[Civ7] Give farms and agriculture in general more importance.

[Naokaukodem]

Agriculture has been a revolution in humandkind history. In Civ6, we sometime struggle to get the feudalism boost (build 6 farms) !

And, Maize giving gold is pretty nice.

So I thought : I once emitted the idea that production was representing the internal economy. (because you can't build spaceships out of horse bones, no no no. ) Why not make food, that is not only for growth purpose in reality, if not at all, but more for an economic boost and the udder of some strong economies, if not all, more modulable so you can either obtain, or exchange food for gold or production ?

Hmmm it sounds like the gone sliders for science/gold. Except it would be food/production/gold ! (and possibly other types, like faith) And, it could be changed tile by tile instead of globally or city-located.

It's not that idiot, because you would have to make a choice between growth and other things. Basically you could do anything one can still now do in Civ6, but with farm everywhere, and you could even have good production in a capital that has few hills ! Now that's balancing things in multiplayer heh ?

What do you think ?

EDIT : I forgot to mention that every fertile lands would be first colonized by trees, that would have to be managed in order to be able to build farms. Hence the need of an infrastructure (like, in terms of Civ6, being able to build many builders) in order to benefit truly from this new farm ability. Young cities would still rely early on bonus resources and city placement.

 

[Amrunril]

Rather than directly converting food to other yields, I think you could create similar strategic options by increasing the value of specialists. The more food rich tiles you're working, the more specialist slots you can work without starving or sacrificing growth. If engineer specialists were more competitive with mines, and if science yields were more dependent on scientist specialists than on flat building yields, then investing in farms to support specialists would be a valuable path towards generating other yields.

 

[Sostratus]

Rather than directly converting food to other yields, I think you could create similar strategic options by increasing the value of specialists. The more food rich tiles you're working, the more specialist slots you can work without starving or sacrificing growth. If engineer specialists were more competitive with mines, and if science yields were more dependent on scientist specialists than on flat building yields, then investing in farms to support specialists would be a valuable path towards generating other yields.

In large part a lot of civ5 worked around this loose concept because specialists were also your source of GPP. One thing we lost, though, was the ability to have specialists at the city level (rather than district level) so we could have more freedom with the system. And we lost the unemployed citizen specialist (i think they produce 2 gold now? or something?)

 

[mitsho]

I agree:the old concept of food/production/gold/science/etc. is not current anymore. It worked in 1993 for civ 1, but nowadays it is an oversimplification. It was needed once due to computer processing power, but now we can do better. Yours is a soft solution, but it still makes a city dependent on the food grown arount itself. Rather, it shifts the balance towars food heavy cities as they can adapt the slider. My own proposal is simpler than yours:

1) Gold + Production are combined. Buying units, buildings, infrastructure makes more sense in a game representing all of history. Wonderd might need to be bought in phases though.

2) Food is local, meaning it feeds the population of the tile itself. If you want to use the food of the farm to feed a city, you have to build up a trade network that moves the excess food. And make sure its safe and the population is content. The distribution is then calculated automatically.

3) Science, Culture, Faith and everything else is combined into a new yield: Governance. As it is the state that ultimately decides in which areas he wants to spend his resources. (Science) Buildings or specialists then do the opposite from what they are doing now. Instead of producinh more (Science), they lower the costs (of techs), open up new ones or raise the threshold of how much you are allowed to invest and still keep your population happy (science in relation to faith infrastructure). Also, what you do will influence what you can do afterwards, by way of random events, adjacencies or other elements. So, Science doesn't vanish, you are just freer to switch strategies.

 

[Lord Lakely]

I'm going to float two ideas: Water and Food Processing

Water: Add a Water Table (or Lens) to the game, showing which tiles make ideal cropland. Farms built on those tiles will yield more food. Conversely, make pastures/camps a tile improvement you can place anywhere and are alternatives for Farms on tiles where the soil is less rich. (Example: Farms can provide extra food when built on fertile land, but pastures/camps don't get extra food bonuses on those tiles. Instead, the provide production and gold respectively, regardless of resources). Irrigation ditches, cisterns and watermills can be added as tile improvements that help your agrilculture (and that can coexist besides them. Tell me why the game shouldn't have a separete layer for support infrastructure? We can already build farms on top of roads, so why not be allowed to build other stuff on top of them as well?). I personally would not be opposed to having "Water" added as a resource either, with cities needing both Water and Food to produce and sustain population, creating the opportunity for more buildings, such as Fountains, Bathhouses and Swimming Pools (all staple buildings in a self-respecting city) to be added to the game.

Food Processing; Shops are the liveblood of any city and by adding buildings that process/sell food you can exponentially increase the value of food. A Bakery can turn that source of Wheat/Rice/Maize into more food. A Brewery can turn the same source of Wheat/Rice/Maize into an Amenity. A Confectionary can turn that Wheat/Rice/Maize into a gold (or culture) tile. There are plenty of ways to implement this: You can slap extra yields on top of the food resources if you build that building. You can add buidings that provide +n yields for every x tile improvements. You can add manufacturable resources, such as Bread, Beer and Pastries to the game, which provide Amenities, additional yields or other effects (such as +% growth) when hooked up to the city.

Both of these would tie in well with a Health/Hygiene mechanic. Fresh water often results in larger cities since waste disposal is easier and the fields remain irrigated and fertile, while food variety and fermented/preserved foods (example: pickled cucumbers, smoked fish, cured meat, blue cheese, yeasted bread, alcoholic beverages, marmelade) last longer AND have historically prevented the spread of diseases. (Fresh water and veggies are fine now, but before the advent of microbiology were a common source of illnesses due to the high amount of bacteria that were, and still are found in soil)

Keep in mind however that while more meaningful mechanics would be awesome, they would also push Civilization 7 further away from Turn Based Strategy and straight into the Historical Builder category that resulted in overtly complex, easy to win games.

 

[Myomoto]

I think the system as is is generally fine, but as already mentioned the problem is the specialist yields.

Apart from making specialists more critical, I would also like to see internal trade routes give yields based maybe more on tile improvements rather than districts (or just from the city's yields directly). If I have a city with tons of farmlands, it should be the one that supplies the rest of my empire with food. If I have a lot of lumber mills and mines, this should supply my empire with production.

 

[Boris Gudenuf]

Interesting Thread, and a bunch of us seem to have been considering some of the same problems in the game - or the next rendition of it.
First , as always in my thinking, the Historical Basis:
1. Unless/until you had water transportation (coast or river) or railroads, all the food for a city comes from a radius of about 100 - 150 km around it. No improvement in road/animal transport will extend that by much. That means any city not on a river or a coast (or, preferably, both) can only be fed from about a 1 tile radius.
2. People seem to have developed agriculture to exploit only a few useful crops in their climate/terrain area. I don't know of any group that suddenly started cultivating Everything: Chinese neolithic sites raised rice and millet, Mespotamian sites raised wheat of several kinds, etc. In other words, each Civ has a Staple Crop that it winds up planting on every suitable bit of terrain. Changing the Staple Crop for a civ is really, really hard, and requires that there be an obvious and unavoidable Benefit from changing. Note that even today, when technology allows us to grow almost anything anywhere, Americans still base their diet on Wheat (the European Staple) and the other Staple Crops - maize, potato, rice - are strictly secondary as Human Food (because, Maize is by volume the most grown crop in the world, but that's because of its widespread use as animal feed and chemical additive - corn oil - and biofuel source)
3. There are distinct historical/technological Multipliers for every Stale Crop: the 'three field' crop rotation for wheat, the multiple annual crops for rice, the Three Sisters polycrop system with maize as its base, the multiple-variety development of potato, and, of course, development of irrigation systems, fertilizers, and mechanized processing for all of them. That means the game can have in perfectly historical fashion points for all the Staple Crops at which the Food/Tile increases dramatically.

From these basics here's what I've come up with so far:

The Bonus Resources indicating the Staple Crops would only appear on the map before you started exploiting them, or had the capability to exploit them. So, if your starting position is next to Maize, that's what you will 'plant' - on every available suitable tile. The 'maize graphic' will appear on every such tile that has a farm, ad the bonuses from Maize will appear on every such farmed tile, because that's what your little digital farmers are cultvating everywhere they possibly can.

The Staple Crops I define as:
Maize
Potato
Rice
Korn - a very useful word, that applies to all the 'grass grains' - wheat, millet, rye, barley, etc. This keeps us from needing up to a half-dozen different graphics for crops that essentially have the same characteristics in game terms.

Each Staple has not only a Food Value, but also a potential 'bonus value' - which may only be unlocked with Technology. For instance, all of them can produce a Distilled spirits Amenity/Trade Good once you have distillation and build Distilleries to exploit it. Ask Canada or Scotland ho much Gold a good distilled spirit can produce IRL!

Maize, as mentioned, can also increase production from Cattle, Sheep, or Horses because of its value as Feed. Maize or Korn (oats) are also required to get large military horses (Horses in the wild, like the American mustang herds, don't get much over 14 hands high, which is the lower range for a riding horse, and not large enough to carry a man, heavy saddle, armor and equipment - larger horses require Feed, not foraging) Rice and Potato are probably the most concentrated Food Bonus producers of the lot and Potato also has the advantage of thriving in extremes of altitude and climate beyond the other Staple Crops.

This is all Initial Thoughts on the matter, but potentially, such a 'built in crop' system has the advantage of vastly increasing the usefulness of Farms, and the Bonus Resource related to Food Crops adds variety to the Civs - based on your Staple, there will be an 'automatic difference' in how your cities develop.
By increasing the Food Value of farms with the Staple Crop, this also allows exploitation of the other biological Resources on other tiles without 'eating into' your Food Production. Cattle, Horses, Sheep, all have Non-Food uses in Production, Military, and Trade (leather, mounted units and Wool, respectively) but also take up large amounts of land that otherwise would feed a lot more people. Really useful (read: over 15 hands tall) horses require Food that would otherwise go to people (maize, Korn as in oats) so your ability to form Heavy Cavalry units could be tied to the availability of the Bonus from certain Staples. This would allow the recreation for good or ill of China's problem with cavalry horses - she bought them from the 'Northern Barbarians' throughout most of her history because she couldn't afford to sequester enough farm land for horse feed, and the Human Food in China, rice, was not very suitable for feeding horses.

 

[HorseshoeHermit]

Let's talk about the idea of shuttling food around from one city to many. Which aspect of the real history would be fun/challenging to institute as a mechanic? I imagine a few things are implied at base by this idea:

• Food will travel along some kind of maintained ROUTE, so, either roads or a caravan.
• The food will be leveled out to all cities on a common network, as though the cities had demand for food simply proportional to their size.
• As a result, whatever Food does in this Civ7, those cities will experience about the same benefit (consumption and supply proportional to mouths).

Naturally then, to specialize food production to one city, you obtain more economic power in the other city... so the power of the tiles that did not become farms will be how that occurs. And, the fact that the population does not work as farmers, if citizens and tiles are in some substantive way distinct in Civ7.

I immediately feel more pull to what Boris has said just above. I can see the tile features in my mind, but I'm concerned about the first part, of spreading the seeds around. How to model that and how much to model. For six iterations, "ideas" have been an advancement owned by the player at a global level and instantly transmitted everywhere. I have found the designs for tech/civic transmission rather ambitious and doubted their success, but maybe trying it with foods as you say would be a good stepping stone.

 

[Sostratus]

Which aspect of the real history would be fun/challenging to institute as a mechanic?

I think the part players might enjoy would be the trade off between investing in your (Trade) infrastructure and the increased efficiency of improvements. If you have a bunch of small cities it wouldn’t really matter, but if you have to feed a megalopolis, suddenly you do care about effectively making food in one place and bringing it elsewhere.

Most concepts like this- not just in food but also production- usually get bogged down in the fact that micro management of the proposal would be its death.
I think resurrecting the “ city connection” as a core economic mechanic and tie things into that would probably be able to keep things really simple, especially if it’s layered.
Extremely simplified Example:
Basic (road) connection: share luxuries/amenities with the empire
River/Canal/Harbor connection:
Can share things like Food surplus with the empire
Railroad connection: Allows the benefits of water connection for landlocked cities

Airport connection: I have no idea, some other thing.

But having these be part of a duality where trade routes themselves / passive tax income also scale on that type of infrastructure would be neat.

The idea of having a separate tile layer for stuff like irrigation, navigable canals, aqueducts, etc, would really help too. You could introduce it to players by having an early tech around flood control- farms on rivers being the prime beneficiary if you build irrigation. And some later tech allowing you to extend irrigation from a fresh water source outward (a la Civ4 civil service.)
Slap on maintenance costs and you’ve really got a system going...

 

[The googles do nothing]

There's a relationship between food and happiness that missing. Food riots seems more appropriate then partisans appearing because of a lack of oranges.

Basically you could do anything one can still now do in Civ6, but with farm everywhere, and you could even have good production in a capital that has few hills ! Now that's balancing things in multiplayer heh ?

Instead of giving food more of a production how about farms only produce food with out production or housing but take no worker? Freeing up the workers from the farm tiles (could) balance out the difference in productivity.

 

[Boris Gudenuf]

To add some fuel to the fire . . .

@Sostratus has it right - right up to Airport Connection, which allows great increases in Production through 'just in time' deliveries of parts and components - the possible Global Production Supply Chains we 'enjoy' now. It could also be part of a Modern/Information Era Tech advance: Containerization, in which the number of different transportion connections you have increases your gold and production base: Containers allow easy movement of goods from truck (road) to railroad to sea to air efficiently, which means that the more transportation lines you have connected to your city, the more efficiency of Production and Trade revenue that Containerization provides. Container freight traffic is one of the great Unknown Advances in Trade of the past 500 years, arguably as great an advance as steam propulsion for shps, but it has, to my knowledge, never been explicitly modeled in any game.

Another point is that while Staple Foods to make a difference to a city population require shipments measured in 100s or 1000s of tons per turn, so cannot be traded or transported except by ship or railroad or modern truck/highways, Luxury Foods like Wine, Spices, Honey, and other 'Luxury' organics like Dyes, Silk, Olives (Olive Oil) can be transported by cart or pack animal with economic benefits - a few hundred pounds of spices or dyestuff is worth it, a few hundred pounds of wheat or rice flour is not.

Finally, note that part of the mechanism for making Something New in tile exploitation work is already in the game Endless Legend and the new historical 4X Humankind - in both of those games the city automatically can 'work' all tiles adjacent to a city tile. City tile meaning a District/Quarter or similar. That mechanic would mean that, for example, a tile is automatically worked by the city, but to make that tile really lucrative you'd have to build a Farm/Pasture/Plantation/Mine/'Extractor' on it, and then Technological changes like various forms of Irrigation (I can think of at least three 'levels' of Irrigation that could be in the game from Ancient to Modern Eras), Fertilizer advances (a product of Chemistry!) and mechanization of agriculture could then increase the basic 'yields' as the game progresses.

As tor 'seeding' the tiles, that should be automatic: once you have access to a Food Crop, farmers will plant it everywhere and at the Game Scale you don't have to explicitly model the farmers. In other words, if the staritng radius of your first city has Maize in it, you will plant Maize everywhere you can. If you have several Staple Crops - like, say, Korn and Rice, they will e 'plantable' on different types of terrain (at first - technology changes that later on also), so you can exploit more than one Staple on a wider range of terrain - China, for historical example, divided into a northern tier eating Wheat/Millet based food (Korn) and a southern tier eating Rice. Europe, once it had access after the 16th century, planted Wheat everywhere it could as it had for centuries, but also planted Potato in places where, due to shorter growing season and poor soil, wheat wouldn't grow well.

 

[Sostratus]

To add some fuel to the fire . . .

i feel the cornerstone is a good underlying, simple, yet powerful mechanic that all these features of history can tie into.

We could say that a general direction of advancement is that the player can aggregate more and more "power" at the empire level vs the local level over the course of the game. The broad design goal here is to allow us to have this high level of detail become abstracted in late game so you don't have to click so darn much managing 20 cities.
But let's take Amenities. In civ4 you need to connect resources with roads to plug them into your trade network. So here we can pretend that most cities start off isolated with just a few local options for amenities - any nearby resource, plus perhaps a rudimentary building line that unlocks over time. There's also an empire level pool, like now, that is clearly displayed on the UI. By hooking up to the network, the city can then send its surplus amenities out. As time goes on you may be able to get more amenities from resources, entertainment, (local sources) but eventually perhaps even from your ideology itself just existing. (Empire level.)

Okay, now we can talk about food. At first everything is local, but the player is aware of an empire level food pool. You need to build and improve these connections and trade infrastructure to increase how effectively cities contribute to the pool. This total balance is clearly shown on the screen. (it would be how much food surplus or deficit from having all cities* sitting at stagnation.) Because late game, we can imagine that food is grown in fertile areas to feed big cities elsewhere. But it also makes the tedium go down because if I need more food I can build farms almost anywhere.

You could come up with something for production too, but I'm not sure what empire level production could or would be used for. I think you'd have to come up with things, sort of like national projects or campaigns. I could see a system though, where cities can contribute say half their production to the empire level effort, and maybe that is "spaceship parts" or "build wealth" or needed for wonders or something.

You can apply this to other stuff too; but a central pillar of "local->empire level" would be vital to having these types of systems make any sense. And it needs to be paired with a very clean UI that's one click to "turn off sharing" if you need fine control.
Containerization? Railroads? Maglev? Amazon Drones? Pick a neat bonus to the functioning of your network.

As an aside I think i would make the concept of trade itself, like half your actual economy. I haven't figured out the perfect way to express it but something that balances things like traders scaling with or without empire size, the fact that you want to encourage trade nodes to organically develop, etc. Probably something relating to a collector-emitter model where "trade value" can "build up" in cities/nodes and then your traders "harvest it" and bring it back home. The more effective your traders become, the more they can bring back... eventually allowing you to have more and more trading partners/ tapping into the full value of economic exchange with any given partner. IDK.

 

[Boris Gudenuf]

Local versus 'Empire Wide' or more accurately, 'Regional Plus' could be considered, and could be made the basis of the game, as 'Fame' is for the new Humankind game: the essential marker for how well your Civ is progressing.

But that means, at the most basic level, it has to be based on Trade/Transportation Connections, and that means the most important of those have to be easily shown on the map. That means going back to the older Civ model in which Rivers, the most important historical trade routes, should be in the middle of tiles, not on their edges, so that their direct impact on the movement of goods (and Units, for that matter) can be shown graphically.

This would allow an immediate indicator of Connection: All cities with a City Center/District (and all ordinary Districts would have to be adjacent to another District or the City Center - another nice touch swiped from Humankind) on or adjacent to the same river would be Connected from the start (river boats predate the 4000 BCE Start of Game). That means Food, Production Bonuses, Gold would all be shared among them - barring other difficulties, like the fact that the government is a City State type so the individual cities jealously guard their Gold and Production and Food or charge Top Drachma for them.

Without a river or coastal water connection, within a radius that changes with technology (road-building, better wheeled vehicles, etc) a city could trade Luxuries or some Production Bonuses (Obsidian blades, etc) but not Staple Food or Industrial Level amounts of goods and services.

This Connected/Disconnected Status could also be a major modifier for Loyalty, Religious Spread, or even Cultural Diversity. Not to mention the already mentioned concept of government types that make a 'virtue' of Disconnectedness, like City States.

It would also be a mechanic related to the perennial Tall Versus Wide debate in Civ: a basic definition of a Tall Empire would be one in which all the cities and regions are Connected.

A host of technologies and Civic/Cultural choices would be influenced and influence the Connected nature of your Civ: obviously better transportation technology, but also Coinage, Currency, Markets, Banking, Credit, Insurance, Stock Exchanges, Warehousing, Granary and Harbor infrastructure would all enhance or make possible the Trade Connections. A Directed Economy or God King-like directed Empire would make it possible to specify trade routes and amounts, but a City State or Local Tribal government with 'Free (or more accurately, 'uncontrolled') Market' economy would encourage multiple routes and a larger economy overall, even though you the God King Player might not be easily able to access all that wealth - but it would affect the growth of your cities and economy.

Implemented well, such a system would vastly increase the diversity of player options wthout having to throw in fantasy elements, which alone would be a nice change in Civ VI . . .

Oh, and for those that are concerned about such things, we could have rivers divided into two types: small streams and watercourses that are not navigable by boats that show on the tile edge/side like now, and the Navigable Connection rivers that flow down the center of the tile. Either one would give access to potable water for population, or water flow for Power, but only the Navigable river would Connect - and as the boats get larger, even those might have to be Improved with new channels and canals to keep them navigable, the sort of thing that China did with its Grand Canal, USA did with the Erie Canal, and most of western Europe did canalizing its rivers throughout the 18th and 19th centuries.

 

[HorseshoeHermit]

There's an interesting geometric fact about hex tilings. If you consider the edges between hexes to be hexes themselves, and sort of "blow up" the tiling to twice the resolution, then you can represent the edges between hexagons as hexagons in a regular hex tiling all over again. In case I can't explain myself I have prepared a simple sketch of the idea:

Spoiler :

Looking at the tiling on the left, see the green hexes as the real hexes and consider each other hex as referring to an edge between those hexes, color-coded according to that edge's orientation. Purple for vertical, orange for slant down, and blue for slant up.

I am sure that something helpful on the codebase side can be made of this observation. Last time I peeped at the Civ5 DLL, it seems that references to the tile borders was as an extension of the tile, the "NE, E, or SW" side, etc.

---
The problem with putting rivers as a tile, though, as expressed in a YT comment on some Humankind gameplay, is that, as a position for a military unit, you are either on one side of a river or the other. Rivers must remain an attribute that awakens only to color a relationship between two hexes, as in a movement or a maneuver like a river-crossing. One option exists, which would be to have a two-tiered tiling, in which 1/4 of the tiles are "real" tiles as destinations for unit movements, while the others are drawn to show rivers, are always hopped over in military maneuvers, and cannot be the site of anything other than these water routes that Boris talks about.

 

[Sostratus]

The problem with putting rivers as a tile, though

I think the between tile rivers need to stay, and workaround be had. Anyone who's dealt with farmland knows you never want to end up with land on both sides of the river...
There's no need to have river traffic be units moving about. the can just be animations on the map if needed.

 

[Boris Gudenuf]

I think the between tile rivers need to stay, and workaround be had. Anyone who's dealt with farmland knows you never want to end up with land on both sides of the river...
There's no need to have river traffic be units moving about. the can just be animations on the map if needed.

@HorseshoeHermit , back in the 1950s the RAND Corp research group did a study on hexagonal geometries. Don't know why or what the original purpose was, but it was the basis for the original Avalon-Hill military board game maps with hexagonal 'squares'. I vaguely remember reading the study back in High School, but unfortunately have no idea where you'd find a copy now.

For simplicity in map generation, the rivers could be kept Tactical, as in on the edge of tiles so that the 'battle' modifiers are easy to figure, but another possibility, also 'borrowed' from Humankind (and numerous other games) would be to have tactical battles take place on an expanded tactical map. That way, rivers could be depicted on the regular map as required to show Trade or Connections, while on the tactical map the river could be shown as the divider between two armies - or, depending on how the armies got to the 'battle tile' as a boundary on one or another flank with both armies on the same side of the river.

Either way, a navigable river needs to provide not just a bonus, but an entirely new Class of Trade and Connection, along with coastal boats/ships and later railroads and modern trucking and highways. Quite simply, you cannot trade certain goods without one of those Routes. No historical combination of animal-drawn transport (or pack animal) and road will supply a city with Food in enough quantity to make any difference at the Game Scale.
Basically, ALL Trade Routes need to be divided into river/coast/railroad and wagon/road/pack animal. The latter allow you to trade Luxury/Amenity Goods of all kinds and even Strategic Resources early in the game - 50 pounds of iron can practically be back-packed by a man, and it will serve to equip a heavy infantryman with armor and weapons. 50 pounds of Copper will provide blades for a lot of workers - so even Production can be traded early on by overland route.

Until the Industrial Era.
I've posted on this at length before, but basically, once you are producing at the Industrial Level with Steel Mills, Factories, etc, the quantities of Resources required go well beyond anything that non-mechanized transport can provide. A single Ironclad now requires several thousand tons of iron/steel, and producing that iron/steel requires more thousands of tons of ore, coke or charcoal, limestone, and, within 50 years, alloy metals by the ton like nickel, manganese, chromium and molybdenum. Water transportation or Railroads are Required to build and use Factories, and a massive increase in the ability to extract Resources is also required (which is one reason the first steam engines were used to pump water out of Deep Mines used to extract the ores by the thousands of tons - at the same time a single Ship-of-the-Line required 3 - 500 tons of cast iron cannon, or about 4 times more iron ore than was required to equip an entire Roman Legion 1500 years earlier!)

All of which means that Connections as we've been talking about, for about the first 1/3 to 1/2 of the game will be based on Rivers and Coasts, the access to water transport, both to feed really big cities and to Connect them to other cities.

I suspect that also means that Map Generation algorithms will have to change, because so far, in observing several hundred game maps over the past couple of years, the really long and important Connecting Rivers don't appear on Civ VI maps, even on Pangaea continents. At most, the average map gives you room for no more than 2 - 3 cities on a single river, and at least one of those will be in a mediocre location useful only if they can receive bonuses from the other cities. We need at least a few Great Rivers on the map: like the historical Tigris-Euphrates, Hwang-Ho, Rhine-Main-Meuse, Ohio-Mississippi, Volga-Don-Dnepr (the fact that all three start or flow within 100 km of each other is why Moscow is where it is) systems.

Parenthetically, rivers could also extend the city radius, if we want to keep the current Civ system: historically you should only be able early in the game to access the tiles next to a city tile, but along both sides of a navigable river, the 'radius' could extend 2 - 3 more tiles, so that even a city on a river that doesn't directly connect with other cities would still gain an advantage from better communication by barge and boat to resources along the river - and Irrigation systems and canal systems cold extend that 'radius' even further and to include tiles away from the river.

 

[HorseshoeHermit]

I'm getting a sense that a game which employs these concepts will take a different shape...

• Civs 2 through 6: The world has tiles which have features. A player is an empire that has claimed some city sites. Cities extract yields from tiles based on their features. Yields evolve the empire and thrust it to the final tally.
• The Civ being described here: The world has tiles which have terrain features. Tiles have people living on them, and industry generated there. Natural methods, and later artificial methods, allow [the livelihoods on tiles] to become connected to each other to greater and greater ends, beginning with boat cargo and the city. Players guide populations to develop through [???]. The industry, financial power, cultural products, etc. of networked populations propel the player's "people" to their final tally.

I like it. But something is missing from continuing to extend our concept pool this way. In the form of a question, put to @Sostratus : When you connect resources to the network, what does the player have to not do, to do that? What are you paying with, or doing, or choosing? Should I take it you still mean that we are making Builders and sending them around to do jobs? In that case, we must design more than 1 kind of job that must be done, or we would be pestered as the designers to have made the cost of those builders be taken directly out of our yield-paycheques in a streamlined roadmaking process.
Somewhere there must be a contrivance to make a game out of it, as we do not want the system to just play itself. (Ho hum, sometimes it seems that, in fact, plenty of players would buy a game that did itself!) I am comfortable putting off the need to identify it as we toy around with concepts for now, so long as we have this understanding. But each time we are saying "the player does [X]", we should know there is an absent choice to be specified.

For sure, it looks like we should have a Civ game that starts talking in terms of 1000s of items and 1000s of people, instead of the 4s and 2s. I would be ready for it, so long as I am not truly asked to calculate finish times by any finicky division with so many significant digits. The idea would just be to show the explosion of scale and efficiency as Boris tells of it - so we can see the output on our mines and factories and see technological superiority over a rival in a number.

And so, if I read it right, Sostratus suggested in #12 that the game of it would be to fold the productive local phenomena into the empire's command, centrally, which of course will help the player "build an empire" to stand the test of time. This requires some program for the procurement of those productivities... some way to describe the change, maybe a percentage bar for how much is arrogated? And of course, some idea of what the player is doing throughout to gain and maintain that arrogation. We need to spell out how governments affect, and reap from, interacting markets or other industrial activity. I can sort of glimpse it... if this part were where we planted our gam-ified contrivances.

 

[Sostratus]

In the form of a question, put to @Sostratus : When you connect resources to the network, what does the player have to not do, to do that? What are you paying with, or doing, or choosing?

Well, I am not specifically advocating that we abandon the "pops work tiles for yields" model. I was just discussing some ways to bring functionality into the game - functionality which would allow the player to exert more empire-level control as the game progresses - that can tie into historical advancements. This is mostly because I feel like the way districts and buildings work now has made the economic game perhaps too heavy on discrete decisions.
In civ5, you had to build roads out and pay maintenance on them. In civ6, things like harbors and canals cost a lot of hammers to put up (and like all things, probably too little to maintain.) So in that sense, you have two kinds of sacrifices: first, you are actively not making something else while putting up this stuff. That's investment not made in your military, or religion, or whatever. Secondly, infrastructure is not cheap to maintain. A road has to be maintained constantly even if no one drives on it. So you want to build up stuff, but not so extensively or so fast that there's no underlying activity to facilitate. And if you cannot defend your vital trade corridor, you are asking for enterprising gentlemen to show up and start collecting Danegeld...

As an example, building a railroad out to small village to add 5 units of food to your empire pool is probably not worth the effort. But maybe having the railroad means you can do other things to grow that city faster.
I'm not sure if an empire level pool of food would be a good idea ultimately, but it's interestingly something a lot of people ask for in some way ("why can't my farming town share food with the metropolis!!")
I do think an empire pool of production would be really interesting if you spent some time to come up with what good use cases would be for it. And I'm not advocating for going to a 100% transfer to empire level, in the same way that culture for social policies doesn't remove the ability of cities to grow their borders. (Limitations and inefficiencies likely influenced by some of the innovations mentioned already!)

 

[acluewithout]

snip

Really good post. Particularly agree with the idea of increasing Empire wide decision making and just adding a bit more historical flavour around things like Railways and Farms (and Irrigation).

I also agree having a Global Food Pool probably won't work with Civ's current design. I don't think a Global Production Pool would work either, given that's basically what Gold and Faith are.

I wish I had some deep thoughts about this topic, but I really don't. But I do have some idle thoughts for what they're worth.

• Work Ethic and Percentages. Civ VI doesn't have many percentage modifiers for yields, and with the last June update got rid of one of the biggest, i.e. Work Ethic +1% Production per Pop, Max 15. I really wonder if maybe this mechanic, and percentages more generally, might be the way to buff the importance of Population and other things in a balanced way.
  
  
• e.g. maybe you could re-work one of the existing buildings (e.g. Shipyard, Stock Exchange, or (bit too predictable) Factory) to give +1% Production per Pop, up to 15%. Something like a railway could give another +5%. You could also have similar sorts of mechanics around Science or Culture etc. I think there's a lot of scope here.
  
  
• Void Singer Ritual etc. I also think the x% * Yield A = Yield B mechanic, e.g. Void Singer's Ritual Promotion and Ethopia's LUA, is a super interesting mechanic. I could see that also getting used via cards or buildings, particularly to give Food more value.
  
  
• e.g., you could have a "Great Leap Forward" Policy Card or Dedication, that convers gives you Production equal to 15% of Food Production (with perhaps negative amenities etc. as a negative), or you could have say a Commercial Hub building that provides Production or Gold equal to a % of Food Production.
  
  
• Temple of Artemis. Other than TOA, I don't offhand know of any Wonders or abilities etc. they give City A a benefit based on X resources being within Y tiles of City A. e.g. TOA grants +1 Amenity for each Plantation, Pasture or Camp within 4 tiles of the TOA, even if they're in a different City to the one that build the TOA. You could do a similar things with Farms - e.g. some City Centre Building that gets +1% Growth for every Farm (or Improved Food Resource) within e.g. 6 or 9 tiles of the City (max 15%). That would maybe let you create a sort of a quasi-"regions" system, particularly if you also required this building couldn't be built within 9 tiles of a similar building in another City.
  
  
• Amenities. I just can't see Amenities ever being relevant unless they change dynamically, so that the number of Amenities you need at any point isn't just fixed by how much Population you have and what policies cards you're running. I don't know the best way to ever achieve that, particular if the game is going to keep its "Board Game" mechanics feel.
  
  
• I think one option would be to enable players to actually spend into negative Gold, but at the cost of reduced amenities (and maybe reduced great people too). The way I see it, there would be some maximum negative you could reach, perhaps based on how many Banks you have in your empire. When you were negative, you could keep spending up to this limit, and units wouldn't automatically delete. But, yeah, you'd suffer reduced amenities as a result (which you could counter with Policies, EC or WPs etc.). This wouldn't make amenities truly "dynamic", because you'd choose when to go into negative Gold, but at least it would let players push the empire to the extremes, like you can by deliberately pushing for Dark Ages, to gain some strategic benefit versus some particular trade-off.
  
  
• Another option would be having the number of amenities required per pop change as you increase in tech, so the more advanced your society, the more your people demand more amenities.

Anyway.

I do wonder if Firaxis ever read these posts about Farms etc., particularly when they're in the I&S Forum. It's a pity if they don't, because I do think it's these real underlying base mechanics where a lot of the game's character gets decided.

I'm interested to see what changes in the next few balance updates, now that the big bug fixes have been addressed and Religious Beliefs and Envoys (somewhat) have been overhauled. I'm curious to see if FXS re-balance buildings, specialists and rationalism-type cards, given these could all have an impact on the value of population (and so the value of farms etc). Interesting times.

 

[Myomoto]

I think city connections is definitely an idea to be revisited, and I think the current system of rivers on the edge of tiles works fine.

Connections could basically work from a kind of tiered system in order of how much food/production the boost/allow you to move.

Roads are the lowest level, but they increase in value over the game, i.e. from cargo carrying donkeys to semitrucks.

Next are harbour and river connections, these would generally allow for the greatest amount of shipping. Cities on the coast would automatically have harbour connections to other cities with harbours or on the coast of the same body of water, but if the city has a harbour district the connection bonus is amplified (proper shipping infrastructure vs. a small fishing village dock). River connections exist as long a the city centre, commercial hub, or industrial zone are bordering on the same river as those of another city. That way a city could be connected to multiple rivers at same time. Rivers could potentially be expanded short distances by canals.

Railways in late game will offer similar shipping bonuses as the rivers have done up until now. The final level of connection is by airports, allowing cargo airplanes to bring goods between even the most remote and otherwise disconnected regions of the empire.

I think such a system is quite light to implement, and wouldn't overly complicate city planning. The bigger question is maybe how to define the city connection bonus. Is it a flat +% to yields like in V, or should it be a more comprehensive system where yields could be exchanged between cities via a kind of shipping system? I.e., send 5 food from one city to another via river, another 2 via land. Then this receiving city sends this food to a third city via railway, etc.

It could very quickly become a very complex system - but I think a quite enjoyable one to play with as well. Disrupting supply lines could wreak havoc on an empire, especially if military units were required to consume some kind of supplies (combination of food+production) to function. Basically a unit would have a number of supplies indicating how many turns it can be sustained outside friendly territory, and it would recharge these either by pillaging or spending time in friendly territory consuming some food + production from the nearby city (in such a scenario, I think stacking of army units would have to return, with a potential tactical map for fighting battles).