simple and elegant way of encorporating size limits into militaries based on both how productive the society was and the type of government by having units cost hammers to maintain.

Depending on the type of government you got a certain amount of units “for free”. The less authoritarian a government type was typically the more productive it was, but often maintaining a military was very punishing. Often as a democracy or republic there was a strong incentive for a “peace dividend” as soon as possible

It was also a great anti snowball technique since maintaining a large military drastically reduced your ability to do anything else.

It worked great, simple, clean and effective

Making Production the measure of Unit Cost for maintenance as well as formation of units is elegant in that it shows the 'hidden cost' of putting your population in the military which is that it also reduces the numbers of productive people in your economy.

On the other hand (and this is relatively Minor) it doesn't, by itself, show the measures that a government could take to reduce this 'hidden cost', by exempting certain 'war industries' from losing workers, adding women and children to the workforce (famously, the Soviet Union had a workforce consisting of over 50% women and children under the age of 15 in their factories by 1944, but Britain and the USA also put a very greatly increased percentage of women into the Industrial workforce during the war)

Any and all of these could be wrapped up in the bonuses or attributes for various governments, or even be made more granular by attaching them to Civics or Social Policies to be inacted (with, perhaps, Costs also attached) during wartime - and some of those policies could, in fact, be made prohibitively expensive for certain governments or societies (also famously, the Nazi heirarchy refused to put German women into the factories: their totalitarian government was over-ridden by their extremely conservative social outlook!)

 

[aieeegrunt]

Making Production the measure of Unit Cost for maintenance as well as formation of units is elegant in that it shows the 'hidden cost' of putting your population in the military which is that it also reduces the numbers of productive people in your economy.

On the other hand (and this is relatively Minor) it doesn't, by itself, show the measures that a government could take to reduce this 'hidden cost', by exempting certain 'war industries' from losing workers, adding women and children to the workforce (famously, the Soviet Union had a workforce consisting of over 50% women and children under the age of 15 in their factories by 1944, but Britain and the USA also put a very greatly increased percentage of women into the Industrial workforce during the war)

Any and all of these could be wrapped up in the bonuses or attributes for various governments, or even be made more granular by attaching them to Civics or Social Policies to be inacted (with, perhaps, Costs also attached) during wartime - and some of those policies could, in fact, be made prohibitively expensive for certain governments or societies (also famously, the Nazi heirarchy refused to put German women into the factories: their totalitarian government was over-ridden by their extremely conservative social outlook!)

Keep it simple the way earlier wiser Civs did, have it change depending on government type, with potentially it also being affected (up or down) by cards.

I hadn’t thought avout the Kinder, Kuche, Kirche thing but I could see a card for that that boosts city growth by 20% but costs you -10% production, and another Rosie The Riviter card that does the opposite.

Also a Shiftwork card that boosts production by 40% but -4 Amenities and -40% city growth.

 

[Mahi]

There are definitely things that can improve from Civ 6 but as much as I loved Civ 4 and 5 I find it difficult to go back to because Civ 6 gives you much different play styles than the earlier game. Civ 6 is also the game that I must admit, in the end I have struggled the most to master as all around. Especially the limited worker charges and district placement are a huge game changer for me from Civ 4 and 5. To this day I still make stupid mistakes or miss huge bonus opportunities because I didn't think it all through in the end.
Civ 5 is much more of a "cruise" because you don't really have to think about too much other than controlling happines and income in the beginning.

The thing I do really enjoy and miss when I sometimes go back and play Civ 4 or 5 is the policy trees. I'm not a particular huge fan of policy cards but it's actually because I don't find them fun to manage. They still reward players who love fine tuning. I'm not sure I want to go back to policy trees though so it would be really interesting to see a new version of policies.

And also Civ 6 should always be played with mods that improves the information and UI available to the player. It would be nice if they invested a bit time to improve this in vanilla Civ 7. I REALLY miss the diplomacy relation chart in Civ 4 for example.

 

[HorseshoeHermit]

The problem with using citizens outside of cities is that they are not a set unit of a quantity of something. A citizen can cost 10 Food or 100, so not all citizens are equal. It would make more sense for units to just cost Food. A big city might be able to produce four units without losing a citizen while a small city might lose a citizen right away when producing just a single unit. But even that might still not scale well, making the cost too prohibitive early and too neglible late. Also, there's the issue of maintenance. Do they still consume 2 Food per turn? If so, from where? Is there a global stockpile of Food for your military, maybe that's what you build Granaries for?

[...]

If military units are produced with food, that could go toward having the system of multiproduction queues, because here, there is then a strategic cost to making military units again even though you can also build infrastructure at the same time.

Expanding on this subject of sourcing and maintaining military units. . .

Just a few comments on a very good statement of the Problem:

I would argue that the "problem with using citizens outside of cities" in Civ at least, is that there is no in-game measurement of citizens or population outside of cities. The only population measure is the number of Pops in each city, and the Civ total is the total of all the cities. All population 'working' tiles outside of the city have always (as far as I am aware) been related directly to the pop of the city: want to work another tile, either move someone or add someone to the city.

I've posted on this long ago, but in a game spanning 6000 years there simply cannot be a fixed ratio of population to unit. The largest organized permanent or semi-permanent (between wars) unit in ancient Egypt and Mesopotamia seems to have been between 600 and 1200 men, and anything larger was indicated by words that all translate as "host" or Whoever Shows Up. By the Industrial Era, 1200 men is barely a Regiment of infantry, and European powers like Britain, France, Prussia, Russia and Austria in the Napoleonic Wars fielded 100s of regiments each. To avoid trying to manipulate units by the hundreds in the mid-game, the unit to population ratio has to be on a sliding scale - and that suggests that the population Point to City population measure also has to be a sliding scale to accommodate the earliest cities at >20,000 and 20th century cities at <10,000,000.

At least in the mid-20th century, the US Army's Maneuver Control manual of the mid-1950s assumed that a unit that lost 10% of its personnel within a few minutes was ineffective for the rest of the day, but that was for units of platoon or company size - less than 100 men. During WWII the German and Soviet armies both kept divisions in the line and fighting when they had lost up to 75% of their combat strength, but the Germans, at least, didn't expect those units to mount a sustained attack successfully. How much and what kind of losses a unit can sustain and continue to function is, frankly, more a matter of the morale and leadership - 'soft' factors - than numbers and equipment, which makes it difficult to put hard numbers to them.

To your summary on gameplay and abstractions required I would simply add that whether or not some kind of citizen/population figure is used, that cannot be the sole criteria. Societies (and in game terms, that means Religions and their tenets, Governments, Civics, Social Policies) may have more effect than 'raw' population numbers on military capacity, no matter how the population numbers are divided into tile, city, or Specialist workers.

I am interested in iterating the "sliding scale" factor of population ratio to unit size. Once again, I'm going to point to Caveman2Cosmos. However, in C2C, this is only a system that is literally just there, it isn't a given that the gameplay is balanced around it at all, but C2C attaches a "size" measure to each unit on the field. It essentially describes the number of warriors actually present in the unit, with a logarithmic scale that has "sole individual" at the bottom, "30-50" in the middle somewhere, and goes up to thousands, and even millions. One idea is that combat outcomes can depend on the numbers of soldiers that are brought to an engagement. (Also, it even factors into some of the noncombatant abilities that C2C units have, like detecting criminals and spies, which I mention just to brainstorm.)

It is, I assume, a given that one thing you mean when you bring up the idea of a player's units having a certain count-of-heads magnitude, is to factor that into the combat result formula, but I think I want to extract from you more about the unit production side of things, and also the progression through eras and technology. You reference the idea that regiments of soldiers have become greater and greater by orders of magnitude in our own history, and I believe you're implying that this is a secondary reason why a less developed army would be utterly ineffective put against an advanced one, (secondary to the difference in the weapons themselves). It makes me think of having a dynamic where a player in the game can have an army, but they do not multiply their numbers and so you run into the situation of representing on the map a totally irrelevant and ineffectual cadre of warriors once you get into the upper turns.

Like, I think of it as strange how, in Civ V and Civ VI, you can even have an archer stand in front of a tank. It feels as though the standards for what can even count as a military asset would evolve globally and automatically obsolete the archer, disbanding it. Put another way, I mean, as a Human being standing there in the mud with a bow, how is it possible that they would even charge the tank, I do not care how well drilled you are. So, while thinking of these reasons, I am curious to inject into the game this headcount statistic for the units we build, which the game's combat rules and possibly other systems on the maintenance side, will consider and calculate.

Maybe if we bring back the Civ2 army support thing (also successfully used in Alpha Centauri) where soldiers are supported with hammers, in combination with a units as population limiter, this can provide a counter effect to the snowballing issue. (Here, "the snowballing issue" is the problem for fun created by the numbers of your output becoming blindingly large and everything becoming too plentiful too fast to even take seriously - in a 4X game where you don't have any increasing costs or diminishing returns.)