ArbitraryGuy said:
What would terrain be? Board squares with different resource values on them? Empty office space? Thanks for the food-for-thought.
Gah! What do I know? I don't even know who the Masons are!
Office space isn't a bad start... something like a "division" or "department," maybe? The point is that each would lean towards a particular capability... an "open" organization like the Vatican would have much more land equivalent to flood plains, while a more secretive one would have lots of production capabilities.
Some brainstorming --
tile = Org Chart "box".
Not sure whether all tiles should be equal or whether some provide more resources than others. If the latter...
grasslands = public departments (food)
plains = internal departments (production).
water = black ops? can't be improved except special resources. Water would be useful in helping you segregate 2 types of units from each other (there are ways to turn off most of the special effects that make the tiles look like water).
As with vanilla Civ, you could improve each org chart box towards food, production, or commerce:
Food - Recruiting department (farm), PR department, etc.
Production - Training center (mine)
Commerce - R&D unit (cottage)
Combo - Brainwashing operations (windmill / food + production)
Some of these improvements could upgrade over time: unit -> department -> division or something like that.
"Bonuses" would not only boost production and add flavor, but also enable special units for those organizations, e.g. the "migrant laborers" resource could be improved with a "human trafficking network" (+2 production, +1 commerce) and also enable some kind of special building or unit.
[btw, another advantage of using the tile system is that you can use city AI to emph food, production, commerce without having to click into the city.]