Do away with the settler

[LDiCesare]

This idea (lack of settlers, exact mechanisms differed a bit) has been implemented in a Call to Power 2 mod ages back. I think it was Ages of Man. When your civ had grown enough and people wanted more space, they'd automatically settle somewhere. It was a very interesting concept. If you have CtP2, you might want to check it.
I don't remember how they handled crossing the seas, however.

 

[AlpsStranger]

It's a neat idea but I have to reject it. It adds realism without adding fun or strategic interest. Realism is a *very* weak card when played alone.

 

[Schuesseled]

I had to scim most of this thread as there were some long posts and well I was eager to get typing. This may be a little hippocritical given I going to make a large post lol.

Well the one main flaw with your arguement, where you say "cities / towns only develop where it is economically viable, where its residents can make a profit" now what you are thinking of here as others have said is how cities are formed when there already exists a civlisation with an economy to speak off, such as when America was colonised. Civ starts off with basically a newly formed tribe, their goals in life are not to make profit, to mine for gold or w.e, but to SURVIVE!, hunter gatehrer people as it were. I think the way Civ does things is fine. Settler units would be people from a tribe who decided they wanted to make a new life away from the tribe. This may happen because of disagreements within the tribe, shifts of power, or if the tribe was getting to big it may need to split its population into more areas so they could all get more food. While Civ doesn't really show this, it more shows some egomaniac wanted to build a vast empire, it is certainly sufficient as is.

However there is one thing about your idea that does make sense, notedly I didnt read it all but, why do we need settlers, for that matter why do we need cities as they are currently used. Really for the idea im going to come up with we would a much bigger map for Civ, as instead of having 1 tile made a city and all buildings made in the city. Why don't we have citizens walking around on tiles building things for the "city". Currently we have like a cultural boundary, this is basically the boundary of the city, and citizens move out into the many tiles in a boundary and build things either automated or by players command, such as farms to improove food, or a baracks to train units, or housing to attract higher amounts of citizens in the "city" This would move Civ out of cities and into the landscape, as it is doing with military units by only allowing 1 per tile. So you would have the Citizens of a city running around inside the city's border building things, thus they would all be workers if you wanted to build a barracks in your city a citizen would stop farming food to feed the city and instead build the barracks. This is an entirely different concept to what is used currently, instead of citizens getting hammers to produce things, citizens build buildings like for example how buildings are built in games like Age of Empies or Command and conquer. Then this barracks can train soldiers for your army. And the barracks would not be in the city tile, but have its own tile out on the land. If you want to "build a settler" instead what you do is simply walk a citizen out of the city, you can then move him to where you want a new city and start building, in classical times he would maybe build a chiefs hut, in modern times a town hall, the point being, this is the hub of the city, new citizens spawn here when enough food is gathered to provide more citizens, and the "culture border" or as it would now be known the city border has the town hall in the middle, from there the citizen builds whatever else the city needs. And so on and so forth, you massive empire is built, not with 1 tile cities and improvements around but the very cities themselfs spread out in the landscape.

I'm not saying this idea should be implemented in Civ 5. But it would be a good basis perhaps for the next Civ. They have done "why have all the army in one tile" in Civ 5. Now they can do "why have all the city in 1 tile" In the next Civ. This would obviously mean more space is taken up, as ideally 1 tile = 1 building, whether that be a farm or a barracks or a library. So yeah... Cities would get BIG. The landscape would need to be equally big. You could maintain 1 tile per military unit, even more so in this new landscape. But Civ 5 limits of 1 swordsman for 1 iron would have to go as the land the armies will need to fight on will be a lot bigger so will the armies. The peaceful side of things would have the game play out as a giant game of "settlers" in that everything was spread out on the landscape yes?, and then when it came to war, It would be like a giant match of total war over your hard work you put into your landscape .

Its good I think because instead of building workers and settlers you use the very citizens themselfs. If you wish to make lots mroe cities all at once, you would basically take your frist city population wise back to being a tribe. Perhaps the military can be citizens too, by this I mean you take a citizen, put it into a barracks, commence training and a few turns later a swordsman is born. Ofcourse this Civ would have bigger maps, bigger armies, and lots more citizens then it currently has if they have to do everything. But I think it has the making of a good little game.

 

[settlervstank]

They have done "why have all the army in one tile" in Civ 5. Now they can do "why have all the city in 1 tile" In the next Civ. This would obviously mean more space is taken up, as ideally 1 tile = 1 building, whether that be a farm or a barracks or a library. So yeah... Cities would get BIG. The landscape would need to be equally big. You could maintain 1 tile per military unit, even more so in this new landscape.

Cities should stay in 1 tile. Imagine, if you will,in Civilization n, in which this system has been implemented, a map, with a single, good sized island, which has 8 starting points for 8 civs. At the beginning, it's not all that bad. But as you build more cities, when you build buildings, a LOT of space will be taken up. Soon there's no more room on the island. Two things can happen:

1. Several buildings could end up on the same tile, making the game look like a complete mess.

2. Building would become impossible overall.

In scenario 2, building cites would become impossible. Existing cities would become overcrowded, resulting in anger and/or sickness. the only way to allow expansion would be to demolish another city that belongs to another civ, which would mean WAR! The AI might have to do this too, resulting in a 3 to 8-way conflict. If this goes on to the industrial/modern period, and if there's uranium on the map, if one civ controlled the entire uranium supply, the others would face major trouble. Of course, it would be more likely that 2 or 5 civs have uranium, or all of them. Which would basically mean that this extremely bloody war will escalate into a nuclear holocaust, with regular units still fighting. If the bodies of dead units stayed on the tile they died for the rest of the game, the entire island would become covered in corpses. Even worse, all those nukes could cause global warming, causing the entire island to become a radioactive desert, and cities would wither away slowly. On top of that, Firaxis might add a game mechanic where the polar ice caps would melt due to global warming, and sea levels would rise, causing the entire island to be engulfed.

And besides, the maps would have to be so big to prevent this from happening, that the game would take forever to load.

 

[settlervstank]

And, of course, a delay after I post. Great. Why does this happen? I'm posting this just to get someone else to post. It makes no sense.

 

[zeggy]

lol...

 

[epicivfreak]

I don't have a problem with getting rid of the settler, at least in theory, but I don't like any method proposed thus far. So how about this method?

You start the game with a lump sum of gold, let's say 100. Let's also say that 100 gold is what it costs to build a new city - thus your initial lump sum allows you to build your capital city. You can build a city anytime and anyplace within your borders so long as you can pay for it. Maybe the cost of building a city should even rise for every one you already have?
Civ5 is bringing in the concept of buying tiles for gold, so, if you want to go out and build a city somewhere that currently isn't in your borders (or directly adjacent to it and neutral land), you should buy up all the land to that spot, then pay to build the city.

It's a very minor change really, but it's the only way I see being viable to get rid of the settler unit. Now, don't get me wrong, I'm not 100% behind this idea really, I'm just saying if some Civ 4 or 5 mod, Civ 6 or some later version of Civilization were to do away with the settler, this seems to be the method to do so.

 

[Raneman]

Here's how it should work: You take 1 population from a city and you can make different things out of it.

 

[bwcbwc]

You might be able to simplify the mechanics of this by merging it with the Civ 4 concept of cottage growth. Workers would build cottages which eventually grow into towns. Workers can also build cottages outside of city radii. After a cottage grows to a town, if it is at least a minimum distance (say 2 squares/hexes) from any existing city, it can also grow to become a new city at the players choice. When a town was ready to grow to city size you could elect to turn it into a city or leave it as a town (either permanently or to delay expansion for some reason like needing a defender.)

In order to accommodate variety in city types, have cottage growth not always grow commerce, but grow the best resource on the square, so a town on a hill would have increased shields, a town on a grassland would have increased food (or increase the food from surrounding farms), a town on a river or coast would have increased commerce. cottages/Towns would also benefit from being built on top of resources, and the improvement would carry over if the town became a city. You could also expand the idea of specialization so that a city that gets a production bonus from being on a hill also gives a general production bonus to citizens that move out to work the surrounding spaces via the traditional citizen work assignment mechanism. In order to preserve the current game balance of food production from a city, it might be necessary that the bonus you get from converting a town to a city is always a food bonus. So your city on a hill might take 60 turns to build but it would start off with 2 food, 5 or 6 shields and a commerce, while a city on a grassland might have 5 food, a shield and a couple of commerce, in their respective city centers. So once a city got established it would tend to either grow more quickly or produce buildings/units more quickly than under the original model. This would be especially true if cities were allowed to set up trade routes based on their specialization, so your hill city with excess shields could trade shields to your river city with excess commerce in exchange for cash.

This version of the scheme would get rid of the need for a special "citizen" unit which IMHO could become a huge micro-management nightmare, but it would still simulate the "organic" growth of small settlements into towns and cities and provide more specialization in city production. It would also fit in nicely with the Civ V concept of one military unit per square since you could defend your developing towns and cities with border-facing units, or even surround the town with units.

The flip side of this whole idea, though, is that it would probably require completely rebalancing the resource model for shields, food and commerce, since some cities would be huge producers of specific resources even in the early game. It would also be interesting to see how specialized towns and cities would interact with the unique building/unique unit concept. If your unique building generates extra cash, is it worth it to overspecialize in commerce-building cities?

 

[Souron]

That would make a rather different game and one I would be interested in trying out.

However, throughout history, thought not the norm, there have been a number of planned cities. It would be a shame to eliminate this ability completely.

Particularly, the colonization of the Americas featured a number of planned cities. You mention corporate company towns, but I don't think that will cover it. It might make sense for Africa, but less so for the new world. Also, the time period of colonization was before corporations, so these towns would have to come earlier than you seem to envision.