-Edit-
I've illustrated the exact mechanics of this in posts you can find here:
The Province System
The City System 1 and 2
-End edit-
I've been giving a lot of thought to how I would like to see a hypothetical Civ V innovate over previous games. There's one idea that keeps coming back to me, and I thought I'd throw it out here to run it past some people.
Cities were not the backbone of most ancient societies. Agriculture was. Most humans weren't city dwellers for the majority of history, we were largely farmers. Now Civ has created this system where, for the sake of a simple game engine, all farmers live in metropolises and commute to their fields each day. While this makes for simple gameplay, because all you have to manage as pertains to your civilization's land use can be carried out in the city screen, it means certain periods of history are virtually impossible to faithfully represent.
For starters, the early middle ages was a period of de-urbanization. Medieval lords had large kingdoms and powerful armies, but they did so without controlling and taxing cities, they did so by trading land to soldiers for military service. Civ has never been able to handle this economic system (this is the technical definition of feudalism for those who don't know) with any degree of accuracy.
Second, cities do not depend on grain farmed within a fifty mile radius. No major metropolis could exist if their food supplies couldn't be imported. So modern history also cannot be represented accuratly. In Civ IV, for a city to be a major commerical center, all its tiles had to be towns, meaning most major commercial cities couldn't surpass a population of 20, whereas agricultural centers could reach upwards of 40 on occasion.
To fix this, I propose that cities and the system of working land be seperated, as follows.
When the game starts, you will already have an administrative center and several farms or pasturelands adjacent to it, organized into a prefecture. These farms and pastures are themselves inhabited by permanent population working the land and providing their own food, plus a surplus if the land quality is good. The administrative center is like a stripped down city, and may be developed into a sizeable city over time, but at the beginning, it only holds the local administration of the prefecture. Farms will ship their excess food to their prefecture's administrative center along roads or rivers. The prefecture or province replaces the old "city radius," except that it's size isn't limited to any arbitrary distance. You decide what prefecture you want an inhabited tile in, only the farther they are from the center, the more expensive it becomes to move food and resources, and the price of the infrastructure will be become prohibitive if you try to make one uber-province.
Now, when the food reaches the administrative center, it can be used for several purposes:
Cities can be build within prefectures, and will need this food imported to them to support sizeable populations. Without supporting cities, science, commerce, and production will not be able to occur on a large scale.
Raw materials from mines, etc., will aslo be gathered by people living in the tile with the mine, who will need to be supported with food from the prefecture. Note that, just like farms become prohibitivly expensive long distances from administrative centers, it will become prohibitivly expensive to ship food to a mine which is far off the major roads or rivers at the edge of your prefecture.
Administrative centers can trade unneeded resources to other administrative centers in need. This will be expensive if your civ only has the wheel researched, but in this way, in late games civs which have researched railroad and refrigeration can easily ship food from breadbaskets to major trade centers, creating metropolises like we actually see in the world today.
Workers would still build farms and mines the way they do in previous civs, except population will then grow into them from other tiles that are reaching capacity or less fertile or prosperous.
The question is, would this be prohibitivly complecated, such that everything would need to be micromanaged? I don't thinks so, and here's why. We already have to manage what tiles are used in the city screen. In the "prefecture screen" or whatever we'd call it, we could redistribute population in about the same way. The computer could calculate the extra food left over, and then you could designate "send 20% of the food from the Kansas prefecture to local cities, but send the other 80% to these three cities by such and such a percent.
Such a system would also allow for a truely feudal economy. Say the game has an option like in Rhy's and Fall of Civilization where you start the game at about 300 A.D. as the Franks, with a lot of soldiers and tribespeople, but no land or cities. You overrun the nearby Roman Empire, supporting your units' upkeep costs with pillaged money from cities you burn down. But now you've carved out your kingdom in France and have to find another way to support your units and create new ones. You don't have any large cities to do the job, so you designate a few tiles here and there as a fief for one of your elite and expensive units. That new lord will cost no upkeep, and will be required to raise a few more units for your army in return for his land, which no longer pays taxes to your administrative center, but to your lord. If those units die, he'll have a few turns to provide new units, or forfeit his lands back to you. Obviously you'd want to raise new cities eventually, and de-installing lords can be tricky, but feudalism has its advantages in the short term, and it's something I'd like to see in the game.
I've illustrated the exact mechanics of this in posts you can find here:
The Province System
The City System 1 and 2
-End edit-
I've been giving a lot of thought to how I would like to see a hypothetical Civ V innovate over previous games. There's one idea that keeps coming back to me, and I thought I'd throw it out here to run it past some people.
Cities were not the backbone of most ancient societies. Agriculture was. Most humans weren't city dwellers for the majority of history, we were largely farmers. Now Civ has created this system where, for the sake of a simple game engine, all farmers live in metropolises and commute to their fields each day. While this makes for simple gameplay, because all you have to manage as pertains to your civilization's land use can be carried out in the city screen, it means certain periods of history are virtually impossible to faithfully represent.
For starters, the early middle ages was a period of de-urbanization. Medieval lords had large kingdoms and powerful armies, but they did so without controlling and taxing cities, they did so by trading land to soldiers for military service. Civ has never been able to handle this economic system (this is the technical definition of feudalism for those who don't know) with any degree of accuracy.
Second, cities do not depend on grain farmed within a fifty mile radius. No major metropolis could exist if their food supplies couldn't be imported. So modern history also cannot be represented accuratly. In Civ IV, for a city to be a major commerical center, all its tiles had to be towns, meaning most major commercial cities couldn't surpass a population of 20, whereas agricultural centers could reach upwards of 40 on occasion.
To fix this, I propose that cities and the system of working land be seperated, as follows.
When the game starts, you will already have an administrative center and several farms or pasturelands adjacent to it, organized into a prefecture. These farms and pastures are themselves inhabited by permanent population working the land and providing their own food, plus a surplus if the land quality is good. The administrative center is like a stripped down city, and may be developed into a sizeable city over time, but at the beginning, it only holds the local administration of the prefecture. Farms will ship their excess food to their prefecture's administrative center along roads or rivers. The prefecture or province replaces the old "city radius," except that it's size isn't limited to any arbitrary distance. You decide what prefecture you want an inhabited tile in, only the farther they are from the center, the more expensive it becomes to move food and resources, and the price of the infrastructure will be become prohibitive if you try to make one uber-province.
Now, when the food reaches the administrative center, it can be used for several purposes:
Cities can be build within prefectures, and will need this food imported to them to support sizeable populations. Without supporting cities, science, commerce, and production will not be able to occur on a large scale.
Raw materials from mines, etc., will aslo be gathered by people living in the tile with the mine, who will need to be supported with food from the prefecture. Note that, just like farms become prohibitivly expensive long distances from administrative centers, it will become prohibitivly expensive to ship food to a mine which is far off the major roads or rivers at the edge of your prefecture.
Administrative centers can trade unneeded resources to other administrative centers in need. This will be expensive if your civ only has the wheel researched, but in this way, in late games civs which have researched railroad and refrigeration can easily ship food from breadbaskets to major trade centers, creating metropolises like we actually see in the world today.
Workers would still build farms and mines the way they do in previous civs, except population will then grow into them from other tiles that are reaching capacity or less fertile or prosperous.
The question is, would this be prohibitivly complecated, such that everything would need to be micromanaged? I don't thinks so, and here's why. We already have to manage what tiles are used in the city screen. In the "prefecture screen" or whatever we'd call it, we could redistribute population in about the same way. The computer could calculate the extra food left over, and then you could designate "send 20% of the food from the Kansas prefecture to local cities, but send the other 80% to these three cities by such and such a percent.
Such a system would also allow for a truely feudal economy. Say the game has an option like in Rhy's and Fall of Civilization where you start the game at about 300 A.D. as the Franks, with a lot of soldiers and tribespeople, but no land or cities. You overrun the nearby Roman Empire, supporting your units' upkeep costs with pillaged money from cities you burn down. But now you've carved out your kingdom in France and have to find another way to support your units and create new ones. You don't have any large cities to do the job, so you designate a few tiles here and there as a fief for one of your elite and expensive units. That new lord will cost no upkeep, and will be required to raise a few more units for your army in return for his land, which no longer pays taxes to your administrative center, but to your lord. If those units die, he'll have a few turns to provide new units, or forfeit his lands back to you. Obviously you'd want to raise new cities eventually, and de-installing lords can be tricky, but feudalism has its advantages in the short term, and it's something I'd like to see in the game.
It's too unnatural for my taste.
)+RND(-1..1)) are say ABS
accumulation instead of 
in current city groth model.
