That's exactly what I was getting at and what I'd hope you would say
The advantages:
- nationalizes your economy, so cities can redistribute hammers/food/wealth
- pulls the sudoku out of civilization
I personally like it. I don't think the question is whether Firaxis will find it too much of a fundamental change. I think the question is whether Firaxis is prepared to simplify parts of the economy? I hope they are prepared to simplify the tile-shuffle. Not because I hate strategy, but because I hate puzzle games. I'd like to see the puzzle-gaming replaced with more strategy: like a more intricate international trade system.
My official, original suggestion has a serious flaw in it, though. Well, maybe "flaw" is too harsh a word, but it's a side effect that gives me pause.
MontyLaremane noted some odd results for food production if you mined some hills. I thought about this a bit more since then, and noticed another problem.
Short version: Cities in hostile terrain will be able to grow quite large. Long version (showing why) in the spoiler box:
Spoiler:
Imagine a terrain of 21 grassland-hills, in the middle of which you plant a city. How does it perform in regular Civ? Well, the central square produces 2 food, 1 hammer, and 1 coin (henceforth, 2F-1H-1C), and the citizen (if he works the surrounding terrain and isn't made a specialist) can only produce 1F-1H. That will result in a 1F surplus, and so in a few turns a second citizen will be born. That citizen can also only work the surrounding terrain, resulting in the following production profile for the city: 4F-3H-1C. And that's as big as the city can get, because those two citizens will fully consume the 4F being produced. If the player mines the two hills being worked by his citizens, the city will produce 7H and 1C for use in building improvements/units and research/culture.
Now imagine the same city in my new system, and let's imagine the player maxes out food production in that city. With one citizen it will have a GDP of $8.00, which will buy it 4F, so it will get a new citizen even quicker (because it will have a 2F surplus). Each new citizen will be bring an extra $4.00 in GDP, which will buy the 2F that citizen needs in order to live, so there will be a 2F surplus after each birth, until all food in the city radius has been purchased. There will be 22F in that radius, meaning the city can grow to an 11-citizen city. Not a colossus of the first order, but still very hefty indeed.
Now, by itself, this isn't a real game-changer. The city will be big, but $44.00 of its $48.00 GDP would be consumed in Food production. Depending on how the player distributed the remainder, the city could produce 4C or 1H-2C or 2H. [This is actually approximate; the per-unit cost of hammers would be $1.95, not $2.00, but the round numbers are close enough for purposes of discussion.] The city is bigger than its regular-Civ counterpart, but actually less productive of useful things.
Until the player starts mining the hills. If he mines every single one of them, the per-unit cost of food drops in half, and per-unit cost of hammers drops by 75%. That means his food costs would drop to $22.00, giving him $26.00 to spend on hammers, and he could buy 26 of them for that price. After mining, in other words, his choices would range from 26H-0C to 7H-19C to 0H-26C. However you slice it, that's hugely more productive than in the regular game.
Bottom-line numbers: In identical landscapes described above, a regular Civ could only build a 2-citizen city that produced (before forges and marketplaces) 7 hammers and 1 coin. In my redesign, you could build an 11-citizen city that produced (before forges and marketplaces) an 11-citizen city that could produced 7 hammers and 19 coin, and could increase its production of either up to 26 (if production of the other dropped to 0).
Consequences for game play? Hard to predict with precision. It is, after all, an extreme example. At the very least, it would make empires that had such cities richer and more powerful; empires that start with a lot of hills would be quickly empowered against others; players would have an incentive to build in locations where the ratio of food-producing squares to hilly squares is very low.
In replying to MontyLaremane, I suggested the following change to the formula for calculating per-unit costs:
My first thought is to uglify the calculations by dividing the money that could be spent in a square between "Food" costs and "Hammer" costs before further dividing it among the number of food and hammer to be bought. Hard to describe except with an example:
In your mined hill grassland, the $4.00 would be divided into two sets of $2.00. One set would reflect the total cost of food that could be bought in that square, and the other would reflect the total cost of hammers to be bought in that square. The 1 food would cost ($2.00 / 1) or $2.00 per unit to buy, while the hammers would cost ($2.00 / 3) or $0.67 per unit to buy. Increasing the output of a square's hammers would thus not cause the per-unit cost of its food to fall, and vice versa.
Where there is only one type of resource to be bought, the full GDP cost would fall on the one type. Thus, in the case of farmed grassland, it would still cost $4.00 to buy those three food units, for a per unit cost of $1.33.
Where there is coin in the square, the coin would be subtracted before the GDP constant is divided into food and hammer types. Thus, in a 2F-1H-1C square, the $4.00 would be cut to $3.00 ($4.00 minus 1 C), then divided into two sets of $1.50, each of which would be spent separately on food (which would cost $0.75 apiece) and hammer (which would cost $1.50).
This would not stop the player from growing a very large city in terrain composed completely of hill-grassland. But the city would not be tremendously productive. An 11-citizen city would still need to spend $44.00 of its $48.00 GDP on food, leaving only $4.00 to be distributed among hammer and coin. Even if he mined every square, that would leave the city only able to purchase at most 4 hammers.
The change uglifies the calculations you need to make, but it's hidden inside of code.
The idea sounds very well, and I like the simplicity and complexity of it - especially the function about the villager being paid for buying food.
Still, I find that the system has one "up" and one "down" - being that, while the player can tell the city exactly what he wants from the coty, this system pretty much eliminates the possibility of creating specialists, a very progressive feature of the original civ4.
At worst, it renders specialists superfluous when a city has a population of 20 or lower, because the player is able to directly his demand away from food and into, say, hammer or coin production without taking citizens off of squares and turning them into specialists. When a city grows over 20 citizens, though, the extra citizens will only be able produce coins. Non-coin specialists would thus have a role in that kind of megalopolis. And specialists that produce research or culture would still have role. They would have to be added in some other way. I haven't given any though to how they might be added, but I don't think it would be hard. I'm open to ideas.
But is it really a negative to get rid of specialists who produce hammers and coin? Their only use in the game currently is to let you increase production in either of those commodities, but only at the cost of pulling a worker off of some square. In essence, they are a device to give the player more flexibility inside a production model that is quite inflexible. I don't see it as a loss, then, if the new system gives you what they give you.
I think the spirit of the suggestion is still solid though. Sometimes that's more important than the details. I think the details can be massaged until you get numbers that work, no?
Why don't you just have a cap on any particular commodity in the city. It seems strange to be able to magically conjure up food that isn't there. Yeah, you're "buying from rural farmers" or something. Still, this is exactly what you're talking about. A production city is able to buy food that really isn't there. Or, vice versa. Instead, you could allow the player total customization, within the limit of what the city has available.
Why don't you just have a cap on any particular commodity in the city. It seems strange to be able to magically conjure up food that isn't there. Yeah, you're "buying from rural farmers" or something. Still, this is exactly what you're talking about. A production city is able to buy food that really isn't there. Or, vice versa. Instead, you could allow the player total customization, within the limit of what the city has available.
But they're not conjuring up food that "isn't there." Food and hammers are limited just as much as they are currently. If the city has only 22 food units in its radius, it's not going to be able to get more than that (except by importing it, if a "national market" feature is implemented, and even then the imported food comes from somewhere on the map).
National markets probably can't be implemented. Free food was shown to be to advantageous to game milking in Civ3. You could join workers to 1 city, and it can only lose 1 pop per turn, so it can grow to be impossibly large if you keep producing workers in other cities. The same could apply in this. You can have a few 100 citizen cities that produce impossibly high yields (and this makes is far more viable earlier in the game).
Hmmm. I never tried this in Civ 3, so I can only guess how it worked. (1) Mass-produce workers and feed them into a couple of cities so as to build them up really big; (2) use a couple of "feeder" cities to produce 1 or 2 workers a turn feed them into the giant cities in order to keep them big; (3) use the extra pop in the giant cities to produce extra coin and hammers.
Is that right?
I'd have to know in more detail what the strategy in Civ 3 was and what it was good for in order to comment. If it's anything like I've guessed, I have my doubts that the system I've proposed could be used to reproduce that strategy, but I can't say for sure.
I think the underlying system I've proposed could be made to work, though after some very good and perceptive comments, I'd make a few changes.
1. I'd change the coin-generating aspects of cottages-hamlets-villages-and-towns so that they'd add GDP directly to a city. So, for instance, adding a cottage to a square would raise a 2-citizen city's GDP from $8.00 to $9.00. This would solve two problems. First, it would get rid of the "negative expenses" problem—even though it's not actually a problem, it is counter-intuitive behavior. Second, it would be easier to describe the behavior of cottages, et al, in the game documentation. [EDIT: Cottages would "evolve" similar to the manner they do now, except that the number of cottages that evolve would be equal to number of citizens in the city. If there are more cottages than citizens, then the extra cottages would not evolve into hamlets.]
2. I'd change the way per-unit costs are calculated in the manner I suggested earlier, so that farms and mines don't make hammer and food costs, respectively, decline.
It's hard to "playtest" this kind of idea in an actual game, but I've run a lot of back-of-the-envelope calculations on some cities I've built in test games, and I'm not seeing any obvious problems. Such "exploits" as being able to build mammoth cities in marginal terrain don't seem to come with many advantages: Having a big city on the edge of a desert doesn’t mean much if most of your money is going to buy food, thus leaving relatively little to invest in coin or hammer production. In fact, the cost of food, not the amount that is available, turns out to be the limiting factor. In this new system you should buy food only until your next food unit costs $2.00; if you continue to buy food at that price, the only result will be the creation of citizens that will have to spend all of their GDP on food—in other words, a citizen who has to work as hard as possible just to stay alive, leaving nothing left over for research, culture, or hammer production.
So I've been thinking about the idea for the "national market," and I'm seeing some problems there.
First, trade in food does not bring obvious benefits. If you shift food from Smallville to Metropolis, you can make Metropolis bigger than Smallville, but at what benefit? A citizen in Metropolis will produce no more GDP than a citizen in Smallville, unless Metropolis has financial infrastructure (like marketplaces) that Smallville lacks. But then why not build such infrastructure in Smallville? Moreover, any food that goes from Smallville to Metropolis can only be purchased by shifting coin from Metropolis to Smallville, which (ironically) makes Smallville richer than Metropolis.
The only real benefit to national trade in food is that you can arrange routes so that all of your cities are getting their basic food supplies from the cheapest sources, but this sends you right back into "sudoku" puzzles where you have to figure out how much food a city should export so that your other cities can get a cheaper supply.
Second, trade in hammers opens up another potential micromanagement headache. It looks like national trade would create a new version of the old "multiple production" centers suggestion. You know the idea: a city should have two or more production queues, and the player should be allowed to distribute hammers between these two queues. The problem is that the most efficient way to distribute your hammers is to put all of them into one queue, which vitiates the whole idea of having multiple queues.
Well, in the same way, if you can "nationalize" hammer production, then you wind up with one giant, empire-wide source of hammers: just have all of your cities "export" their hammers. If you do that, then, all of your cities become "multiple production queues," and you could, in theory, shift all of your hammers into only one city. The problem isn't so much that you could "rush build" Wonders. The problem is that you could rush-build anything, and, in fact, that would be the most efficient thing to do. But then you'd be constantly micromanaging your internal trade so as to direct your concentrated hammer production into different cities.
The basic problem, it seems to me, is that the most direct way of modeling "national trade" just turns your empire into a larger and more-difficult-to-manage city. It would need a different approach.
Obviously, because it forces you to build x2 the infrastructure. This is exactly why city specialization exists.
Given your model as it stands, it seems clear that the "best" setup would be to specialize the Smallvilles in food and money, and to specialize the Metropolis in something that extra citizens can get you (GPP, or one or more aspects of GDP).
BTW, the food-export model remarkably simulates real life.
Dont know if it has been mentioned, but consider this example:
You plant a city in an area with 20 workable tiles producing 2F6C (a riverside town or whatever. Now, you enter the city and push up the food demand. Because of the amount of coins in the field, this will also increase the amount of gold produced, resulting in free food - this way, one citizen can produce 40 food AND alot of coins the way I get it - please correct me if I'm wrong about this?
Obviously, because it forces you to build x2 the infrastructure. This is exactly why city specialization exists.
Given your model as it stands, it seems clear that the "best" setup would be to specialize the Smallvilles in food and money, and to specialize the Metropolis in something that extra citizens can get you (GPP, or one or more aspects of GDP).
BTW, the food-export model remarkably simulates real life.
That's what I thought too, but I'm having a hard time getting it to work out that way in my "simulations." In practice, it seems best to keep the population and infrastructure in the big, food-producing cities and to use the excess coin generated by their large populations to purchase hammers from smaller, satellite cities. But maybe I just need to play around with some more examples. ("Sudoku" is proving to be a problem in figuring out optimal distributions of food and hammers and the like.)
Dont know if it has been mentioned, but consider this example:
You plant a city in an area with 20 workable tiles producing 2F6C (a riverside town or whatever. Now, you enter the city and push up the food demand. Because of the amount of coins in the field, this will also increase the amount of gold produced, resulting in free food - this way, one citizen can produce 40 food AND alot of coins the way I get it - please correct me if I'm wrong about this?
Well, which version of my proposal are you asking about? The original one, or the revision I made yesterday? If you're asking about the original one, then you could get something like the effect you're describing, and that's one reason I made yesterday's change. With the revision, you shouldn't get that kind of behavior.
IF the revision is changing cottages to provide GDP for the city square, would the city have to work the square to obtain this? How would it work when a citizen can work multiple squares? Wouldn't the example I just gave still give liek 120 gold (yet only 4 food) in this model? Explain please.
IF the revision is changing cottages to provide GDP for the city square, would the city have to work the square to obtain this? How would it work when a citizen can work multiple squares? Wouldn't the example I just gave still give liek 120 gold (yet only 4 food) in this model? Explain please.
Well, citizens do not "work" squares in the new system. Yes, I have referred to them "working" squares, but that has only been to make clear that new system is not getting anything more out of the ground than in the original system.
With my latest revision, cottages would not grow into hamlets unless there was a citizen to correspond to that cottage. For instance, in a 7-citizen city surrounded by 9 cottages, only 7 of the cottages would begin growing into hamlets. This is so the new system "mirrors" the old system; the citizens do not "work" the cottages into hamlets, but no more hamlets would grow into cities than if would grow in the old system.
So, let's look at your example and see what would happen.
First, if it surrounded by 20 towns, then it would have to have at least 20 citizens. That would give it a GDP of $84.00 ($4.00 x (20 citizens + 1 city square)). The towns would give it another $80.00 in GDP (20 squares x $4.00 per square), so the city would have $164.00 GDP.
This is money that the city gets before anything else happens. It's the player's responsibility to spend the money so as to keep the city up and running and productive.
Now, the player could set the controls to buy any amount of food and hammers that could be produced within the city's radius. This means he could produce 0 Food, 0 Hammers, and 164 Coin, if he didn't mind seeing his city quickly starve down to fewer than 20 citizens. [BTW, there would have to be a rule in effect that a decrease in the number of citizens would lead to a decrease in the number of towns/hamlets/villages if the citizen level dropped to less than the number of such things.] But let's assume he wants to keep his 20 citizens without growing the city any larger.
Each square has a production value of 2F6C, you said. Since 4 of these coins come from the towns, that would give each square an underlying value of 2F2C. According to the formula, that would mean each food unit costs $1.00. To support a city with 20 citizens, the player would have to buy 40 food units. That would leave him with $124.00 ($164.00 GDP - $40.00 in food costs). In production terms that would be a city that produced 40 Food and 124 Coin. The player could spend at most $2.00 to buy the one hammer that is within his city's radius (inside the city square). Assuming he bought that hammer, the city would have the following production profile: 40F, 1H, 124C.
(Note also that he would only be able to buy 2 more food: the city as a whole only produces 42 food units.)
Does that seem unreasonable? Let's see how the same city would operate in regular Civ.
Again, to have 20 towns, the city would have to have 20 citizens, each of whom is working a square. That would give the city 42 food units (meaning it would be running a 2 Food surplus), 1 hammer (from the central square) and 122 Coin ((6 coin x 20 squares) + 2 coin from the city square). Thus, the city in regular Civ is basically identical to the one in the redesign. The only difference is that the redesigned city can cut its food purchases down so it's not generating a surplus and pocket the extra 2 coins.
Great, great, but this means that if I raze a large enemy city without razing the cottages, they automatically drop? What if I bring along a settler to use the improvements he has built (in this example, towns)? Would these cities and towns and hamlets all disappear?
Maybe you could implement that the smaller towns would degenerate over time if a city large enough to support them is nearby - that way, when the "heart" of that piece of land is destroyed (the city itself), the smaller parts would degenerate into cottages over time - simply because of the lack of need for their products (now speaking realism) whether it be crops or labour.
Also, another thing just dropped into my mind. What about the civics that change harvests? (US +1 from town, SP + 1 from workshops and watermills (i think it is?))
Great, great, but this means that if I raze a large enemy city without razing the cottages, they automatically drop? What if I bring along a settler to use the improvements he has built (in this example, towns)? Would these cities and towns and hamlets all disappear?
Maybe you could implement that the smaller towns would degenerate over time if a city large enough to support them is nearby - that way, when the "heart" of that piece of land is destroyed (the city itself), the smaller parts would degenerate into cottages over time - simply because of the lack of need for their products (now speaking realism) whether it be crops or labour.
Also, another thing just dropped into my mind. What about the civics that change harvests? (US +1 from town, SP + 1 from workshops and watermills (i think it is?))
I really like the Idea. Mostly because it would change the entire civ strategy by making it unecessary to place your cities in areas with food. This was until now the factor that has always made my industrial cities unable to fully devellop.
Something to consider mebey if infastructure like markets/banks and such could have there power adjustable based on city size so that a small city will get less use out of a bank system then one that is the size of new york.
Also i was wondering if it is possable to have it so that with some advanced technology or what have you that would allow a city to generate more resorces out of the land then is there except at higher prices so if a city wanted to get 4 5 or 6 food out of a 3 food square it might have to pay double or triple the base price? just wondering if that is possable without muffing up the math.
Am I the only one that likes the micromanagement of what tiles to work with your citizens? I like squezing that extra hammer out of the city while starving for 3 turns to complete the next build order in 3 turns instead of 4.
How will this deal with Tile blocking by enemies? Atm, each individual working tile is important. What happens when an enemy axeman places itself on a mine and you lose those 4 hammers? In your system it seems like it's no worry at all, I'll just get those 4 hammers from these 4 forests instead, suck on that Axeman!
If that axemen is over the cheaptest 4 hammers, then you will have to take your hammers from other place meaning that you will get les hammers or less money.
I like the tile micromanagtment too, but i like everithing that gives me more control about what to extract and where to use it. And this system would allow not to extract individual tiles but pieces of tiles, leaving the player to decided which resources to extract and most importantly on which city to use it.
Mxzs: I had an idea. Why should this system mean that specialist are no longer usefull? I think this system could use specialist wery good, you would only have to change its function. Instead of producing resources, specialist could reduce the cost of the produced resources.
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from town, SP + 1
from workshops and watermills (i think it is?))
