Immigration

[Strong Man Sam]

an awesome new concept to encourage growth of already culturally rich cities, the idea would add fun and challenge to the game. For instance, special benefits and wonders could come from immigration, think about where all the people who leave your country when you force them into labour go? Or what about starvation, they might leave to another country too, its a nice concept

 

[yoshi]

Nice thread. This is what CIVILIZATION is all about...demographics.

Unhappiness (due to war, stravation, bad leadership in general, ect.) could also cause immigration (i.e. x chance of civ's unhappy Citizens emmigrating to nearest and best civ --they just magically disappear from your cities and reappear in the most prosperous city of a more "successful" civ).

Another form of imigration, could be from overpopulated cities to newly-founded cities --if they are unhappy, Citizens will do this before they emmigrate to another civ.

A similar effect could be the uncontrollable effect of Citizens moving to your most prosperous cities, leaving the areas in between almost empty --this effect of population movement is a MAJOR factor in the economics of most countries (Canada is a good example). This effect would logically become more noticable in the later game just because of the economics already existant in CIV.

There is one problem, how do you limit immigration? Clearly the effect would vary by government, but what if a civ doesn't want more citizens or doesn't want to lose too many? Or for that matter, what if you want to limit how many of your Citizens emmigrate between your own cities?

This is certainly one of the most relevant topics to the real nature of CIV that I have seen yet. I expect anyone who calls him/herself a real civer to give your support to this thread. If not, I will be very dismayed with the lot of you.

 

[Strong Man Sam]

Well, thats easy. Throughout history, we have seen that the one thing that effects immigration most is te government of the country. A countries' government can help or hinder immigration.

For instance, a democracy is more inviting to live in than a communism dictatorship etc, so whereas a communism can be uninviting, a democray or republic is not. That way, different forms of government in the game can have differnent immigration rules.

Also, immigration could be a tech or concept that is the result of the tech. and maybe there could be a slider or bar, letting you limit rates. Each turn, like pollution the collected masses of people would be tallied up, then divided between each civ. Depending on the circumstances, you could then excpet the pop or not. For instance, a democratic government could increase chances by 50% (america or canada etc.) then with a certain policy towards immigration (your adjusted immigration slider) your chance s might increase.

Thus immigration could be feasible in civ, but it would lead to overpop, so if the 2 bread per citizen concept was changed to 1 or .5, then you could have realistic big cities of 30 mil like NY etc.

 

[yoshi]

Also, immigration could be a tech or concept that is the result of the tech. and maybe there could be a slider or bar, letting you limit rates.

Immigration requires tech advance? Well, immigration has tended to be a reality as long as human civilization has so activating it througha tech would seem redundant for the core game. It could be useful for scenarios though (but developers don't go for stuff that only has applications to modding). Besides, no one would research this if they had the choice.
Limiting the rate of immigration by using a slide bar seems logical enough. Keeps with Civ3's simple interface.

Thus immigration could be feasible in civ, but it would lead to overpop, so if the 2 bread per citizen concept was changed to 1 or .5, then you could have realistic big cities of 30 mil like NY etc.

Dealing with overpopulation is another factor in the proper running of society --disfunctional societies cannot cope.
Lowering the Food consumption of Citizens is a little too simple and would require a series of 'Food' techs.(?) to gradually lower the number --unless you mean to ower the number from the start which would cause rapid population growth not proportional to the civ's level of developement.

Another solution would be to gradually raise the food output of city tiles by introducing new Tile Improvements or discovering Food-modifying tech.

The question of Food also brings up another factor in city development (especially modern cities). Usually big cities dedicate their surrounding areas to Commerce and some Production, not Food. This is something civers have debated over for a while.

I came up with one solution: Diverting Production/Food from your other cities. If this were the case, you could provide the necessary Food from your other cities (and even production) so that your prosperous cities could have huge populations and dedicate themselves to Commerce without having to use up thier tiles with Production and Food. It seems to me that this is the best solution for the overpopulation problem as well as a whole host of other problems that afflict the cities in CIV.

If you want to know specifically how Diverting Shields/Food would work, see the thread in the this same forum at:
http://forums.civfanatics.com/showthread.php?s=&postid=1246561#post1246561

[I can't belive I'm the only one who's replied thus far to this post. One that SHOULD be of interest to most civers!]

 

[Ian Beale]

I prefer the idea of citizens in neighbouring countries asking whether they can join your civ. You can refuse forcing them back to their home country. I would like to be able to choose where these immigrants go. I would also like it if when you raze a city the population become immigrants hoping to join a neighbouring civs population. This would allow you to have a multicultural society which could irritate your own citizens e.g we dislike having americans in our cities- you could then force some citizens to leave?

 

[yoshi]

Getting a pop-up each time Citizens immigrate to one of your cities seems like a good idea and is even simpler than the Slider Bar idea but how would that affect Citizens emigrating from your cities? The Slider Bar idea is also a little too strict when it comes to this because when set to zero (or whatever), it would completely prevent Citizens from emigrating. This would give autocratic govts. an advantage over democratic ones (assuming democratic govts. could not set the bar to zero). There would have to be some kind of penalty involved otherwise players would automatically set the bar to zero.
Better to just get rid of the Slider Bar altogether and replace it with the 'Citizens asking for permission' pop-up for the immigrants, and have the level of emmigration by your unhapppy Citizens be lower under autocratic govts. --mimicing the effect of martial law and refugees-- whereas emmigration is virtually uncontrollable in democratic govts. but they usually aren't unhappy and if they are, it's implied that those civs are still better than the alternative, thus emmigration is still very low in such cases.

As for forcing Citizens to leave...well, I guess you could always select a citizen (like a troublesome foreign national for instance) and expel him/her at a cost of creating further unhappiness for a few turns. The only problem I can see with this is that it would nullify the effect of having to deal with unwanted citizens --because you could just expel them. Having the expelled Citizens reappear in a foreign city is logical enough, but what if there are no civ that will except that Citizen? The Citizen just ceases to exist...you get rid of him/her? Aside from that, this seems like a good idea that would further enhance the differences between governments.

I'm sure someone will bring up the fact that the Citizens just 'disappear' from one city and 'reappear' in another. Considering that having actual 'Citizen' units uncontrollably running around the map would require a huge amount of work on the part of Civ3's designers --not to mention that the additional CPU load would slow down the game and that these units would clog up the map--, it seems to me as though 'teleporting' is the only feasible option. And it keeps with CIVs simplicity anyway.

 

[Ekmek]

An immigrant unit that would add to the city and possible be a way, by non-combat, of adding new cities to your empire by over running it with your people and forcing a cultural conversion. It would be a nice touch.

 

[Strong Man Sam]

Good points. My slider idea was simply based on a control mechanism idea for immigration, so that if you wanted a huge growth spurt in your country, you could allow it by simply putting more money into immigration funds, or moving the slider up. An example of a country putting money into immigration and immigration relief is Canada, which when people immigrated to were given money and land from Britain which of course populated the country but also cost Britain at the same time. The slider could increase or decrease the attractiveness of your country to other civs, as well as culture, wether the civ is technologically advanced or its gov type. For instance, a fascist or communist governement, wich is technologically backwards, and culturally inferior, with 20-0 percent funds going into the slider has a 5% chance or less of having people immigrate towards it, meanwhile , there could even be cases of emigrration from your civ, but cultural assimilation already covers emigration( a city switching over represents your pop. leaving your civ due to unfair, or uncomfortable living in your empire). The civ engine to me, seems to work with percents and numbers, always comparing and calculating etc. So if there was immigration it would definitely be in some kind of percent per turn (like pollution or cultural assimilation). A slider would improve the odds of having more percent in your favour, but at a large cost. Howwever, instead of a slider, each gov type could have a kind of policy towards immigration, making your country more attractive to live in (despot compared to a democracy). An immigration unit could work, but that would allow you to recapture your emigrating pop. ( if thats what you wanted to do). I expect that in conquests the combined culture of your civ affects the percent of tourists in your civ among other things( state of war, governement type etc.) and that it would result in a certain amount of revenue per turn (once again based on percents) in a sense if that is how tourism could work, then perhaps immigration could work the same ways.

 

[yoshi]

An immigrant unit that would add to the city and possible be a way, by non-combat, of adding new cities to your empire by over running it with your people and forcing a cultural conversion.

I think that in Civ3, the number of foreign nationals in your city already affects the chances of cultural conversion. I'm not completely sure though. If so, just having the 'immigrant' foreign nationals added to a city's population would increase its chances of cultural conversion. (Personally I think that by the time Immigration becomes a problem, cultural conversion should not be possible --Canada does not convert just because it has a lot of immigrants.)

...if you wanted a huge growth spurt in your country, you could allow it by simply putting more money into immigration funds, or moving the slider up.

I see. But shouldn't immigration/emmigration be uncontrollable? All you should be able to do is prevent new ones from coming in and, under autocratic govts., prevent Citizens from leaving. The slide bar means that there is an option. Seems redundant since if you don't want immmigrants, you usally want as few to leave as possible, and to only accept new citizens when you want them (i.e. pop-up), not more or less.
The only advantage of the slide bar that I can see is that it saves you having to pick 'Accept Immigrants' or 'Deny Citizenship' every time the pop-up appears.
As for promoting emmigration, forced emmigration has played a role in history, but it seems a little too specific to merit a place in Civ3's interface and it can be done with Settlers and Workers anyway --you can't force Citizens to go to OTHER countries so it's not an issue.

I would like to add that in order to recreate the effect of refugees, a small amount of Citizens would still be able emmigrate even under autocratic governments. Perhaps the amount could be determined by the number of military units in cities.

 

[Bamspeedy]

I expect anyone who calls him/herself a real civer to give your support to this thread. If not, I will be very dismayed with the lot of you.

You sure are funny sometimes, yoshi.

This is something that may work in Civ4, but not Civ3.

For something like immigration, you could use something similar to how Tropico handles immigration. In Tropico, if you wanted to control immigration/emigration at all, then you had to build an immigration office and with the immigration office you can set it to have different 'policies' depending on what you want. The options were:

1. Skilled Workers Welcome- you would get more college educated immigrants (but I guess this wouldn't really apply to civ).

2. Tropico First-Reduces immigration

3. Love It Or Leave It-Most of the people who leave your civ would be the people who are the most unhappy. (again this probably wouldn't apply because Civ doesn't have citizens with unique attitudes like Tropico does)

4. Nobody Gets Out Of Here Alive- Reduces emmigration

In Tropico the better skilled the workers who worked in the immigration office were, the more efficient each of those options would be. I suppose in Civ, the efficiency of those options could be determined by what government you are in.

 

[yoshi]

You sure are funny sometimes, yoshi.

Yeah...that's it, 'funny'...that's what I was being...heh,heh...(cough).

This is something that may work in Civ4, but not Civ3.

Haven't played Tropico, but I understand what you're saying. I just don't see why the other, more civ-like ideas that have been mentioned aren't suitable for Civ3. How does Tropico relate to that?

Citizens in Civ3 wouldn't need unique attitudes as this effect would be based on general unhappiness levels, randomized and then immigration is either accepted or it isn't.

2. Tropico First-Reduces immigration

This is what the slide-bar and govt. types discussion was referring to.

Would the 'Immigration' concept affect Civ3's strategy in some negative way? It would change things by having poulation movement become a factor (or more accurately, emmigration is what you get for bad leadership), but I don't see how that's a bad thing?
Perhaps it would be too difficult to implement given the nature of the existing program? We don't know enough about the actual program to make that assumption. I would think that all it would take is a few extra fields in the area of,
x=base unhappiness for citizen transfer (each extra unhappy citizen increases chances by 10%)
x=base population for citizen trnsfer
...and so on until all the variables are covered.
Something in that general direction can't be too difficult. And best of all, this requires very little AI participation, except whether or not to accept new emmigrants, taking inot account the effect of govt. form, basing decisions on tribe characteristics, ect.

 

[Bamspeedy]

Perhaps it would be too difficult to implement given the nature of the existing program?

Yes, that is why I am saying it wouldn't work for Civ3.

If, and when they make a Civ4 they would have to re-write the entire code for everything in the game, so they would have more flexibility in doing something like this since they have to start over from scratch anyways.