Great DECEPTION over food supplying methods

[Vael]

Yes. But you forgot about the governor?? You just make a default governor that will take care of such MM stuff. And everything will be OK and everybody happy .

You show me someone who uses the city governor and automated Workers and I'll show you someone who won't win over monarch.

Automation for tasks that require a large amount of micromanaging will never be as good as a human player. When that is the case you force humans to do all micromanagement when they want to be competitive or even to feel like they're doing a good job.

 

[mitsho]

Interesting and certainly realistic thing. Imo it should be added in, if it can be done without cropping the screen full of numbers. The game should still be playable. On the question, how to do this, I've no idea, but it looks like these ideas are around on the forum, so no problem

I also wanted to remind some people in here, that shields no longer exists. Hammertrading needs to be added...

mitsho

 

[Aussie_Lurker]

You know, Vael, saying that a feature shouldn't be in the game because 'it hasn't been in previous Civ Games', has GOT to be one of the worst reasons I have ever heard (right up there with 'its just not civ'!!)
So many changes have occured between each iteration of civ-especially between Civ2 and Civ3, that such an argument can't really stand up to scrutiny. Civ evolves as a franchise-and IMO an ability to shift 'shields' and 'food' between your cities is part of that evolutionary process.
Of course it would need to be balanced to avoid the very abuses pointed out earlier, but I feel that can be done. Perhaps limiting both the % of food/shields you can move, and the maximum distance they can be moved, on the basis of both tech level and connection to the trade route is a good start. What you also need to remember, though, is that city placement will still be just as vital in the Ancient and even Middle Ages of the game-as few cities would be able to provide for themselves AND other cities in their nation. It wouldn't be until the late Medieval period that major city specialisation would occur. Which brings me to the other self-balancing feature. Everything you provide to one city has GOT to have come from another city, a fact which requires you to make certain sacrfices. If you don't have any 'breadbasket' cities, then an ability to shift food between cities is NOT going to stop all your cities from being stagnant, or even starving!!

Yours,
Aussie_Lurker.

 

[Stilgar08]

When it is true what we've heard:

-you can specialize your cities, that means you CAN have food-producing cities helping shield power-houses or Science think-tank-cities out! Why? Because:
- you can trade resources and as far as I understood food as well! At least different types of food which already adds to reality...

And furthermore: health determines your city growth and I think health will be (partly) determined by the VARIETY of food you have in store, not the amount! IMO, they took care of the food system. And we don't know what's true before we know, right?? *doh*

P.S.: I stated it before and I state it again: It has to be balanced. Realism is important, yes! But if it's too realistic the game will just suck! If you want realism go to a bus-stop and watch the people waiting there. THAT'S realism! Good for your REAL life (makes sense, doesn't it?), not necessarily good for the game!

 

[Sirian]

You show me someone who uses the city governor and automated Workers and I'll show you someone who won't win over monarch.

I know a player who automates 90% of his workers and NEVER zooms a city (runs them all on governor) who wins a fair amount on Deity.

Despite this, I agree with your wider point. Adding layers of complexity only to turn around and automate them all is the worst mistake a game designer can make. This is what turned Master of Orion III into a steaming pile of junk.

If you don't want the player to touch it, you abstract it.


Civ2 had Caravans that could transfer food from one city to another, but it was a load of added micromanagement. I tried it a few times, but it never struck me as anything particularly useful.

Soren said (in that video from E3) that one could trade Wheat. So what does do in the game? It must be something measurable (and simple). I didn't catch that in the video, but maybe I missed it.

Now I didn't see anything in there about trading "food" in the Civ2 caravan style. But if it were in there, I'd want it out. The part of civ that keeps the game fresh for me for longer is the random maps. The fact that cities vary in character according to their terrain is a big part of the fun.


The last thing I would want Firaxis to do is to add micromanagement I'm not supposed to mess with, leaving me to rip out my hair when the automation that is supposed to handle it for me only ends up mismanaging it. Gah!


- Sirian

 

[mitsho]

@Aussie_Lurker, Stilgar08

shields no longer exist! We have hammers now!
So please, please, use the new term, it just feels more like civIV

mitsho

PS: I had to write it that large, cause nobody listened to me before...

 

[Sirian]

Wow, how many shields did you need to produce those big letters?

- Sirian

 

[Doc Tsiolkovski]

They kept the well-known, classical civilization food supplying method...

Yes. Mind you, they even kept that outdated, 15 year old name for the game. They even seem to have kept those outdated 'turns'. Oh, and the worst - AFAIK, CIV is supposed to run on a PC, not xbox.

 

[Aussie_Lurker]

There will ALWAYS be 1 or 2 things within Civ which will never-and SHOULD never-change, such as its name, its turn based nature and possibly some of the key civs, units and improvements which we have come to know and love. Everything else, though, is well and truly 'up for grabs' IMHO. This time around I really think that it is how your food and hammers get distributed that needs a huge revamp.
As I have pointed out, this CAN be done in a simple way-without tonnes of MM.
In your trade screen, you have an IN and an OUT column. In both columns you have each of your cities listed, with their current Health and Population, and with 2 sets of hammer and bread icons next to them-one followed by their current output, and the other set followed by '% number boxes'. If your city is too far from the capital (according to tech level) or if its not hooked into your trade network, then it WON'T appear in either of the two columns. Im this screen you can tell-at a glance-which cities are doing poorly and lack food/hammers-and those that are VERY healthy and have a food/hammer 'surplus'. You can also adjust the % number next to the hammer/bread icons in both of the IN and OUT columns. In the IN column, it refers to what % of its output goes into the central 'Pool', and in the OUT Column, it refers to what % of the central 'Pool' they are taking out. %'s are easy, IMO, because you don't have to keep going back to the screen every turn to adjust it just because a city is producing a few units more-or less-food each turn. For me, this represents a relatively easy 'set and forget' model which need only be checked every so often if a player feels circumstances have changed sufficiently to warrant altering the incomings and outgoings. It could be automated, but doing so would provide little more advantage than if the player chooses to do it randomly. Also, just to be certain, these % should also be settable within each city screen-as a backup.
Hope that all made sense.

Yours,
Aussie_Lurker.

 

[covenant]

Soren said (in that video from E3) that one could trade Wheat. So what does do in the game? It must be something measurable (and simple). I didn't catch that in the video, but maybe I missed it.

Soren stated you can trade food between cities but only for health purposes, not for growth.

So unless something has changed in the past week I dont think this will be happening.

I know a very easy way to implement this idea of food and shield trade with very little MM. Say you have a breadbasket city and a city in the mountains, you have a tool to link the two. That is it. Click trading city, Click recieving city, Done. The food city will just send what it can to any linked city, dividing it appropriately. You could have a button so you could see all the linked cities with colored lines and easily redistribut.

I think its the people that play at the higher levels that dont want this, cause they realize they would have to spend every turn maximizing where the food goes. But I really dont care about this. They play a totally different game then me, which I dont even call civ, but civmath. These are the same people that enjoy moving workers around every turn and dont want a CtP type of work project system, because that is a civ type experience.

Not being harsh, they are free to enjoy they game as they wish, BUT WE SOULD DEFINITLY NOT BE DESIGING THE GAME WITH THAT MINDSET.

They game should not get more difficult at higher levels by requiring more MM, it should require more advanced strategy.

 

[The Fjonis]

Hey, interesting thread!! I agree with Aussie Lurker - your idea seems pretty close to what I believe would be the best. Just imagine the possibilities!! If you wanted to, you could follow Soviet's example, where Stalin decided to export lots of grain to make money which he could use to industrialize Soviet. Bad thing was, of course, that Soviet starved, and Health went down, but Soviet was industrialized. Or, you could rely on trade relations with your allies so that you could import food, and focus on economy and production. I am very excited about this, and I wonder how Civ4 actually works in this respect. Different types of food also offer a great amount of possibilities....

 

[kafkaesk]

Why not just sum up all the food produced in your civ and - only in case there´s an undisturbed trade route available, of course - automatically distribute it to where it is needed?

Having a "pool" like that (with "food produced"/"used" per round), trading food with the other civs would be done just like the x gp / round-treaties in civ3.

This pool-concept could be applied to hammers as well, creating the possibility to trade production capacity with other civs.

These options should be available only after getting certain techs (transportation-techniques for both, some economy-tech for the hammers) - and influenced by government style and diplomatic conditions.

I think this deepening of the international trade/economics concept could make especially the late game significantly more interesting. (Just imagine how much more effective a multilateral embargo or, on the other hand, alliance-systems would be, for example.)

I don´t see why these concepts should afford any additional micromanagement, and it would certainly make the terrain you choose to place your cities on even more important.

 

[Graadiapolistan]

For yet another time the Firaxians did not succeed in taking care of the food supplying system of Civ games. They kept the well-known, classical civilization food supplying method, that is unrealistic and, to me, annoying.

The world's largest cities do not produce the biggest food amounts. Instead, a nation's cities SHARE FOOD SUPPLIES via trade routes, etc., especially in modern times. If such a feature existed:

would allow a mountain-surrounded city to grow normally and ...become a nation's most important industrial centre. Similarly, little important dessert cities, found in rivers' banks, would become a nation's most important food supplier, if the player wished so.

HISTORICAL EXAMPLES:
::The province of Egypt has been the main grain supplier for the medieval Byzantine Empire.
::Modern Northern France gets all of its crops from the southern part or from the french overseas territories.
::The US southern states play the same role for the industrialized northern states.

ANCIENT TIMES: Grain crops were dried and transported over the cities of empires.
MODERN TIMES: Little needs to be mentioned; there are numerous ways of transporting goods and food without risking of spoiling it.


Hopefully, Civ5 will include such realistic and obstacle-overcoming features, although I doubt...

I think they kind of delt with that issue by haing food resources such as wheat and corn. I doubt tat woill completely solve the problem- but I agree with you, look at las vegas, the fastest growing city in the us, and it's in the middle of a desert!

 

[Doc Tsiolkovski]

The reasons why I strongly oppose this one and the CtP style Worker automation isn't that I love MM that much. The reason is game balance:
A breadbasket city... Civ2 had something like that (at least 1fpt export). I seriously doubt a strategic planing of such an extent could be teached to a TBS AI within the next decade.
CtP Worker distribution: The opposite. Either the AI is completely inept like in CtP, or the human won't ever be able to compete with the AI (or The City Governor) here. With the Civ3 type Workers, he can - by long-term planning.

The real problem with TBS AIs is to find the proper 'power': it needs to be strong enough to be challenging; OTOH, the game needs to contain elements were the human can learn to outperform it (and not, outperform it by default) - eitherwise it's no fun to play at all.

I, too, don't want to sound harsh. But, anyone wishing for a game with no need to ever open the city screen, to ever improve the terrain with his 'own' hands - in other words, to not bother with city level choices at all: Play Diplomacy.

 

[kafkaesk]

I´m not too sure about the AI not capable of handling the concept, it has to manage more specialized cities in Civ4 anyway, as it seems.

Another suggestion concerning my food-pool idea: if you have sufficient means of transport, why shouldn´t it be possible to cultivate land that´s in your civ´s territory, but not in immediate proximity to a city?

As the whole city-system works now, it just doesn´t have much resemblence to the modern world and makes the late-game-mechanics feel quite strange.

 

[warpstorm]

Soren stated you can trade food between cities but only for health purposes, not for growth.

What if city population growth and city health were somehow related? Hmmm....

So unless something has changed in the past week I dont think this will be happening.

Considering how fast game programmers sling code, a lot can happen in a week, much less the few months they still have.

 

[Commander Bello]

The reasons why I strongly oppose this one and the CtP style Worker automation isn't that I love MM that much. The reason is game balance:
A breadbasket city... Civ2 had something like that (at least 1fpt export). I seriously doubt a strategic planing of such an extent could be teached to a TBS AI within the next decade.
CtP Worker distribution: The opposite. Either the AI is completely inept like in CtP, or the human won't ever be able to compete with the AI (or The City Governor) here. With the Civ3 type Workers, he can - by long-term planning.

The real problem with TBS AIs is to find the proper 'power': it needs to be strong enough to be challenging; OTOH, the game needs to contain elements were the human can learn to outperform it (and not, outperform it by default) - eitherwise it's no fun to play at all.

I, too, don't want to sound harsh. But, anyone wishing for a game with no need to ever open the city screen, to ever improve the terrain with his 'own' hands - in other words, to not bother with city level choices at all: Play Diplomacy.

I have to humbly disagree. While I'm already there, I have to disagree completely...
Distribution of food could easily been done, given that some concepts would be changed (which would make the whole more realistic, anyway...)

1) Population growth doesn't depend on the absolute food available, anymore. It would depend on the "necessary" food available, though. What does this mean?
Spoken in terms of Civ3, a pophead would reproduce every 10 turns. That means, 10 popheads would reproduce this new pophead every turn - under the assumption, that enough food for 11 pops would be available.
This is realistic, as you don't have more children, just because you have a bigger food store the next block. But more people have more children, causing more population - if both can survive.

2) Any food produced but not consumed in your city, goes to the national "basket" or pool. From there, it will be distributed to cities which lack food. Let's assume you have a surplus of 5 food and 3 cities, which lack it. They would get the food needed due to internal (automatic distribution).
In case you would have 3 surplus and 5 cities running short (which by the way, could then only be caused by military actions or other forms of loosing territory, thus reducing MM further), the cities with the highest impact of having a shortage would get it (under the assumption that starving causes unhappiness - again, this is a concept which currently is missing in the game).
Easy to calculate, and no need for micro-management at all. The pre-requisite for distribution would be a road or ship or air connection, obviously.

3) This would make for more accurate city placing. You could have the farm areas, and the industrial areas as well. Cities like New York, Tokyo, Paris, Berlin completely are dependant on food coming from outside of their city limits.
There would be less benefit of concepts like OCP as well, thus lowering the "exploitive" factors.
So, this in turn would mean much more realism in the game.

4) It doesn't seem so complicated to make the AI identify bonus ressources. A tile with wheat or any other bonus ressource is easily to identify for both, the human player and the AI. The AI then even could handle modded ressources more easily and wouldn't fail to place the cities in an "optimal" way, anymore.

About the public working system as of CtP2:
You (and the AI) would determine, where to improve a given tile. But, you don't send a worker to it, it will be improved by the "PW-quantity" available per turn.
Let's assume that each improvement would require 10 virtual PW-"hammers" per turn, which are provided by the percentual rate of your cities' productions being allocated to the national pool.
Now, we assume that the national pool will be filled by 120 "PW-hammers" per turn. Then you just could improve 12 tiles, simultenaously. You couldn't allocate a 13th tile, then. What is realistic, once more. And what doesn't differ that much from the worker concept, except for having to manouvre them manually around.
The respective improvement could require different totals, though. Maybe a "standard irrigation" would "cost" 60 "PW-hammers", so it would take 6 turns to get it. A "standard road" would require let's say 40 "hammers", a railroad 100 and so on (all numbers just for display).

This would be very easy to understand, it would definetely require less micro-management and I don't see a major difficulty for the programming.

Voila!

 

[mitsho]

@commander bello Some questions to your food system (I actually would really really like to have a such): what happens if you have say 3 surplus food and no city needs it? Are they stored, where? Is there any way to influence where the food goes to? (ex. The player can block a city of sending its food somewhere or blocking a city of recieving it, he can place x-y priorities (where the food goes to first)). Your system above leads to Sir-we-have-food-surplus-but-no-use-for-it.

mitsho

 

[Commander Bello]

@commander bello Some questions to your food system (I actually would really really like to have a such): what happens if you have say 3 surplus food and no city needs it? Are they stored, where? Is there any way to influence where the food goes to? (ex. The player can block a city of sending its food somewhere or blocking a city of recieving it, he can place x-y priorities (where the food goes to first)). Your system above leads to Sir-we-have-food-surplus-but-no-use-for-it.

mitsho

In case surplus is not needed, it would just go to the garbage. As it does in the European Union very often.
My basic idea is just that the size of the population determines the growth of it. Food has to be available, but more food doesn't make for more children.

About how to determine where the food goes to:
Always to the city in which it is most needed = where a shortage would cause the most unrest.
As already mentioned, in principle you just couldn't have shortages, just as a consequence of lost terrain. BUT, missing food can hold your growth.

As far as I see it, this is a balanced concept, dealing with quite some problems as of Civ3, it is understandable, requires no micro-management and shouldn't be very hard to be programmed.

 

[mitsho]

Well, as I said, I like the idea a lot. But the food surplus must have some effect:
- sell it on the market (to other civs)
- more food -> less starving AND -> ability to grow more different luxury foods (that use more input and provide less (nutritial) output (but more econmical) -> more money and/or more health (-> more growth)
correct?