Food commerce?

[Tavdy79]

That's fine, I guess, but the problem in with this strategy in Civ 2 was that it took a lot of effort establish these routes and even more effort to change them. The Master of Magic-style approach is automatic and eliminates all this micromanagement effort.

What about this idea then:

Caravans can only be built in a city with a market, and instead of being units they appear as filled spaces within a "market" section of the city-view screen. The caravans themselves would need to be built in the same way as a building, but could be deleted like a unit. You'd be able to change the target city of the caravan from inside the market section of the city-view screen.

Each caravan would have a specific movement range (e.g. 8) and could transport food to any one city within its range. The range of the caravan would be limited by terrain types (1/4 point over rivers/seas, land-based movement same as for conventional units) with the costs reduced by certain by terrain features & improvements (roads, bridges, railways, canals) by other improvements in the city (harbour, airport) by certain techs for sea/river-based trade (compass, astronomy, steam power) with flight making trade route lengths unlimited. The amount of food transported would be increased by certain techs (astronomy, railroad).

The number of caravans supported by a city would be related to its size. E.g. an equation like "caravans = 0.25x(city size-1)" would prevent cities under size 5 from building any caravans, and the city would be able to build an additional caravan each time it's size increases by four.

 

[Ahriman]

What about this idea then:

Sounds like tedious micromanagement to me.

 

[Tavdy79]

Sounds like tedious micromanagement to me.

Not if you set a city to automatically send all caravans to a specific location. E.g. a breadbasket city could send all food caravans to a mining city that doesn't have much food available nearby but does have loads of hammer resources. You'd only be doing this with breadbasket cities, not every single one, and it would give you the option of micromanagement without the requirement. It would probably be less complicated to manage than a single-network system where you have to manage how much food is coming from/going to each city.

It would also reflect the growing range of trade networks over the years, making them less significant early on but increasingly crucial as you get to later stages in the game. For example, many countries/regions (US, Brazil, Australia, Africa) are key food exporters while others (UK, Japan, Benelux, Arabia) have to import food. The trade system could allow you to export food to an ally for cash, or vice-versa, which would act as an extra incentive for you to be allies: mutual dependency.

 

[Yakk]

Then what *would* determine population growth?

Throughout most of history, Malthus was right.

Which means "having enough food is important to how healthy your population is".

A healthy population can reproduce -- a sick population doesn't, because they die (and their kids die).

You can keep population down via massacre, mutilation, or (occasionally) social policies. Plagues also drop populations.

For much of history, having enough food was key to being healthy. It wasn't sufficient... but it was often in short supply.

With modern medicine and excess food in third world nations, there is an exponential population explosion. In first world nations, social policies and changes to how society lives has dropped population growth sharply, while still having sufficient health and food.

This should behave a lot like "breadbaskets get huge populations", but at the same time allow for increased exports, building farming colonies (which tend to grow and become cities as they eat their food rather than export it), trade in excess food between empires, a modern era with an agricultural revolution, blockading island kingdoms that have gotten into the habit of importing food, etc.

 

[Ahriman]

Which means "having enough food is important to how healthy your population is".

Only if you're pedantic enough to define "malnutrition" as a "health" issue, that is solved by health resources/buildings rather than food.

Its not "poor health" that kept populations down, it was starvation.

 

[Yakk]

Yes, starvation is a form of poor health. So is plague.

How food is allocated can easily make a given food supply change from "most of the population is starving to death" to "everyone is a big hungry". The first case will result in lower population growth than the second, but the amount of food consumed is the same for the same population.

To put this another way -- if you have enough peasants to farm the land, the lord might not provide the peasants with more food, and instead sell it. Even though there is lots of local food, the lord doesn't need more peasants. The lord does need more knights, or maybe more money -- so the food is either sold, or used to feed an elite class.

A society where the lord needs a massive healthy peasant army would have a more flat food distribution -- and a higher population growth -- from the same amount of food produced.

At the same time, a city with sewers will have a lower plague rate, which would produce ... a faster population growth rate (as fewer people would eat food, then die before the end of their reproductive age) at the same base population and food levels (admittedly, people living past the age of reproduction could reverse this trend).

 

[ShadowWarrior]

I'd be happy with a system where food wasn't the determining factor to growth (it was needed, but not determining).

Then when a city has excess food (determined by its food consumption rate, which is determined by policy and growth), that excess food gets shoved onto the trade network.

Depending on technology level and transportation network, a larger or smaller percentage is lost. Then the destination city, also depending on its technology level and transportation network, another percentage is lost.

Suppose 70% lossage on export on a land-locked city, and 70% lossage on import on a land-locked city, in the ancient era. Then 90% of food doesn't make it to the destination.

Having river access would reduce the lossage to 65%, and ocean access to 60%, which reduces the overall lossage to 84% (a 50% improvement).

By the modern era, you could have as little as 10% lossage on export and import, making a bread-basket city 80% as good as being right there.

You could then make deals with foreign powers to buy or sell food -- with the note that if you can make someone dependent on your food exports, then blockade them, they end up with serious unrest!

For a long time, I have advocated a similar idea.

Basically, I think food and hammers should be transferrable among cities, subject to certain limitation of course. That way, cities with surplus food/hammers can transfer some of the excess production to cities that need them.

The specific implementation of this idea will go something like this.

There is going to be a screen divided into three sections.

The left side of the screen will show a list of cities and their corresponding food/hammer production amount. From this screen, we can pick cities, their particular production (hammers or food or both), and the amount of that production that is to be contributed to transfer to other cities.

For example, the left screen will show the following info:

City A - 10 food/16 hammers
City B - 3 food/9 hammers
City C - 4 food/8 hammers

From City A, I have it contribute 2 food/4 hammers for transfer to other cities. From City B, I have it contribute 1 food/1 hammer. I ask nothing of City C for contribution.

The center of the screen will show the total amount of food and hammers being contributed to inter cities transfer. Continuing the above example, the center screen will show 3 food and 5 hammers availabe for transfer to other cities.

The right side of the screen is where I can select cities that will recieve the transfer. I designate City C as the recipients of the 3 food and 5 hammers.

There will be limiting factors of course. Maintenace cost increases with size of transfer. Maintenance cost is 1 gold, for example, for every 3 food transferred, and 2 gold for every 6 food transferred. The numbers I used are arbitrary. I'll let the designers determine the exact numbers.

As a non-sequitor, I like to see the ability to exploit landtiles that are not within any city raidus. We should have the ability to get settlers to build a village on one of those landtiles outside of any city raidus but within the empire boarder. The village will produce hammers and food. These hammers and food will automatically go onto the center screen which I have previously said will show the available quantities of food/hammers available for transfer to other cities.

Continuing the above example, the center screen showed 3 food and 5 hammers. Lets say I build a village and now this village produces 2 food and 1 hammer. The center screen will now show 5 food and 6 hammers.

Since maintenace cost increases with size of food/hammer transfer, players will not abuse the village feature since the more village they built, the greater the amount of production transfer taking place, which will eventually bite into the gold revenue. We can also make it quite costly to built a village. For example, a combo of 1 settler and 2 workers are needed for a village to be built.