Grey Fox said:
Unhappiness already affects

&

, since an unhappy worker dont work. And unhappines makes you value

less since you dont want your city to grow to become unhappy. Unhealthiness does and should affect

. Thats a GOOD mechanic. And since it affects

, it affects

&

as well. Since they are both dependant on you having population, and population is dependant on

.
So I think it should stay as it is.
I know all of what you just said, but theres not a direct corilation. THe only corilation between unhappiness and unhealitness and

&

is the relation it has to

and subsequent citizenry to work tiles. Thats a long way around to affects something.
I was comparing each "income resource" one to another. Food is the weakest, with Gold being the strongest. Gold is a direct contributor throughout the whole of the game, it gives money for purchases, and beakers for science and potentially notes for boarder expansion. Hammers produce units and buildings, food produces citizens. Note how gold does 3 things, hammers 2, and food 1. Yet there are not one but 2 types of impedements to food.
I maintain that its debateable if having more total population, one civ to another, makes that civ more powerful. Honestly, I think that there are too many other considerations to be assessed. But it's debateable enough that we cannot consider total-citizenry to be the mark of whether or not a civilizaiton is particularly powerful. I think we CAN determine NUMBER of cities and the ability to hold them as a good signifier, because it would mean that enough money is being made to deal with maintenance, and enough hammers are being produced to effectively protect that much space. I believe, and have always believed that # of cities is the best indicator of a civilizations power.
Now many of you are going to say that a few great cities is better than a lot of crappy ones. But let us be honest, In building our civilziations, we dont spam cities and grab the crappiest city spots first, we grab the best spots first. So it can be assumed that most cities of any given civilzation were the best possible options they had at any given time. Including the "crappy" spots. In this, then, it still is about direct number. Those who can effectively have and hold and continue to produce with more cities is more powerful.
Food, however, does not equal cities. In fact people with lots and lots of hammers can produce settlers equally as fast as your nearest food king. Or if slower, its not a big deal because the hammer king could simply invade the food king.
Food as a resource is increadibly weak. Primarily becuase it only serves one function, but subsequently becuase its blocked by two impedements. If hammers and Gold were also blocked by SOMETHING, then you'd see strategies emerge that would focus on food, and slavery and the like.
For food to be more equally effective in any game, it would have to be able to preform another role, or citizens, the output of food, would have to have more functions that working tiles that bring hammers and gold.
Let me put it this way. Food is Oil, Gold is Fuel, and Hammers are a M60 machine gun. If your civilization is a Armed Jeep, then you can see the relation of how this works. You need the oil for your jeep to run, to function, however, it does nothing else interesting. The Gas does everything, it powers the beast, and can accelerate it to mindnumbing speeds, the machine gun is to ward off other armed jeeps, if you didnt have it, your jeep would be toast.
The function of the Food, in my little analogy, clearly makes it important, and necessary, but not at ALL interesting or powerful.
As it is, people have "just enough" food to be slightly growing. Even then you dont want unhappy people. Though unhappyness doesnt really have any negative modifiers to it, since all execess unhappi people simply dont work. Its still good to actually have those citizens.
Regardless food is weak, hammers are nominal, and gold is uber powerful. This is why the cottages are the "best" improvement in the game, because they offer the most possible for their tile. In gold.
If food had more options, or if hammer and gold has some impedements, I think we'd see more diverse economic strategies.
I just want it to be plausible that someone would try to "monopolise" food and make food production a back bone of some strategy. Same with Hammers (the kahazad sort of fill this role currently, but really thats STILL based on gold) Gold as a strategy is ALREADY the mainstay. You maximise gold? You win. I want hammer based, and food based socieites. I think to do this for food, specialists need to be enhanced (so that there are causes to use them more often) and/or increase the sheer amount of food IN the game, so taht the "undervalued" nature of it is supplanted with sheer volumue. If for example, we dont want to change how food works, then let us increase the total potential yeilds of it everywhere. The net consequence of this would be that strategies like "conquest" as a civic, and slavery - uses would be far more useful, because youd have more excess population to spend on things.
I'm done rambling again.
-Qes