I absolutely hate the whole food transforms into people system. It's not only more unrealistic, it's also bad game play mechanic, especially when coupled with that "grows faster when its smaller" nonsense. Things like corruption to force people to not spam cities is just a lame run around attempt at dealing with the base issue.
Someone was just explaining to me how powerful the slavery civ is because it turns food into production at a much greater efficiency than actual production. But if you had a set amount of people that grew organically, you could not be so careless with their lives. And imagine if food expired, if you didn't have enough food and your people were starving, ALL OF THEM. Ration time suffering production and commerce lose maybe. As though people were something to protect and grow rather than just another resource.
I could go on and on about this, and I have in other threads and such. But considering that Civ4 seems the best of the civs, I've played and have 2, 3, and Alpha Centuri (such a good game, if only it's glaring weaknesses could be fixed in a updated version. Like the motivation to spam cities is extra high there) I haven't played 5 or 6, but from what I've read it sounds like 4 is better. So is there a Civ4 mod that fixes the food turning into people nonsense? If not, how hard do you folks imagine it would be to make such a mod for Civ4?
I've heard of a mod for 6 that does that, but it also does alot of stuff, and it's still in development. It probably doesn't change the 1upt issue either.
To paraphrase a recent gaming meme, you think you want to get rid of slavery, but you don't. It's actually one of the mechanics that makes this game the best in series. I'd say it's the one conversion that every other civ game lacks, not the other way around.
First, strip away names like "slavery, population" etc., lets just look at what they do.
Population of a city is the number of its productivity potential.
Productivity potential is hard capped by tax that kicks in at a certain point (health, happiness).
After you hit the cap, you can only turn productivity potential into actual productivity, no way around it.
Slavery is a mechanism of turning productivity potential into a short-term credit. You are sacrificing future production for the sake of having it now, at a cost at lowering your credit rating (happines goes down by one).
Basically, when you whip, and whip a lot, you're indebted. You better find other ways to increase your debt ceiling (luxuries) so invest your credit well.
Imagine having a modern economy without credit. It would be dull and impossibly slow and inflexible. Even muslim nations following strict Sharia that forbids lending money with interest have other mechanicsms that offer the same thing, because it's essential for growth as we know it.
Civ5 and Civ6 don't understand credit. It's just "grow as you go". That's why they feel so incredibly dumbed down.
TruePurple does have a point thou, i also think that slavery should have fiercer penalties.
Combined with granaries, and when looked at from a game mechanics balancing view only, it's not really implented well.
IV would be great without an overpowered mechanic, cos once you know how it's not really challenging to whip 20 units in 4 turns.
This problem is nicely solved in RI mod. If you adopt Slavery there is a chance of slave rebellions. When that happens a stack of rebel units spawns near one of your cities. Number of units in a stack depends on size of city,so if it is size 10 city there might appear up to 10 rebel units in a stack near that city,and they usually spawn in forest/jungle/hill so it is not easy to get rid of them. This means that you can no longer have one crappy warrior as city defender,you must guard all your cities well.
We can debate this if you like but please also answer the question. Do you know of a mod that fixes/changes this issue? If not, how hard would it be to code a mod for this in Civ4? If it's a mod then it won't matter how right or wrong I am in your eyes. It would only matter if a sufficient number of other people see the potential I see for a mod to be made (or for me to learn to mod it myself, but I'm not that good with such things)
Regarding slavery, it's more a side note of this . Not the whole thing. I've wanted this well before there was such a mechanism by that name in this game. *Looks at 2popbulb's post* See what you did Bibor? Now people are treating this topic like it's about slavery, when it's not about slavery, it's about food turning into people and how there are much better ways to do population growth than that. So unless that RI mod changes that, such is not very relevant to the topic.
So to keep my post shorter I am putting my replies to Bibors credit business in spoiler
Spoiler:
First I will argue this on your ground. People=money. Remember the basic rules of the game though.
The less you have, the more you get until you reach a max and stop getting anything.
The more you spread it around, the more you get because spread around, it counts as less.
Now for this, please forget the corruption/cost mechanism since that's a artificial limit designed to fix a self made problem by how cities grow in the first place. It only kicks in when the game has decided too much, and not before then.
So imagine a game where the idea was to save up for college, you have to balance room, food, tuition, job, school time, home work, sleep. Hey, there are simulations for all sorts of things out there like farming simulators, so why not. But for my purposes I am going to focus solely on spending verses work hours.
In the game, each job you get pays $10 for the first hour, $8 for the next and on down the line till you get zero money for working, no matter how many hours you work. So you have to get multiple jobs because each boss works like this.
Now if you spend money from a job, that boss reups your pay.
So its not a perfect analogy. But its close enough. The cities don't produce less because they are smaller, they produce more thanks to slavery and how cities grow faster when they are smaller. But remember, this is not about slavery, I am just touching on it here since your whole argument depends on it. As I said from my perspective, it doesn't even really act like debt/credit, I have already outlined what makes it most uncredit like.
Sure I can sort of get the idea of credit with slavery in principle if we ignore the mechanics that defeat that analog, but slavery is not the game, but instead only a very small mechanism of the whole, one civ out of many to choose from and one you can't even choose at first.
Hey if you want credit in the game, put in a system where you can borrow from other nations or even your own banks with interest. Then it's literally credit in the game. I think Civ 3 had that.
The influence on gameplay effects are basically you spam cities you can defend till you run into the artificial mechanism designed to stop you from doing so, each city making every other city more expensive because reasons but in actuality simply to limit the drawback made by how cities grow in the first place. Slavery just allows you a way around the artificial cap and further exploit how silly growth works in the game. Reached a number of cities where it doesn't make sense to build more because of the silly corruption system? And now your existing cities won't grow at all or super slow because of the silly way cities grow fast and slow down. Just use slavery to uncap your growth and get super efficient transformation of food into production to boot.
On pure game play alone food into people and smaller cities have more people born faster, is a bad idea. But this is a game where we are suppose to imagine leading people into the future, so on realism too, which matters, it's really bad.
Now imagine how it could be.
Each troop comes from your population. When you disband them, they go back. Each unit requires food just like they would in town, it comes from the towns. Some units like scouts can live off the land and not need food from cities. They require upkeep cost, this upkeep cost increases further from the nearest city they get. But you can build forts or supply wagons that act as a new closest. Each has a limit to how far it can go from the other but through a number of them you can go far.
So in my idea population grows or dies at a certain percentage based on health, food availability, civs that encourage or limit growth (ooh my population is growing faster than I can feed them, time to implement the one child per family civ) If they run out of food, all your people start to die, the city doesn't stop growing, but instead you could lose them all. You can ration them, which halves their production and commerce but that's only a stop gap. So you expand. But remember new cities wont grow any faster, you are simply dividing up your people. You might need to expand to claim a resource, you might need to expand to feed a population. You might also expand because people are too crowded in, but you can make high rises to help with that. Cottages would require actual people to move out there, and still need to be fed. Each expansion has to be done carefully since you are dividing up your population. Each unit you make similarly has to be carefully thought out because you are dividing up your population too, so stacks of doom aren't a issue because you can't afford to do that. You can't afford to war carelessly either. On the other hand if you can conquer new people, you can increase the population under you. So the goal of war becomes about being able to control more people. We could ditch the cost per city system altogether, it would become completely unnecessary/pointless.
Mechanically speaking, the way I am suggesting or some other variant alternative to food=people seems like it would make for much more interesting choices. A kind of Organ trail survival feel to things as you balance your needs. Instead of as it is now this "this is how many cities I can make before the corruption system cripples me, so I got to plan their build spots the best I can." And without a city planning mode so your stuck counting spaces out and remembering exactly where you want to place cities. That being the beginning and end of the interesting gameplay. I feel concept could offer more fun, especially with creative help from others.
And from a thematic perspective, this would make your people feel more like people, you got a bunch of people that died for one reason or another? You care, if only because their deaths makes your rise to greatness all the less likely. So you become more attached to your people, you feel the struggle through the generations all the better.
These are just some ideas I am spitballing to demonstrate how changing from food=people system can be good, that there are better alternatives. I am sure you folks could think of even better ideas than me. So please tell me your ideas.
I don’t know of a more universally valid premise that food turns into population growth. It’s so fundamental to all living organisms i’m not sure why we are debating this, but let’s do it for academic purposes.
All living organisms grow in population until they hit some sort of a limit, be it space, enemies or something else.
At that point the contest starts, and “it’s not the strongest, but the most versatile of the species that survive”.
Its the byproduct of life that other things come to life. We eat, digest and poop, perhaps something beneficial or detrimental to some other species. Just to name the most basic influence our life has on the planet.
Turning food into other things is true for all life, with the exception of perhaps plants that create their own.
Regarding handling overpopulation, because that’s what slavery does, sure, you can handle it in numerous ways, as the game already does with happy and health caps. Slower growth due to unhealth == disease killing off higher % of population.
To be realistic, that’s what slavery does = turns life force into usable objects and services at little regard for human life,
except as an investment that needs to pay off.
If you want to be brutally honest, worker drones that spend their life building the hive have nothing to show for it, except perhaps food they receive in compensation. No retirement funds there.
Ha..yeah, that is what has puzzled me by the OP. Food, or more specifically, sources of food, have been a major factor in population growth centers...well..for all time. I think the OP states things a bit too strongly in that regard, strongly criticizing the basic core foundation of a much-beloved 13-14 year old game.
With that said, that certainly doesn't mean that there is not some interesting ideas stated here, especially for a mod. Food = population as mentioned is such a core mechanic in the game that, as I'm not a modder, I'm unsure if anyone has tried to address alternatives in any way. I don't play modpacks much anymore these days, but recall playing some mods that change the dynamic and speed at which population growth occurs, which may in part be tied in how game speed was change. Also, I know that several mods pretty much get rid of slavery for the most part, Furthermore, introducing civics that allow for production of units - not just settlers/workers - using food. I know Fall From Heaven does this, and I believe Pie's Ancient Europe has some of these mechanics as well. I'm sure there are others.
However, actually changing the core mechanic of population growth sounds to me like a major undertaking. Again, I don't know much of anything though with respect to modding. If you want to really know though I would recommend holding a discussion with modders over in the C&C forum (you appear to be a long-time member of the forum so I assume you know what this is)
As for city maintenance costs, what you call corruption, IMO it is one of the best features of the game. I mean, what are the alternatives. Infinite city spam? Is that realistic? It very hard for a video game to be a reasonable facsimile of real life situations and history itself. I think IV did a very good job of remedying some of the issues with early games, infinite city spam being one of them. Additionally, it adds extra depth and complexity to the game. It does not prevent massive empires if you know what you are doing.
I guess what warrants discussion, considering the OP, is what are the alternative factors that can be used for population growth. Seems to me in the versions of Civ I played that food has always been a major factor in growth of cities, so I'm not sure why IV is singled out here.
I think I played a game called Warlocks that had a sort of Civ V type setup, that appeared to grow population regardless of food, but I can't recall exactly what drove that growth. It just seemed over a certain amount of turns you gain a population point. There may have been buildings though that sped up growth like Granaries, but if I recall correctly it was like food on the map was driving growth. Also, I think you lost population when you created settler type units to start new cities. There is logic to that idea.
Well, to be fair, home rule like “I never whip” can also work just fine, since AIs don’t do it that often at all.
Penalties for whipping are there. The reason why human players don’t feel it as much is because they usually (YMMV on deity) successfully capitalize on the whip investment. Human vs human play is a different animal.
Some of the ideas the OP suggest would be meaningful in some other game, but in civ4 the mechanics are what they are. It would be hard to isolate pop growth and change it, wihout changing other mechanics as well (to unknown effect).
I still prefer civ4 growth to not really engaging mechanics of civ 5 and 6
I guess lowering base city health, making health buildings stronger and each unhealth point having a chance to trigger a disease outbreak that kills of pop would fix some of the issues (afair there is a similar mechanic in SMAC so maybe it can be coded in easily as an event)
Whenever I hear corruption being used as the limiting factor, I think the person is in the wrong forum and is discussing III. IV handles the issues of infinite city sprawl the best out of all the versions. And keeping events on at least tries to penalize the slavery civic. It's too bad they couldn't separate that one event so you could play events off and still be penalized. And make it less random and increase the possibility the more you use it.
I call it corruption because it increases per city with more cities and with distance, how is it so different from Civ3s system?
Bibor, aside from your first sentence of post six, which I only partially agree with. I roughly fully agree with the rest of your post. I do hope you understand that from my perspective, none of that invalidates or changes any of what I said.
As for city maintenance costs, what you call corruption, IMO it is one of the best features of the game. I mean, what are the alternatives. Infinite city spam? Is that realistic?
As I explained earlier, infinite city spam would not be possible with organic population growth instead of food converting into people growth. And yes theoretically in such a system you could spread your people real thin, and then you'd lose. My way, there would be no need or purpose for the city maintenance cost system.
I've got nothing against the maintenance cost system, it does do a good job of compensating for the bad system of food=people and small towns growing faster than large, which encourages people to spam towns as fast as they can if not for this system. But what if we simply did it another better way that didn't need compensating for in the first place?
And there is a mod going to be made for civ 6 that makes it so population doesn't turn into people and Civ 6 is also fundamentally food=people just like 4 and all the others. So if it is possible for Civ 6, perhaps it is possible for Civ 4?
As others have said, this probably belongs in the C&C forum. I haven’t played a lot of mods, but I don’t recall one that eliminates slavery outright. And I don’t know how hard it would be to change the mechanic, other than simply eliminating the civic (or making it available at Future Tech etc…), which seems straightforward.
From your post #5, though, there are some interesting concepts
Each troop comes from your population. When you disband them, they go back. Each unit requires food just like they would in town, it comes from the towns. Some units like scouts can live off the land and not need food from cities. They require upkeep cost, this upkeep cost increases further from the nearest city they get. But you can build forts or supply wagons that act as a new closest. Each has a limit to how far it can go from the other but through a number of them you can go far.
I think Call to Power and Civ2 had a similar mechanic. Units required support in Civ2 (each unit used up a unit of production from its home city every turn), and I think CtP had units consume food and production units on a per-turn basis too. I like the concept of a unit consuming population when built, and if disbanded, the population returns to the city it is disbanded in. I also like the idea of supply chains, which make warring more realistic. Might be a bit too much micromanaging to play, though.
So in my idea population grows or dies at a certain percentage based on health, food availability, civs that encourage or limit growth (ooh my population is growing faster than I can feed them, time to implement the one child per family civ)
That’s what happens now. Cities grow slower if there is unhealth or lack of food surplus. State Property provides food bonuses on Workshops and Watermills. Slavery obviously limits growth. So what you are suggesting is just a different means to the same end. Nothing wrong with that (all modders do the same thing), but what makes sense to you might not make sense to others.
If they run out of food, all your people start to die, the city doesn't stop growing, but instead you could lose them all.
Again, this already happens. Cities that run out of food see their populations shrink. If I pillage the food supplies of your large city and park units on all the arable land, the food box will gradually empty (visualize this as the store shelves being emptied by hungry consumers) and the population will start shrinking when food reserves are exhausted.
A city with food surplus of 0 isn’t out of food – it has exactly enough food for the population it has.
Personally, I have toyed with the idea that a city that is in a food deficit should automatically switch to building Settlers until the food surplus is restored. When a population is running out of food, what usually happens is they pick up and move somewhere where they can feed themselves.
As others have said, this probably belongs in the C&C forum. I haven’t played a lot of mods, but I don’t recall one that eliminates slavery outright. And I don’t know how hard it would be to change the mechanic, other than simply eliminating the civic (or making it available at Future Tech etc…), which seems straightforward..
A whole city starves to death because it ran out of food? That is not what happens in Civ 4 unmoded.
Please explain to me how I failed to convey my ideas and reasons.
If population grew as a percentage, the percentage going up or down according to conditions, sorta like real life, and simply needed food to survive else face complete death, not a portion, but everyone. Then there would be interesting strategy about how you use and protect your citizens to bring them and you to greatness. It both would bring better realism and strategy and fun into the game.
If population grew as a percentage, the percentage going up or down according to conditions, sorta like real life, and simply needed food to survive else face complete death, not a portion, but everyone. Then there would be interesting strategy about how you use and protect your citizens to bring them and you to greatness. It both would bring better realism and strategy and fun into the game.
Civ4 is a very fun game for the intelligent mind. Throw reality out of the window and enjoy the game for what it is.
It's ... not a civilization simulator. None of the civ games are. The closest someone got to one is, I'd say, Sim City 4.
If you want a proper competition, you can't have realism. One of the two has to go. There's a reason why competitions are planned to be short, both sports and wars. Because if it lasts too long, winter will come, people will go hungry, rivers will dry up, pestilence will spread, volcanoes will explode.
Bibor, you are right. Living things need to eat. Civ4 is a fun game that requires intelligence. Also, having populations grow organically instead of being converted from food(along with related tweaks) would add additional depth and fun to the game. Realism would only be a bonus, not the main point.
And please realize at no point did I say Civ 4 is not a great game, it is. I said so in my OP. But if there wasn't ways to improve or do differently, then you would be saying the whole mod community are wasting their time. And that is what I am asking about. Civ4 is a done game, I am asking about a mod. Why Civ 4? I already said, because I like as the best of Civilization games. Do I really need more of a reason than that to ask specifically for Civ4?
As Civ 4 is now, populations are perfectly content to be starved. It just results in losing a little population, no big deal. If you lose a portion of population to starvation, magically the bin fills with food again as a person is converted to enough food to feed a town. Bibor is right, people need food. But in Civ, you don't need to feed your population, you just grow it like you have a magic ray gun that you point at a pile of food and turn into people.
Here's an example of how a moded game like I am suggesting. Please keep in mind this is just off the top of my head and one of many ways we could do this.
You've been playing for a little bit now and have 5310 people. Each tile can be worked by a max of 1000 people. You've been having them work the grasslands for food and things have been going well with you getting 15% more population each turn, you'll get 796 more people next turn. But farmers have started seeing signs of a drought, (notification of such pops up) and in that case your nonriver tiles will have their food production cut in half and you barely have enough to feed your people as it is. Your neighbor has a big old river going through them, you need it. So you've assigned some to the woods to train to be warriors, 500 population will be subtracted for each warrior group(aka unit), but they will still need to eat. They also need to be paid each turn. You've wisely built up a army while you can still feed them. And send them off to do war. After you made enough warriors, you set ration mode for the city, which halves how much everyone needs to eat, but also halves their production and commerce rounded down, but the amount of food they produce remains the same.
You succeed and capture the other nations city. They have 2032 of their own people, but you decide not to have them killed. This new area is rich in food to support them, if you can hold it. But the preexisting residents of the new city will refuse to work for a few turns, so you have population migrate over from the other city (a simple command to tell X amount of people to go to Y city and it happens next turn or the turn after depending on how far away it is) your people work the fields of the city while we wait for the resisters to calm down. But now you can take people off rations and ramp up military production to take the rest of the area. But some of the area hasn't even been claimed, so you make a settler, which has a reduced production requirement compared to a normal game, but needs constant production support and food for as long as its up.
Now if you had failed to expand and there wasn't enough food for everyone, you'd maybe lose half the population one turn with half the remaining population sick and unable to work. If you still didn't have enough food, your whole town would become dead/empty and diseased for some turns. (from the corpses)
Now if possible, we could make it so we assign a specific amount of people per tile, but then that would require granulating their output too. Instead to keep things simple and consistent with the existing game mechanisms. Each 1k of population equals one head to work a tile. Partial numbers that aren't military or worker simply only count for growth. They can't be used to work tiles nor do they require to be fed. So if you have 6891 people in a town, and we want the ratio to be one head per 1000, (we can work with the numbers) mechanically it would be a population of 6 heads. The other 891 only count for figuring out how many people will be in the town next turn, but again, don't need to be fed and can't contribute work either.
Obviously you never played III or you wouldn't have to ask. In III Corruption drastically reduced production in cities so if you built too many you would only get 1 or 2 shields and take forever to build anything. (especially a courthouse that would help reduce it.) this sucked all the fun out of early expansion and led to a lot of people giving up on the game. They supposedly tweaked it later but by them I had already stopped playing it. So totally different.
Well I have played 3, but its been awhile. My point is, its still the same concept of game punishment for owning more cities as a counter measure for the failings of food turning into people and small towns growing faster than large ones. That failing is, it encourages city spamming as fast as you can. Civs system makes it so you don't have people, you only have cities. Civ4s production normal upkeep corruption still encourages city spaming, just makes for a artificial limit where you don't want to make more cities than that because the punishment would outway the gain. But if population growth happened organically, there would be no need for the corruption system of civ4, or whatever name you wish to call it. Give me a short name for it to use instead and I'll use that, even though it is still a corruption system.
Changing the food growth formula technically probably isn't a very big deal, but since it's such a core mechanic the implications are huge.
Now it is true that the current growth formula makes no sense from a realism-perspective. Cities should grow slowly in the beginning and then accelerate. In many ways, growing 1->2 should take as long as 10->20.
There are of course also other problems such as the "Rome vs New York" where your new cities have no chance of catching up to your ancient powerhouses. 2000AD your #1 city is probably one of your (or an AIs) first three cities, and certainly not a city founded 1600AD.
But AFAIK there's no mod that solves the unrealistic city growth "problem". You would have to redesign so much that you might at well just create an entirely new 4X game from scratch.
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