do you want civ 5 to have civics or goverments?

[Tlalynet]

Post combustion farmers have had to have an increasing amount of skills to effectivly do their jobs. My great great grandfather farmed and he could take good metal and forge it into machinery from scratch. More commonoly modern farmers have extensive mecahnical repair skills and more and more seem to have more extensive knowledge of biology to make decitions on planting what when in what type of soil when there has been so much moisture and the land has been sewn for so many years without being fallow. From there you can get into soil testing ect...
Anyway, obviously there wouldnt be any benifit from skilled farmers before even the knowledgable knew about some of these things, but even there there would have to be a shift from unskilled to mechanically skilled to scientifically skilled over time.
Youre obvious basic labour classes would be what? Oppressed slaves, slaves, some kind of standard citiczin , skilled labourors (engineers, accountants), some sort or artist\philosipher\storyteller class (that reduces food\hammer\commerce production but adds to science or culture) and some sort of aristocracy class that eventually turns into a highly skilled class.

Hmm, something like
Farm\Wheat\Grassland, 5 Food
Worked with Slave\Opressed\Standard Citicin, 5 Food, but oppressed only need 1 food per turn upkeep, and standard slaves dont add to city maintince costs.
Worked with artist 4 food 2 culture 1 science
Worked by philosipher 4 food 3 science
Worked by skilled labour and after machinery tech 5 food 2 commerce
Worked by specialit labour post biology tech 6 food 2 commerce.
No benifit for putting a machinist on a farm tile before machinery, but you might have to do it if thats the kind of citicin you have and you need to switch on the fly from hammers to food (due to unhealthyness or need for growth or bad planning)

Anything above the regular citicin level adds to upkeep (not 1 commerce per level, more like .1 commerce per pop per level, so a skilled labour on the farm would cost .2 and add 2 to the plot)

Its off the top of my head, but thats kind of whats in my mind for the idea you described.

 

[ggganz]

Other: Enabling/Disabling individual laws! Some civics could force/disallow some laws, but others would be your choice and have different pros/cons. The tough part would be finding the balance, because too many laws results in too complicated of a game yuck and too few laws results in failed use of a feature!

 

[Tlalynet]

Law micromanadgement would be awesome and terrible for exactly the reasons you stated.

 

[ggganz]

So is that a yes?

 

[grommit5]

i'm kind of liking civics but "don't care" is a good answewr too.

 

[Tlalynet]

Its a yes.

 

[paydro]

Tlalynet: I guess maybe highly skilled workers should just be better at everything, but cost more? Probably that makes the most sense.

I don't think it makes sense to say oppressed/non oppressed slave... what slave isn't oppressed? I would say slave/serf, then unskilled free labor, then skilled labor, then basically "elites." Keep the specialist system, to represent non-working nobility in the past, or current super-elites.

If you think about it in terms of education, it would go none/basic/decent/great. Obviously things change as time goes on, so the definition of "decent" would once have been "craftsman" but would in modern society be something more like a modern farmer. "Elite" might once have been a monk, now it would be a university professor or a doctor.

I think what you described for that farm is basically what I'm talking about, though I don't really like the "artist" category and think they make more sense as non-productive specialists. It should definitely change (benefitting skilled workers more and more) as technology advances.

There are two options I guess... the first would be to have improvements lend themselves to having certain kinds of labor work them. Perhaps an order like: mine, farm, sea, lumber/water/windmill, workshop, offshore platform, town. That would ensure that even to the end of the game, it would be desireable to have all types of people in your society at all times. Even with the slider maxed out, you'd still probably have unskilled citizens around to work in the mines and fish and stuff.

The other way would be to simply say the more educated you are, the more you produce. You're "paying" with the slider for more highly-educated workers, so they produce more, period.

The question is how to balance the game progression... personally, I would lean towards the latter system, because it seems like it's more customizeable. I even think it should be possible to, in the modern era, have a society where nearly every citizen is either "skilled" or "elite." Some countries today are not too far from that, depending on what you call "skilled." It costs a crazy amount of resources to keep those people happy and educated, but they're also crazy productive.

That would allow for more diversity in choices... some players might like having slaves well into the industrial era (like Brazil, Russia, or the USA), and maintain a lot of unskilled labor and reap the benefits in increased cash or something, while other players would want a highly productive workforce, like modern day Sweden or Germany.

What a cool idea, if only Sid read these boards.