population transfer

[CaptainPatch]

This came up while I was playing a game as Venice. The situation was that I had Venice and one puppet. For Venice, puppets grow painfully slow. Because of population increases "at your nearest city", the puppet ended up with 4 excess population units with no place to be allocated. Meanwhile, Venice had scads of space, but not nearly enough population units to utilize workable tiles or Specialist berths. It would have been sooooo nice to be able to send the puppet's excess over to Venice, which was just down the road.

Normally, an excess population problem could be alleviated by having the crowded city build a Settler unit and have it march over to the city that has room. But that option isn't open to Venice because 1) Venice can't produce Settlers, and 2) the Venice player has no say in what the puppet chooses to build.

So I'm thinking US history with its many periods with dramatic population shifts like "Go West, young man. Go West!" Or practically every economic downturn causing people to go to wherever the jobs were, like the Okie migration. Create a distinct unit similar to a Settler, but it doesn't take nearly so long to build. Then the ONLY ability it has is to walk to another city and join that city's population.

 

[Skykiller]

That's a good idea and I thought a lot about this, especially when I'm in a game where the population is not always when I need the most. I would be ready to propose the ability to move population from a city to another (something that is possible in Civ IV Colonization) as a replacement for the Manifest Destiny UA. As you, and the american intro, said it, migration is part of the american history.

Now for the way, it can be as a unit or in a abstract mecanic (in a box for example). It could be very interesting, as we could have citizen moving to the capital to work on a wonder or to fill a specialist slot (a bit like people raised in a small city and who go to work on the bigger city when they are formed).

 

[CaptainPatch]

I could see a mechanism like gifting units to CSs: Designate the unit to be donated, it disappears from the map and three turns later it appears at the destination CS. In this case, the unit would be an unassigned city population unit.

 

[Camikaze]

This wouldn't really solve the Venice problem you describe, though (I'm not entirely sure it's a problem, given you could purchase culture buildings to speed border growth). Some sort of migration mechanic, however, would be nice. I think a nice change to caravans & cargo ships would be the ability to add on extra food, subtracted from the city's growth, though this could have the potential to create unstoppable mega-cities. But that way you could redirect growth from a city that is unable to currently utilise it, to a city that is in need of a higher population.