So I've been playing a longer game now. I've had freeze crashes on both, although I got farther in the second game than the first. Not having ocean tiles feels odd, it's way less obvious that I'm able to collect sea resources when they're not in my territory. The housing system for each type of population is interesting. The housing system Firaxis uses is really just a stand in for a more complex feature that involves access to clean water and sanitation, where as population increases so too do death rates due to disease and such, which slows population growth. Access to clean (or enough, in the case of deserts) water, food, sanitation, etc allow for higher population. Here though, we have to micromanage the amount of actual housing in a city. Obviously that IS something a city needs to take care of, but it feels a little too much like something a minor official would do rather than something for the leader of the nation to worry about. If you count the production time as well, I found I was building housing so often that I didn't have time for military or buildings. Maybe I was growing too fast though.
Either way, I'd be interested to see a system where a lot of these buildings required gold more than time. I'm typing this while staring at my frozen game and I can see that in the classical era (560 AD, turn 139) I have 3259 gold banked and it would make a lot of sense if I had to pay my citizens for their work. I wouldn't mind having to micromanage my cities as much if it wasn't so time consuming, so perhaps the wealthy housing costs more to construct? It's also hard to understand the purpose of wealth classes as it is, why do I care if my wealthy citizens are living in the middle class housing? Are wealthy citizens good?
The game feels good to play, don't get me wrong but there are a few systems left over from the base game that feel insufficient in this mod. For example, the population level being tied to how many tiles you can work. I understand that without it, it's difficult to represent populations properly but I don't think it's necessary as much. In previous civ games, there were many mechanics tied to population number, such as religious followers, housing (which we seem to have dropped), amenities, any buildings that generate yields for every 1/X population (such as in Civ 5 where libraries were 1 science for every 2 population I believe?). Now, it feels like the only remaining feature that isn't tied to the actual population number is the tiles we can work.
I just think it would be cleaner to break away from that whole system and have your own. When I have 3500 people at the beginning of the game, I can work 1 tile. When I have 150 000 at population 6, I can work 6 tiles. There's something funky going on with the scaling here, clearly. I think it makes sense to be able to select which tiles you want to work, but I don't think it should be tied to city population directly. It would be cool to see a system such as the following:
You can select as many tiles as you like to be worked. The population of your city available for working tiles is split evenly between all the tiles if you do this. Based on tech level and other factors, the yields of these tiles are scaled against the number of citizens working each one. The way you scale it is really up to you, but if you wanted to keep it SIMILAR to the current system, maybe the number of tiles you could work at FULL capacity is still the old city level (so at size 6 I can work 6 tiles at full capacity or 12 tiles at half capacity). Still, we need a way to control this system. Similarly to the buttons that Civ 6 has that let you "focus" the output of your cities on food, production, etc, you can "focus" your cities on all of the different resources. Rather than a radio button though, we can have sliders. If you increase one slider, it would obviously decrease the other sliders proportionally. For a small example, say there were only 3 resources I wanted to control. All three start at 33%. If I lift one slider to 50%, the other two would fall to 25% (because that is proportional to their relationship). We'll call these sliders A, B, and C where A is 50% and B and C are 25% each. If I drop slider C down to 10%, we should see the other two sliders increase.
In terms of coding, the change in the other sliders due to altering the level of any given slider is proportional to their percentage. So if I drop C to 10%, we've freed 15% (because 25% - 10% = 15% and C was previously at 25%). That 15% gets split among the remaining sliders (A and B). A is 50% of the total remaining and B is 25%. However, the total was 75% (which is 100% - C), so we should see that A gets (50% / 75%) * 15 % and B gets (25% / 75%) * 15%. Therefore, A goes up by 10% and B goes up by 5%. The result is A = 60%, B = 30% and C = 10%.
Here is another sample with more sliders: A = 32%, B = 5%, C = 20%, D = 15%, E = 28%. If we increase B up to 20%, we will see the following changes: A -= (32% / 95%) * 15%, C -= (20% / 95%) * 15%, D -= (15% / 95%) * 15%, E -= (28% / 95%) * 15%
The final results would be A = 27%, B = 20%, C = 16.9%, D = 12.6%, E = 23.6%. I've rounded these numbers a bit (they add to 100.1%) but I'm sure you understand the gist of what I'm saying.
These sliders obviously don't directly translate to how the game decides how to work the tiles. The sliders basically let you tell the city how it should focus its population. Many tiles have multiple types of yields however, for example a tile may yield food, production, plants, stone, etc. The percentages are used as weights to determine how to properly execute this. The yields of each tile are multiplied by their percentages and added up. It makes sense that after a tile is being worked by the maximum number of citizens (this maximum may increase over time with era/tech/building or whatever), it's less efficient to add more citizens to the tile. It will still increase the yield of the tile, but the numeric increase rate decreases. The city will "overwork" a tile if doing so will be more valuable than putting those citizens in another tile (as I said before, the "value" of a tile is calculated by multiplying the yields by their focus sliders).
Using the first example of three sliders, let's say these sliders represent Wheat, Stone, and Wood corresponding to A, B and C (50%, 25%, 25%).
We have 4 tiles we want to work, their yields are as follows (only in the categories I mentioned above): [4 wheat, 0 wood, 0 stone], [3 wheat, 3 wood, 3 stone] (imaginary tile), [0 wheat, 8 wood, 0 stone], [0 wheat, 0 wood, 8 stone].
If we multiply these yields by our sliders, we attain the following "value" for each tile: [4 wheat * 50% = 2 + 0 + 0] = 2, [3 wheat * 50% = 1.5 + 3 wood * 25% = 0.75 + 3 stone * 25% = 0.75] = 3, [8 wood * 25% = 2 + 0 + 0] = 2, [8 stone * 25% = 2 + 0 + 0]
Therefore the "values" of these tiles are 2, 3, 2, and 2. The city would prioritize putting citizens in the value 3 tile. After this, it would likely dump the remaining citizens into the first value 2 tile. This is a tie, but it would probably be easiest to sort the tiles that "tie" in value by the sliders, ie because the first tile has more wheat than the other two, it's chosen first. It should be noted that because the value 3 tile is 50% more valuable than a value 2 tile, the city may choose to "overwork" that tile and "underwork" the other tiles because it would be more valuable to do so.
