A lot of the food-type resources should give percentage food yield bonuses, because it represents knowing how to work with the resource just as much as having it (for the most part the first implies the other), and therefore generally speaking should mean that the more food you have available, the more of it you actually know how to work with. They usually already do, just on buildings instead of with the resource proper (which is fairly understandable). When you list 'consumer' buildings you also need to take into account the ones that don't have it as a prerequisite (hard or soft) but instead look at it and say 'okay +1%
/
, this means it is using the resource'. Obviously eggs are used almost ubiquitously in food.
First off, thanks for speaking up! In discussions like these, the more voices, the better. I feel you're showing strong insight here with this comment. This points exactly towards the whole reason for this discussion. I'm wanting to start making access to resources mean more than a small +1 health here or there or just as prerequisites for buildings, particularly in the trade goods that buildings can generate. It's a two or three part concept, depending on how you want to look at it.
Project goal #1: Make it more difficult to amass all of the manufactured resources and spur trade of them more often. Achieved by establishing limits to how many buildings of a resource generating nature can be constructed in a city and base those limits on the nature of the industry taking place in that location in the tiles that city owns, thus also making the choices of how to improve the plots around the city to be based on MORE than just maximizing yields. Do this by defining categories of industry and call them zones. Improvements on surrounding tiles and some generic buildings create zones for the city. Not all buildings require an unused zone but many buildings do require a zone of a particular type, and when built, consume that zone, potentially making one have to choose between a number of options as to what to have the city produce (or change how you're working the land so you can open up other zones you may need for buildings you want). Commercial zones for markets and such (coming from 'town' improvements, for example) would also compete for space.
Project Goal #2: Make it clear that there are buildings that generate resources and buildings that consume or represent the consumption OF resources (and sometimes ones that convert one to another or do both create and apply, but still make it clear how the resource is going through both steps). And you pretty much nailed it on the head as to how I want to achieve that. The only exception to what you suggested is that I'm wanting to introduce new tags for
%/+/- yield/commerce/happy/healthy/XP/XP to UnitCombat etc PER population (out to two decimals in most cases) with access to Bonus. By doing so, we should really be able to make nearly every bonus significant and have a lot of granularity to work with in game balancing the impact of buildings and bonuses.
I don't know about this. To begin with, the concept that children working is equivalent to exploitation is both modern and not even globally accepted. The fact is that children can't actually do much complex work anyway (which is why the rise in 'true' public child labor came with industrialization and factory tasks, as these were extraordinarily simple tasks that required little to not training); what the children would realistically be doing is simple, not-very-physically demanding, but tedious work such as sorting nuts, butchering animals, finding shellfish in tidepools, and so on.
A nicer outlook. Perhaps if the bonus wasn't so strong one might not be led to think the children are ruthlessly made to work themselves nearly to death. There's also other factors involved. If it means fairly heavy duty labor for a kid, it could increase the mortality rate (unhealth) but also make them stronger, thus +XP to units. That could also be part of its production benefit, not just what the kids bring to the community directly, but what the way they are raised making them more productive adults as well. Also also labor is the bane of the artist since play and freedom and time to explore and express are what develops creativity, thus the building should probably also penalize culture (rather severely I'd think.) And it doesn't sound like a happy way to grow up and could be begrudged a bit, thus some unhappiness from the building sounds right. If it's just a couple hours of chores a day, I'd say the building effects are far too strong. So perhaps we could have a couple of options as to what you choose to build, one that's more hardcore, one that's less, and then perhaps one that is in direct opposition to the concept that fosters total child freedom from effort, each one being an exclusive local decision for that community that once constructed, cuts you off from being able to construct the other. Perhaps we should also consider child work crews that operate in the fields with the women, bringing in food instead of helping the builders of the tribe with construction tasks or early training programs. Going down this road of thinking, we could end up with some interesting 'local civic' building options that may be a choice for cities in many eras to come, not just at this stage. Perhaps this should be divorced from overall civics as prerequisites?
Just some thoughts.