Technology and Civic Wishlist

[Vahnstad]

The internet could be a world congress project too. If it passes, there could be a higher diplomatic visibility for all civs. I don't think it would fit as tech, maybe as civic (and we have already social media), but definitely not as tech

 

[dunkleosteus]

I don't think the internet needs to be world congress (since we don't yet have a congress) and because there WAS no governing body that controlled the internet. The internet just sort of became a thing.

I think internet should be project sort of like the manhatten project, but with a few differences: more like a world wonder, the internet can only be completed once in the world. The civ that completes the internet instantly gets the associated building (perhaps just called "internet") in every city they own. Personally, I think the internet is so revolutionary that it needs to be massively useful. The yields of the "internet" building are: +1% science, culture, gold, production, tourism for every "internet" building that exists in the world. So for example if I have 5 cities and I build "the internet" I instantly get an internet in those 5 cities and because there are now 5 internet buildings in the world, each city gets +5% to those yields.

But let's say I didn't build the internet, someone else did. Starting with unlocking electricity, I can build an internet in any of my cities. If I just have electricity, each internet is really expensive though. If I also have radio, the cost goes down a bit. If I have telecommunications the cost goes down even more. If I have the internet technology, the price is the same as for the civ that built "the internet" in the first place.

The number of internets I build adds to that global total, so if I build 1 and the civ that created it has 5, each of our internets produces +6% of the corresponding yields.


The point of this design is that even though the internet was created in the US, it has become entirely global. It's a place where everyone can interact, share ideas and knowledge, do business, etc. I think there are a lot of countries in the world that are developing much faster since getting internet access, because it opens them up to the vast array of information and resources created by the most developed countries. The first country to create the internet gets a big headstart by getting internet in all of their cities for free but every other civ has the opportunity to catch up.

Additionally, I think that any city with internet gets an additional +1% science or culture when researching techs or civics that are already known by another civ for each other city with an internet. This means that catching up to the tech leader becomes slightly easier.

so for example: let's say there are 20 internets in the world. I'm trying to research satellites and there's a civ that already researched satellites. That civ has internet in 4 of their cities. Each of my cities that has internet would get +4% science when researching satellites (in addition to the +20% science for the 20 internets that exist in the world).

 

[Boris Gudenuf]

I'm aware of the hide shaped ingots, I think my local museum even has some. I was thinking about a course I took that discussed ancient Sumer, and the way they handled how much grain people owed etc. etc.

Taxation is the difference between a government and a village though. Sites like Catal Hoyuk (sans diacritics) represent relatively large concentrations of people but there is little to no evidence of buildings purposed for things other than housing, which implies that although people lived together, there was no governing body. Also, we believe the people that lived there were hunter-gatherers, based on our understanding of how agriculture spread and the middens we've found from the site.

To the Civ-Point, though, 'Taxation' as a Civic would be related to Record-Keeping if not Writing as a 'Technology'. But it does not have to be related to Pottery or Granaries, because in many cases the Palace was the storehouse for 'Taxes in Kind'. I remember a paper that pointed out that the labyrinthian storerooms in the basement of the palace at Knossus on Crete was exactly similar to palace floor-plans in several places in the Middle East that were contemporary with or pre-dated Knossus: among their other functions, they were the original Tax Shelters - places to store the 'taxes' paid.

 

[dunkleosteus]

That's an interesting point, I didn't know that.

On the topic of wealth, taxes, etc., ancient civilizations often equated food to wealth, which is something Civ does not do at all. In Civ, wealth is derived from trade goods or minerals which doesn't make a ton of sense at the beginning of the game. I think that when a society is just beginning, they'd have neither the knowledge nor capacity to take advantage of them.

At this point though, we're talking about major changes to the mechanics of the game and I'm not sure if we want to expand the scope of this discussion that far. But an example of what I'm talking about is that resources like silver, marble, diamonds, etc. are meaningless to ancient people. The ability to process, refine or make use of these materials comes much later. As a result, people didn't begin to exploit these materials until quite a bit later.

In most of the games that I play, the wealth of my civ early in the game is dependent on the luxuries I start with (if I have cocoa for example, that's like 2 gold per tile early on) and these tiles form the bulk of my income until trade. My point is that at this point in time, "cocoa" would be insignificant to the wealth of a nation compared to the food and other services. Sugar, too, which is difficult to process doesn't make a huge amount of sense as a resource that can be exploited early in the game.

I think the gold bonuses of many of these resources shouldn't be available until later in the tech or civic tree. That may be a controversial opinion though.

But we could talk about a totally new approach to the way money is used and handled in the civ series. Costs don't scale well over time (instead by how many times you buy something) and it's hard to reflect the scale of wealth from the beginning to the end of the game. Basically, 1 gold is too valuable to be the basic unit of currency.

In another post I made a few months ago I went into more detail about this, how money could be changed and how in my opinion, gold should be the most basic and most important resource you can have. I'm not sure if it would make the game better, but it would make it less arbitrary which I think makes it easier to understand. For that reason, I think it's worth talking about: what it would be like if you had to spend gold to do virtually everything. A system like this would still require production in cities but it only represents the maximum capacity of your city to accomplish something.

The production of a city would be limited by the population and technological advancement/buildings in the city: (excuse me if my facts aren't right, but I believe they are) it took 20 000 Egyptian workers (not slaves) 20 years to build the largest of the Great Pyramids. Now imagine what could be done today with 20 000 workers but with cranes, modern quarrying techniques, trucks, cars, etc.

The limiting factors aren't just technology and resources however, there is also a population limiter. Basically, your cities should only be able to generate a certain amount of production per citizen. Doesn't matter how much quarried stone, lumber or iron you throw at them, a small work force can't exceed their maximum productivity.

So this means that there are times in your city where switching all your citizens to mining or having lots of improved stone won't actually increase your productivity. I think the same thing should apply to food: cities should grow at a rate dependent on disease and birth/death rate, not how much food you have. The only situation in which that would be the case would be if every women gave birth every year for their entire lives and if there was no disease and only famine.

I think that trade routes shouldn't pull food and production out of thin air, either. Food or production can be moved along trade routes when a city is able to produce more food than it consumes,because in a city with 10 citizens, the citizens are satisfied with 20 food per turn. Having 100 food per turn won't magically make people spawn out of the ether-

This got way off topic.

 

[AnonymousSpeed]

This got way off topic.

Oh, not a problem in the slightest. I'm not a particularly strong advocate of keeping things on topic. So I don't mind if you continue this discussion. The moderators might, but I don't.

 

[dunkleosteus]

Oh, not a problem in the slightest. I'm not a particularly strong advocate of keeping things on topic. So I don't mind if you continue this discussion. The moderators might, but I don't.

Great!

Ideally, I'd like a system where gold is the most important resource you can have: when you want to build something in your cities, you don't get production for free, you have to pay for it. Let's say I want my citizens to build an aqueduct. For the sake of argument, my aqueduct is going to cost 150 hammers to complete and based on the resources I have available (perhaps I've improved stone or lumber- really it doesn't matter as long as it's "production") I have 30 production worth of materials. At my tech level (researching things like construction, engineering, masonry, etc. might increase these things), my citizens are worth a maximum of 6 production each. The cheapest option would be to assign a single citizen to work on the project. Even though I have so many resources/materials, this citizen unit can only work so fast and so my production is set at 6 per turn for the duration of the project (which comes out to 25 turns to complete). However, if I paid more money to hire MORE of my citizens, it could happen faster. Since my resources amount to a maximum of production of 30 for my city, I could pay 5 citizens to do it instead. That would mean my city would get the full 30 production/turn and complete the project in 5 turns.

However, I think hiring more citizens should either be more expensive or less effective, where I'd lean towards less effective. Maybe for each additional citizen you add, citizens become 2% less effective (perhaps we're indicating that more people require more organization/management and so not every person is a manual worker). If that was the case, then our 5 citizens hired would be worth 10% less each, so instead of 6 production each, they'd be 5.4 production each. Our total would then be 27 production, which would take an extra turn to complete with some spill over production.

I like this system because the amount you pay increases linearly rather than in some other, less easy-to-understand way.

However, I also think that we shouldn't be talking about this workforce in terms of "citizens" because all of our citizens will be working tiles. Could look at this again later.

Somethings that doing this would change: no more rush-buying/purchasing buildings or units in a city. Instead, you can control how quickly something is produced by affecting how much you pay per turn to have it built. When producing units, there might be a hard limit on how fast something can be produced based on how quickly you can generate people (soldiers, workers, etc.). That could get complicated though.

A feature like this would allow production costs to scale much, much higher than they currently do (which they should!) By default, a battleship costs 430 production in Civ 6 and a galley is 65 production. That means a battleship costs less than 7 galleys!

If we're going to dissociate the number of "citizens" you can put towards production from the population of the city, I'd propose a simple equation to get your "workable" population from your "actual" population (they are different and your workable population is larger).

My proposal is this (where x = city size); workable population = x * 1.1^x, rounded.

So at pop = 1, you have 1 * 1.1^1 = 1.1 = 1
at x =2, you have 2 * 1.1^2 = 2.42 = 2
at x = 3, you have 3 * 1.1^3 = 3.99 = 4
at x = 4, you have 4 * 1.1^4 = 5.86 = 6
at x = 5, you have 5 * 1.1^5 = 8.05 = 8
...
at x = 10, you have 10 * 1.1^10 = 25.94 = 26
at x = 20, you have 134.55 = 135.

So as you can see, when your cities get big, they scale way higher in terms of their productivity output.

The productive capacity of your city may be increased by resources but also by how many people are assigned.

If we compare this to Civ 5's demographics screen, a size-1 city has a population of 1000 people and a size 20 city has a population of 4.3 million. An increase in the productivity of the people of 135 times is not unusual in this instance.

It's important to note however that you are PAYING each citizen you use, so if at size 1 you are paying a citizen 1 gpt, a size 20 city could feasibly cost you 135 gpt to build something. Prices may even increase per citizen over time. Also, if we take into account the -2% productivity per additional citizen from earlier, we quickly run into problems where the 50th person makes everyone worthless. Here's a link to a wolframalpha graph [Interpretation of this graph: it shows how production increases as you add more citizens. The 25th citizen is the last citizen you can add without your production actually decreasing.] The optimal number of people is clearly 25, beyond that it becomes less efficient. Maybe the algorithm could be tweaked, but I don't think that's necessary.

A really interesting side effect of this feature would be the idea of building multiple things simultaneously: a lot of mods add queues and Civ 6 does have a sort of hidden queue (as far as progress towards building different things is maintained even when you stop producing them). If we agree that beyond 25 citizens, each additional person added doesn't increase productivity, a size 10 city would be able to put a full workforce into production and still have a single citizen left over to do something else. It's interesting to consider the idea that cities could have multiple projects in progress at the same time. Here's an idea of how that could function:

Production of buildings or units consumes the production available to your city each turn. The first item in your production queue gets priority here, it will try to satisfy the needs of that project first. For example, let's say the first item in my queue is a workshop. I'm not going to look up the current cost of a workshop, but let's say it's 200. My city has a maximum of maybe 75 production from the resources available to it. Each of my workable citizens can produce 8 production and I assign 6 of them to work on the workshop (each is only working at 88% capacity now, so each can only produce 7.04 production now). With the 6 of them, they consume 42.24 production per turn towards my workshop, which will complete in just under 5 turns. During that time though, I have 32.76 production from my maximum left over. I could assign a few more citizens to build something else at the same time, for example maybe I also want to build a library.

This means that after size 10, cities stop being able to work faster from population alone, but start being able to do more things at the same time. There are a lot of reasons why you'd want to split your citizens across multiple projects as well: 25 citizens will cost 25 gpt no matter where you put them (as long as you're employing all of them) but if put all 25 of them into a single project, you'd only be getting 50% of the value of each citizen. If you split them across 5 different projects, you'd be able to get 90% from each citizen.

It means you can pay a lot of money to forcibly rush your project but it will be pretty costly. I can imagine doing this on a couple of wonders though or on a space race project.

 

[dunkleosteus]

Based on messing around with wolframalpha a bit, (I'm not a mathematician) it became apparent that if you were optimizing for cost and number of turns to complete (ie if you multiplied the number of turns it would take to complete a project by the cost to complete it and tried to minimize that number, your optimal number of workers is 50/3, which is 16.6666

I started with an equation f(a,b,c) where a is the number of citizens assigned to the project, b is the base productivity of a citizen and c is the total cost of the project. The equation for the number of turns it would take to complete is c / (a * (1 - 0.02a) * b). (let's call that 'n') so then the total cost of the build is n * a (assuming each citizen is 1 gpt). But if minimizing the cost was your goal, you'd just assign 1 citizen and it would take like 100 turns, so we want to minimize the number of turns as well. So that means we have a * n * n which is an^2 and regardless of your values for b and c, you will always find that most efficient method would be 16.66666 citizens assigned. I did this by taking the derivative of that value and solving for the derivative = 0.

 

[Boris Gudenuf]

A lot of interesting thoughts here...

I've been thinking somewhat along the same lines, starting not from the standpoint of What Resources Are Really Needed for Production, Gold,etc, but rather from Why can a Builder produce a mine or plantation instantly but it still takes several generations to get a slinger in the Ancient Era, or if I start building a market in Classical times it won't be done before my grandson is of age to use it?

The Production/Unit Building is 'way out of synch with Improvements - and, like you, I don't think Civ has identified the real requirements/resources and limitations on production of anything.

First, a couple of comments on your intriguing posts:
1. You are absolutely right in that early "State Workforce" manpower was, before coinage, paid in Kind: there are records of 'beer and bread/grain' payments to Egyptian workers. That definitely reinforces your argument that Food = Gold, at least before Coinage/Money are 'invented'.
2. Not everybody is 'Working Tiles'. In the earliest of cities, there are still or already some people being supported by the majority 'working tiles' while they do something else: craftsmen/tool makers, priests, record-keepers if you are storing anything, especially Food.
3. While Gold is the most-mentioned Payment Metal, Silver was in many ways more important, or as important. Gold was prestigious, but too expensive for day-to-day payments. The huge majority of the coins in circulation in the ancient/classical/medieval/renaissance eras were silver, from the tetradrachem of the Hellenistic World to the Joachimthaler of the Renaissance.
4. Aside from 'strategic goods', there was some early trade, and therefore value, in Luxury Goods. Specifically, Amber, Obsidian (both Luxury razor blades and very prosaic cutting tool blades) and Jade, none of which has to be extensively 'worked' to be Impressive. Gold and silver, having relatively low melting points, could also be worked very early, even 'cold worked' like copper.

My approach was not to look at the total Population points, though, because for most of history in most cases the bulk of the population is exhaustively employed in producing Food and basic raw materials. That part of the population available in any sense for Building Projects, the Military (on anything like a permanent basis) or any such 'non-productive' tasks is a small fraction of the whole. Therefore, I would like to see Specialists re-emphasized.

Every point of Population would produce a Specialist which now represents that fraction of the population above and beyond what is needed to work a tile. Every Building in a City would have one or more Specialist positions, and it is filling those positions that really makes the Building useful: a Market by itself will provide a slight increase in Amenity and Production, because it saves people time and effort in obtaining goods from their neighbors by trade or barter, but to obtain Gold from it, it has to be populated by specialist Merchants, Traders, Salespeople, etc. to flog the goods and pay the government of the city for the privilege of making money themselves.
A Shrine or Temple with nobody 'working it' may provide a bit of religious comfort by its availability as a place to pray, but it will provide a Great Prophet only by sheerest accident.

So, to get Mobilized Manpower (a Builder) you need surplus Food (or, later, Gold) to 'pay' them, and you remove a Specialist from the city. The Specialist will return automatically as more of the population grows up and enters the workforce (possibly, at least in the early eras, only when the city adds a Population Point, which in a slow-growing city could make Builders and other Construction very expensive in the long run). A long as the Builder is in existence - that is, still expending Charges - you have to keep 'paying' them in Food/Gold.

Similar mekanism applies to ALL construction in the city:
Build a military unit - remove a Specialist - run out of Specialists to remove, no more units. Military units also require Equipment of some kind, but especially early in the game most of it is not especially 'specialized' - slingers use the same slings that shepherds use to protect flocks and boys use to keep birds out of the grain fields, javelins, spears and bows are used in hunting - all of these can be 'produced' based on the number of Horse/Sheep/Cow resources that are being worked, Pastures/Farms/Plantations in use, etc. At first, the Palace 'stores' military equipment, later the Encampments would do that.
Build a structure in the city - requires building materials that, at first, are pretty general: clay, rock, wood - only pure desert or snow tiles would be absolutely worthless in producing 'materials'. Having lots of Forest or Jungle (wood), Floodplain (clay/brick/adobe) tiles being worked would increase the Building Materials available per turn. Some Resources (obviously, stone and marble, but also copper and later, iron and gypsum) would also increase the per turn accumulation of materials.
You could, as now, build by slow accumulation of enough materials, but more often, you'd build in One Turn after storing enough materials and by paying the 'workers' to build it - remembering that the minimum turn is 1 year long, and usually 5+ years, which is enough time to build the majority of 'buildings' in the city.
BUT it does very little good to build it if there is no Specialist to work it, which is another limitation on 'runaway construction' - because you have to Maintain the structure from the moment you finish it, which requires Both building materials and Gold/Payment to workers.

Wonders by definition require massive amounts of materials and workers - so much so, that in most cases they will require more than one turn of construction in addition to their very specific requirements in terrain and placement.

Later in the game, Specialists will be a higher percentage of each Population Point, but Buildings in the city will have more Specialist positions to be filled and Buildings and Units will get more demanding in materials and manpower/work required to produce them.

While this is still being 'massaged' in my mind - because I don't think there is the slightest chance the anything like it will be seen in Civ VI: this is at least a Civ VII Mod project - I think it could result in construction/recruiting/building times for everything being in line with the more rapid Improvement construction we have now, and the ridiculous slowing down of all construction that occurs late in the game now being reduced so that you can actually use the technologies you can research so much more quickly than before.

And it might stop the idiocy of requiring several generations to 'build' a military unit in a new city!

 

[dunkleosteus]

For clarification, when I said every citizen is working tiles, I was referring to in Civ 6, not in real life. In Civ 6, you can't afford specialists until much later in the game. Sorry for the confusion.

Also, to add to your point: a vast, vast majority of ancient populations were involved in food production. Prior to the Industrial revolution, 90% of the population of the United Kingdom was directly or indirectly involved in producing food (meaning growing, harvesting, selling, transporting, preparing, storing, etc.) The other 10% of the population was responsible for everything else, from building cities to making tools, to mining and processing materials. I don't have figures for other European cities or cities in other parts of the world such as East Asia, but I expect the numbers were quite similar.

After the Industrial revolution, 50% of the population was involved in food production. This is what caused so many advancements during the Industrial revolution: much more efficient manufacturing combined with a 5-fold increase in the workforce.

Any input on the idea I put forward towards production? It took me a while to write and I took some time to do some analysis on it to make it easier to understand what it might mean in practice. Whether positive or negative, I'd be interested in feedback.

 

[Boris Gudenuf]

That's an interesting point, I didn't know that.
In most of the games that I play, the wealth of my civ early in the game is dependent on the luxuries I start with (if I have cocoa for example, that's like 2 gold per tile early on) and these tiles form the bulk of my income until trade. My point is that at this point in time, "cocoa" would be insignificant to the wealth of a nation compared to the food and other services. Sugar, too, which is difficult to process doesn't make a huge amount of sense as a resource that can be exploited early in the game.

I think the gold bonuses of many of these resources shouldn't be available until later in the tech or civic tree. That may be a controversial opinion though.

I agree, with the addition (as stated earlier post) that there are a few 'primitive Luxuries' that were worth Trading, and therefore had some 'Gold' value: Amber, Obsidian, Jade, etc. But you are on the right track that early in the Game, Food is the most common source of 'value'. Payment in Kind - Food specifically as Wages - was from what we know the most common form of payment in the ancient world, and forms of it persisted into the Renaissance, at least.

But we could talk about a totally new approach to the way money is used and handled in the civ series. Costs don't scale well over time (instead by how many times you buy something) and it's hard to reflect the scale of wealth from the beginning to the end of the game. Basically, 1 gold is too valuable to be the basic unit of currency.

Not only is Gold too valuable as a measure of individual wealth in most of the world over most time, but the total of all the gold in the world no longer represents in any way more than a tiny fraction of the 'wealth' in the world. The disconnect between the two became explicit in the 20th century ("Modern Era"), but really started with the beginnings of 'modern banking' in the Renaissance, with international Letters of Credit, 'paper' wealth, and the general ability to generate Wealth independently of specific Production of (valuable) goods and services.

In another post I made a few months ago I went into more detail about this, how money could be changed and how in my opinion, gold should be the most basic and most important resource you can have. I'm not sure if it would make the game better, but it would make it less arbitrary which I think makes it easier to understand. For that reason, I think it's worth talking about: what it would be like if you had to spend gold to do virtually everything. A system like this would still require production in cities but it only represents the maximum capacity of your city to accomplish something.

IF we consider "Gold" in this case to mean "Value" which early on will be measured in Disposable Food, and later in abstract 'GNP' once Gold is no longer the real medium of exchange, I agree completely. It also means that, as the game progresses, your Resources in Wealth (ability to hire workers) and Production (ability to acquire materials for the Workers to process) will tend to increase Exponentially as they did in reality.

The production of a city would be limited by the population and technological advancement/buildings in the city: (excuse me if my facts aren't right, but I believe they are) it took 20 000 Egyptian workers (not slaves) 20 years to build the largest of the Great Pyramids. Now imagine what could be done today with 20 000 workers but with cranes, modern quarrying techniques, trucks, cars, etc.

The limiting factors aren't just technology and resources however, there is also a population limiter. Basically, your cities should only be able to generate a certain amount of production per citizen. Doesn't matter how much quarried stone, lumber or iron you throw at them, a small work force can't exceed their maximum productivity.

So this means that there are times in your city where switching all your citizens to mining or having lots of improved stone won't actually increase your productivity. I think the same thing should apply to food: cities should grow at a rate dependent on disease and birth/death rate, not how much food you have. The only situation in which that would be the case would be if every women gave birth every year for their entire lives and if there was no disease and only famine.

Two things:
1. Not all Materials are equal. No amount of stone, with or without a Quarry, directly gives you the material to build a galley. That requires certain specific materials, which (in an ideal Historical Game) you may or may not be able to access directly (i.e.: 'Trade For').
2. The population limit is not necessarily based directly on total population, it is a measure of how much of that population can be extracted from Basic Food Production for anything else. I think we can make an historically-justified assumption that every Point of population in a city included a certain percentage of 'workers' not required for Food Production - admittedly, a tiny percentage to start, but increasing as food proaction and other technologies advance through the Eras.
I personally think the best way to 'measure' the Workforce Available for Everything Else is through a modification of the Specialist system. Basically, a Specialist now would be Everybody in the Population Point that doesn't have to work a Tile. Each point of Population would (at start) generate a Specialist - because if you have nobody who is not producing Food, I maintain you really have no 'City' at all. Therefore, each point of Population can still work a tile, while the Specialist Either 'works' a Building in the city, or is available as Workforce for other production of Builders, Military Units, or Buildings/Wonders in the city.

I think that trade routes shouldn't pull food and production out of thin air, either. Food or production can be moved along trade routes when a city is able to produce more food than it consumes,because in a city with 10 citizens, the citizens are satisfied with 20 food per turn. Having 100 food per turn won't magically make people spawn out of the ether-

Another point: unless you are moving strictly Luxury 'Food' - spices, for instance - the sheer tonnage required to make any difference in the for available in even a small city could only be moved by water - rivers or coastal/lake tiles - until land transportation drastically improves rom the start: there's a reason every single 'mega-city' (Babylon, Rome, Alexandria, etc) in the ancient world was on a coast, a river, both, or had such short range access to one or the other (Rome to Ostia, Athens to Pireaus) that in game terms they can be considered 'Districts'.

Increase in population, as you state, is only limited by (lack of) Food, not dependent on availability of Food. In fact, a large component of population increase in cities has always been Migration from the countryside or from other, less-favored cities. The factors in population increase should be things like Amenities, availability of jobs (Specialist positions/tiles not being worked?) access to Power (Capitals always attract people, as a general rule) and could even be Buildings/Wonders in the city - Sewers/Aqueducts are an obvious candidate to reducing the death rate from disease and therefore increasing the population's rate of increase, but Entertainment and Cultural Buildings also increase the 'Draw Power' of a city - but not as much as ways for people to find work, as in tiles/Buildings not being worked by population or specialist points.

More later...

 

[Boris Gudenuf]

Again, lots and lots of interesting ideas here...

Great!

Ideally, I'd like a system where gold is the most important resource you can have: when you want to build something in your cities, you don't get production for free, you have to pay for it. Let's say I want my citizens to build an aqueduct. For the sake of argument, my aqueduct is going to cost 150 hammers to complete and based on the resources I have available (perhaps I've improved stone or lumber- really it doesn't matter as long as it's "production") I have 30 production worth of materials. At my tech level (researching things like construction, engineering, masonry, etc. might increase these things), my citizens are worth a maximum of 6 production each. The cheapest option would be to assign a single citizen to work on the project. Even though I have so many resources/materials, this citizen unit can only work so fast and so my production is set at 6 per turn for the duration of the project (which comes out to 25 turns to complete). However, if I paid more money to hire MORE of my citizens, it could happen faster. Since my resources amount to a maximum of production of 30 for my city, I could pay 5 citizens to do it instead. That would mean my city would get the full 30 production/turn and complete the project in 5 turns.

I would suggest 'Production Cost' should no longer be 'Hammers' but a combination of Effective Worker Time and Construction Materials. Effective Worker Time we'll go into below in a little more detail, but basically it would be a measure of How Many Workers you can afford to have working on the 'project' and for how long. That, in turn, would depend on your Surplus Food (to pay them in Kind) or, later, Gold/Silver/ Coins to pay them to work, and the number of Workers that you can afford to take off Food Production for anything else.
For most Buildings, initial Construction Materials are pretty Generic: a granary, a market, a library, shrine, monument, temple - all can be built out of stone, wood, mud-brick, adobe, mud and wattle, wicker - you name it, and someone, somewhere, has used it in quite elaborate ways.

I suggest, though, that one limitation on, say, building Units is that the Materials/Weapons/Equipment get a lot more specific very quickly. Some of this has been explicit in the game since forever: Iron (and, therefore, equipment made out of Iron) is required for Swordsmen, Horses (and tack, saddles, etc) are required for (some) Mounted Troops. The other side of that, though, is that all the military equipment (spears, slings, bows) you have been slowly stockpiling before you get Iron and access to Swordsmen - doesn't convert very well. Periodically, you will have to throw out or 'write off' a warehouse/Palace basement full of old gear and start over - which means you cannot keep converting all your surplus manpower into Armies at a steady rate.

That same kind of limitation will also apply to some constructions, and possibly a large percentage of Wonders - building Renaissance or Medieval Walls, for instance, pretty much requires Stone in abundance - wicker or mud brick jus Won't Do, and in the later Eras (Modern and beyond) the materials, even when they are 'traditional' are processed far beyond anything possible before - look at modern concrete/steel or even modern architectural wood forms, for example.

Therefore, if I have enough 'Material' stockpiled, and can afford to pay enough Workers, a lot of construction (especially early in the game) can take place within a single turn BUT unless you have a good-sized city (lots of 'extra' workers) AND Excess Food (Payment in Kind) OR Gold/Silver, you are not going to be knocking out a Building/Builder/Unit per turn for very long, if at all, any more than you can whip out a new Builder every other turn in Civ VI...

However, I think hiring more citizens should either be more expensive or less effective, where I'd lean towards less effective. Maybe for each additional citizen you add, citizens become 2% less effective (perhaps we're indicating that more people require more organization/management and so not every person is a manual worker). If that was the case, then our 5 citizens hired would be worth 10% less each, so instead of 6 production each, they'd be 5.4 production each. Our total would then be 27 production, which would take an extra turn to complete with some spill over production.

I like this system because the amount you pay increases linearly rather than in some other, less easy-to-understand way.

One limitation to hiring infinitely increasing numbers of Workers is that large workforces have to be led, managed, and supported administratively: the 'overhead' increases as the workforce increases. While some societies could 'mobilize' huge numbers of workers - Egypt and China for two obvious ancient examples - those 'Labor Armies' also required food to feed them, people to distribute the food, people to tell them where to go and what to do, some way to house them at/near the worksites, and all the support necessary for their work to be productive at all. This is also something that 'scales' later in the game: the technology required to build, say, the Transcontinental (USA) or Trans-Siberian Railroads also included the technology required to keep tens of thousands of men alive and working productively a thousand miles or more from any population/support center. China could build the Great Wall in Classical Times, but lost 100,000 or more men doing it, and could not contemplate building it 1000 miles away from the nearest Chinese city - the administrative and transportation technologies simply weren't available.

However, I also think that we shouldn't be talking about this workforce in terms of "citizens" because all of our citizens will be working tiles. Could look at this again later.

To belabor my point/suggestion, we could use a Specialist system to identify that percentage of a Population Point not required to work Tiles and therefore (theoretically) available for Other Labor. The percentage could really go up as Tech/Civics progress, providing another 'scaling' advantage later in the game.

Somethings that doing this would change: no more rush-buying/purchasing buildings or units in a city. Instead, you can control how quickly something is produced by affecting how much you pay per turn to have it built. When producing units, there might be a hard limit on how fast something can be produced based on how quickly you can generate people (soldiers, workers, etc.). That could get complicated though.

Actually, if we use Population/Specialist 'points' as Abstract Measures of People Available, we can keep it from getting too complicated:
The actual number of people counted goes up per Population point as the city grows: therefore, each 'Point' represents a 'sliding scale' of numbers of workers/warriors. Thus, a single 'point' provides the manpower for a few hundred Singers in 3500 BCE, and the same 'point' provides the manpower for an Aircraft Carrier crew (3000+ men) in 1990 CE. In the case of units, the 'points' of population/Specialists provide a 'cap' on possible numbers of military units.

One thing the game is missing is a 'way around' that cap, which was frequently used historically - hire mercenaries. In Civ V you could get units from City States, but they counted against your number of units. That should only happen if you try to 'over conscript' soldiers and cut into the workforce required to raise Food - and no amount of Amenities will keep you population happy when they are no longer being fed: they will use those weapons you just thrust upon them to tear your Palace down around your ears. On the other hand, mercenary units from City States, other Civilizations, or even Barbarians, as several leaders of the 18th century European States (Louis XIV and Friederich II for two) put it: " - provide three men in each mercenary: on the one hand, he is one more soldier for us. On the other, he is one less soldier for the enemy. And finally, he is one more peasant who can stay home, till the land and pay taxes."

A feature like this would allow production costs to scale much, much higher than they currently do (which they should!) By default, a battleship costs 430 production in Civ 6 and a galley is 65 production. That means a battleship costs less than 7 galleys!

Let's see, Athens, an ancient city-state with one good set of silver mines, managed to produce and maintain 200 triremes. Great Britain in 1918, with resources from half the world and a massive investment in heavy industry and shipbuilding facilities, managed to maintain a little over 35 battleships. Yeah, the scaling is definitely off!

Also to the point, some modern military technologies are so expensive in specialized, technical resources that they simply cannot be produced by many countries. To stick with a naval example, in World War Two, out of the entire world, only 3 countries managed to build and maintain fleets of aircraft carriers and the (specialized) aircraft for them. Only 3 other countries even attempted to build an aircraft carrier, and not one of them succeeded in ever flying a single aircraft off of a flight deck. The range of technologies and resources required was, in the mid-20th century (beginning of the Atomic Era, in game terms) simply beyond the majority of 'Civilizations' in the world.

If we're going to dissociate the number of "citizens" you can put towards production from the population of the city, I'd propose a simple equation to get your "workable" population from your "actual" population (they are different and your workable population is larger).

My proposal is this (where x = city size); workable population = x * 1.1^x, rounded.

So at pop = 1, you have 1 * 1.1^1 = 1.1 = 1
at x =2, you have 2 * 1.1^2 = 2.42 = 2
at x = 3, you have 3 * 1.1^3 = 3.99 = 4
at x = 4, you have 4 * 1.1^4 = 5.86 = 6
at x = 5, you have 5 * 1.1^5 = 8.05 = 8
...
at x = 10, you have 10 * 1.1^10 = 25.94 = 26
at x = 20, you have 134.55 = 135.

So as you can see, when your cities get big, they scale way higher in terms of their productivity output.

Other considerations, of course, are that there are numerous Technologies that also 'scale' productivity of the workforce dramatically: more efficient wagons and harness for transporting materials (Medieval Era), steam powered machinery (Industrial Era), the internal combustion engine and electrical/powered hand tools (Modern/Atomic Eras), just for a few examples. There are also efficiencies of organization that make the larger workforce more productive: once Mass Armies (18th century, Napoleonic Wars, 19th century Draft Armies) became common, the same organizational/management techniques were applied to 'civilian' workforces as well - virtually all the railroad work crews (in the USA at least) were run like military units, frequently with ex-officers and ex-NCOs running the crews - the 'Technology' (or Social Policy?) was applicable to any large, diverse mass of manpower.

The productive capacity of your city may be increased by resources but also by how many people are assigned.

If we compare this to Civ 5's demographics screen, a size-1 city has a population of 1000 people and a size 20 city has a population of 4.3 million. An increase in the productivity of the people of 135 times is not unusual in this instance.

Also because, the Technologies required to build, maintain, and feed a city of 4+ million people also allow a smaller percentage of the population to do the building, maintaining and feeding, so the percentage of the population 'available' for Other Work goes up just as the actual population increases. As you already said, for most of human history 90% or more of the population was directly concerned with producing Food. Since the Industrial Era of the 19th century, though, that percentage has plummeted, until today, in the United States and Europe, at least, the huge majority of the population is not directly involved in food production in any way. This change, though, is directly related to a number of distinct Technological advances - which makes it easy (in Game Terms) to make the scaling of workforce efficiency and availability specific to the Tech Tree and not 'random' or generalized by Era.

It's important to note however that you are PAYING each citizen you use, so if at size 1 you are paying a citizen 1 gpt, a size 20 city could feasibly cost you 135 gpt to build something. Prices may even increase per citizen over time. Also, if we take into account the -2% productivity per additional citizen from earlier, we quickly run into problems where the 50th person makes everyone worthless. Here's a link to a wolframalpha graph [Interpretation of this graph: it shows how production increases as you add more citizens. The 25th citizen is the last citizen you can add without your production actually decreasing.] The optimal number of people is clearly 25, beyond that it becomes less efficient. Maybe the algorithm could be tweaked, but I don't think that's necessary.

Again, the 'pure' graph can, and I think should, be modified by Social/Civic and Technological changes in the game. Beyond a certain number of workers, there is always a 'diminishing returns' where the extra productivity per worker is submerged in the extra resources required to keep the workers organized, focused, fed, led and maintained. Overhead, sooner or later, eats up all the productivity. I would only add that the exact point that that happens can be modified by changing Technical/Social techniques: if one worker with a steam shovel can do the work of 500 men with hand shovels, that may be precisely the difference between building the Panama Canal in the jungle and failing to build it because 100 of the 500 men are dying every month from disease and the food, medical, and other support for the 500 men is overwhelming you. Let's use the math as a Starting Point for figuring what is a good Game Balance between Productivity, Production Requirements, and changing Technological (and perhaps Social/Civic) capabilities.

A really interesting side effect of this feature would be the idea of building multiple things simultaneously: a lot of mods add queues and Civ 6 does have a sort of hidden queue (as far as progress towards building different things is maintained even when you stop producing them). If we agree that beyond 25 citizens, each additional person added doesn't increase productivity, a size 10 city would be able to put a full workforce into production and still have a single citizen left over to do something else. It's interesting to consider the idea that cities could have multiple projects in progress at the same time. Here's an idea of how that could function:

Production of buildings or units consumes the production available to your city each turn. The first item in your production queue gets priority here, it will try to satisfy the needs of that project first. For example, let's say the first item in my queue is a workshop. I'm not going to look up the current cost of a workshop, but let's say it's 200. My city has a maximum of maybe 75 production from the resources available to it. Each of my workable citizens can produce 8 production and I assign 6 of them to work on the workshop (each is only working at 88% capacity now, so each can only produce 7.04 production now). With the 6 of them, they consume 42.24 production per turn towards my workshop, which will complete in just under 5 turns. During that time though, I have 32.76 production from my maximum left over. I could assign a few more citizens to build something else at the same time, for example maybe I also want to build a library.

My vision, because I started my thinking from the standpoint of Speeding Up (potential) production to the same rate as Builders can 'build' Improvements, is a bit different: The 'Production' in the city is the amount of Material the city produces and stores every turn. The building (workshop) requires X amount of Basic Building Material (which the city can start stockpiling from the Start of the Game - stone, wood, mud-brick, etc.) AND X amount of Labor to produce. IF the city has the Labor Force available (Gold/Food to pay them Population/Specialist Points in the city), and the material stockpiled, the Workshop gets built in a single turn. If, say, I get attacked and have to 'mobilize' some of the Labor Force into Spearmen/Archers, construction is going to slow down while I juggle my Labor Resources - and have to keep 'paying' all of them. The game will have to be programmed so that Efficiency of Labor can be calculated by the game, or Micro-Management could drive you nuts!

This means that after size 10, cities stop being able to work faster from population alone, but start being able to do more things at the same time. There are a lot of reasons why you'd want to split your citizens across multiple projects as well: 25 citizens will cost 25 gpt no matter where you put them (as long as you're employing all of them) but if put all 25 of them into a single project, you'd only be getting 50% of the value of each citizen. If you split them across 5 different projects, you'd be able to get 90% from each citizen.

It means you can pay a lot of money to forcibly rush your project but it will be pretty costly. I can imagine doing this on a couple of wonders though or on a space race project.

Multiple Projects/Builds is tricky, and potentially subject to some serious abuse by Human players against the AI. I would be tempted to artificially limit Multiple Builds to one each Building, Military Unit, Wonder at a time. OR limit the number of Projects based on City Size, which allows the efficiency of Labor to be 'tweaked' only as the city grows to make a single labor project inefficient.

OR simply limit it by Type of Material/Production the city has been able to Stockpile. IF Wonders and Buildings use the same type of Building Materials (stone, wood, etc) then that will limit what you can build in those categories more than the Labor available. IF 'basic weapons' from the start of the game can be stockpiled, but only allow you to build Warriors, Scouts, and Slingers, then to build a Swordsman you have to start over stockpiling a new category of 'military equipment'.

And, of course, if you've mobilized all of your Labor Force into Construction, there may be no one left to manufacture the Spears, shields and other gear at all, providing another limitation that has to be balanced for the best outcome.

This is fascinating, but as I said before, the chance of seeing any of it in Civ VI is probably approaching zero even as we discuss it!

 

[Gedemon]

This is fascinating, but as I said before, the chance of seeing any of it in Civ VI is probably approaching zero even as we discuss it!

Some of the points you've described in that post are very close to the design goal of my current mod project for civ6, I won't say that there is 100% chance to see it completed, but I do hope that it's much more than 0, and some of it is already coded (like resource/equipment/materiel stockpiling and used to product and maintain units)

But I'm still struggling with the way of representing the population (and its evolution related to tech/civics), so I'm following your exchange with dunkleosteus with interest.

 

[dunkleosteus]

Some of the points you've described in that post are very close to the design goal of my current mod project for civ6, I won't say that there is 100% chance to see it completed, but I do hope that it's much more than 0, and some of it is already coded (like resource/equipment/materiel stockpiling and used to product and maintain units)

But I'm still struggling with the way of representing the population (and its evolution related to tech/civics), so I'm following your exchange with dunkleosteus with interest.

Good to see you, Gedemon

 

[dunkleosteus]

On the topic of building materials, I definitely agree that we'd need to differentiate different types of materials.

One of the problems with Civ is that citizens are all treated the same way. I can either choose to have a citizen work a farm tile or a lumbermill. In reality, the number of people employed in farming would drastically outnumber the number of foresters and it really wouldn't be a "choice". The other problem with Civ 6's design (and I think this was intentional) is that it's difficult to separate the two now (meaning food production and everything else). In prior Civ games, all buildings and wonders were built within the city itself. Now that cities must give up tiles to build districts and wonders, there are fewer tiles to work. I think this is the reason that tile yields were changed in Civ 6 (instead of all hills being 2 production, now hills are +1 production on the base tile yield). This means that your farms can produce production and your mines can produce food (if the mine is on a grassland tile, the mine actually feeds itself!). If we wanted to be able to represent a true balance of how workers were distributed, we'd need to have separate pools of labour for each task.

In case I'm not being clear, what I mean is that to accurately represent how tiles were worked, you might have 100 miners for every 5000 farmers. That means in real life, you're not really choosing between mining or farming, you can pretty much have both. If we wanted an accurate representation of this sort of thing, we'd have to make resource gathering controlled by something else entirely, a different pool of citizens than you used to farm crops of raise animals.

If we looked at my above numbers for population, perhaps you would use the same pool of workers for building to gather resources. If this was implemented, I'd strongly recommend that only worked tiles would be able to produce resources. You'd have to adjust how yields were generated though, and tons of other things.

 

[Boris Gudenuf]

Some of the points you've described in that post are very close to the design goal of my current mod project for civ6, I won't say that there is 100% chance to see it completed, but I do hope that it's much more than 0, and some of it is already coded (like resource/equipment/materiel stockpiling and used to product and maintain units)

Reading your commentary on your project started me thinking about the 'process' of Building Units, and then Building structures/Wonders, so in a way, this is just more commentary once removed from your own work!

On the topic of building materials, I definitely agree that we'd need to differentiate different types of materials.

Very Tentatively, here are my 'initial thoughts' on the Building Materials differentiation. Much as I dislike the whole 'Eras' mechanism (too Eurocentric, too arbitrary, usually completely inapplicable to a specific game) it does make a convenient mechanism for requiring 'Upgrades' to the stockpiles your Civ is building up.
Ancient Era:
Basic Building Materials
.....Available from the Start, generated from any Forest, Jungle, Floodplain, or Hill Tile, more generated from working Mines, Quarries, or Sawmills/Forestry Camps
REQUIRED in varying quantities to build an Ancient Era building or Wonder (Wonders may have specific requirements for Special Materials like Marble)
Basic Weapons
.....Available from the Start, generated from any Forest or Jungle tile, any tile with Sheep, Cattle, Copper, Horses, more generated by having Pastures or Mines on the related Resources
REQUIRED to build any Ancient Era military unit in varying quantities.
Classical Era:
Worked Building Materials
.....Available from the Start of the Classical Era, generated by any Improved Jungle, Forest, Floodplain, or Plains/Grassland Hill Tile, more generated by working Mines, Quarries or Sawmills/Forestry Camps and by working Resources like Stone, Marble, Gypsum, or Copper
REQUIRED to build any Classical Era building or Wonder, speeds up construction of any Ancient Era structure and uses less quantity of materials than Basic Materials for those.
Worked Weapons and Gear
..... Available from the Start of the Classical Era, generated by working Mines or Pastures on Copper, Iron, Horses, Sheep, or Cattle
REQUIRED to build any Classical Era military unit, in addition to specific requirements of Iron or Horses for certain units.
Medieval Era
Crafted Building Materials
..... Available from the Start of the Medieval Era, generated by having at least one Specialist in a Workshop or Mill and the same Improved Tiles as for Worked Building Materials
REQUIRED to build an Medieval Era building or Wonder, speeds up construction of buildings/Wonders from earlier Eras.
Crafted Weapons and Equipment
.....Available from the Start of the Medieval Era, generated by having at least one Specialist in a Workshop or Mill and the same Improved Tiles as for Worked Weapons and Gear
REQUIRED to build any Medieval Era military unit, in addition to specific Resource requirements for certain units.
Renaissance Era
Woodfitting and Precision Stonework
.....Requires at least one Specialist in a Workshop and Improved Tiles with Forest, Jungle, Floodplains, Hills, and Resources: Copper, Iron, Stone, Marble, Gypsum
REQUIRED to build any Renaissance Era Era building or Wonder, speeds up construction of buildings/Wonders from earlier Eras
Precision Metalworking
..... Requires at least one Specialist in a Workshop and Improved Tiles with Copper, Iron, Nitre, Forest or Jungle
REQUIRED to build any Renaissance Era military unit, in addition to specific Resource requirements for certain units
Industrial Era
Industrial Materials
..... Requires at least one Specialist in a Workshop or Factory and Improved Tiles with Copper, Iron, Coal, Stone, Marble, Gypsum, Forest or Jungle
REQUIRED to build any Industrial Era building or Wonder, speeds up construction of buildings/Wonders from earlier Eras
Machine-tooled Equipment
..... Requires at least one Specialist in a Workshop or Factory and Improved Tiles with Copper, Iron, Coal, Nitre, Forest or Jungle
REQUIRED to build any Industrial Era military unit, in addition to specific Resource requirements for certain units
Modern Era
Concrete/Steel Construction Materials
..... Requires at least one Specialist in a University, Factory or Powerplant and Improved Tiles with Copper, Iron, Coal, Stone, Marble, Gypsum, Forest or Jungle
REQUIRED to build any Modern Era building or Wonder, speeds up construction of buildings/Wonders from earlier Eras
Precision-Tooled Equipment
.....Requires at least one Specialist in a University, Factory or Powerplant and Improved Tiles with Copper, Iron, Coal, Nitre, Oil, Forest or Jungle
REQUIRED to build any Modern Era military unit, in addition to specific Resource requirements for certain units
Atomic Era
Composite Construction Materials
.....Requires at least one Specialist in a University, Research Lab, Factory or Powerplant and Improved Tiles with Copper, Iron, Coal, Aluminum, Stone, Marble, Gypsum, Forest or Jungle
REQUIRED to build any Atomic Era building or Wonder, speeds up construction of buildings/Wonders from earlier Eras
Advanced Alloy Fabrication
..... Requires at least one Specialist in a University, Research Lab, Factory Powerplant and Improved Tiles with Copper, Iron, Coal, Oil, Nitre, Aluminum, Forest or Jungle
REQUIRED to build any Atomic Era military unit, in addition to specific Resource requirements for certain units
Information Era
Molecular Materials Construction
..... Requires at least one Specialist in a Research Lab, Factory or Powerplant and Improved Tiles of any type
REQUIRED to build any Information Era building or Wonder, speeds up construction of buildings/Wonders from earlier Eras
Advanced Composite Fabrication
..... Requires at least one Specialist in a Research Lab, Factory or Powerplant and Improved Tiles of any type
REQUIRED to build any Information Era military unit, in addition to specific Resource requirements for certain units

I am very, very tempted to differentiate the materials by Military Unit: Ground, Air and Sea, which would require the game to keep a little more involved records, but also allow the inclusion of Armories and Shipyards with Specialists stockpiling specific materials for land and sea units. Unfortunately, Hangers don't really fill the same function for aircraft, but for Game Purposes, it could be made to work.

Of course, with the current system of Districts/Buldings in Civ VI, this would require you to build certain districts in order to keep building and maintaining anything. That may not be a bad thing, but it adds an extra complication to the play of the game...

One of the problems with Civ is that citizens are all treated the same way. I can either choose to have a citizen work a farm tile or a lumbermill. In reality, the number of people employed in farming would drastically outnumber the number of foresters and it really wouldn't be a "choice". The other problem with Civ 6's design (and I think this was intentional) is that it's difficult to separate the two now (meaning food production and everything else). In prior Civ games, all buildings and wonders were built within the city itself. Now that cities must give up tiles to build districts and wonders, there are fewer tiles to work. I think this is the reason that tile yields were changed in Civ 6 (instead of all hills being 2 production, now hills are +1 production on the base tile yield). This means that your farms can produce production and your mines can produce food (if the mine is on a grassland tile, the mine actually feeds itself!). If we wanted to be able to represent a true balance of how workers were distributed, we'd need to have separate pools of labour for each task.

In case I'm not being clear, what I mean is that to accurately represent how tiles were worked, you might have 100 miners for every 5000 farmers. That means in real life, you're not really choosing between mining or farming, you can pretty much have both. If we wanted an accurate representation of this sort of thing, we'd have to make resource gathering controlled by something else entirely, a different pool of citizens than you used to farm crops of raise animals.

If we looked at my above numbers for population, perhaps you would use the same pool of workers for building to gather resources. If this was implemented, I'd strongly recommend that only worked tiles would be able to produce resources. You'd have to adjust how yields were generated though, and tons of other things.

As you can see above, I've started thinking about 'differentiating' by tile/resource what kinds of 'materials' are being stockpiled and for what purpose. This needs a lot more work, especially if it has to be 'fired' into the current Civ VI Districts and Buildings and Improvements, but it's a start...

One major problem Civ has always had is Ground Scale. A Classical/Medieval Mine did not have anything like the 'footprint' on the ground that a Classical/Medieval Plantation or Farm had, and the 'footprint' of the average ancient 'city' is a tiny fraction of the amount of landscape a Civ VI city and districts take up. Civ VI seems to have 'incorporated' this by having multiple types of Yields per tile, which means the 'Farm' or 'Quarry' you build on a tile only represents the principle 'working' being done in the area represented. Every tile on the game map essentially represents far more varied territory and resources than is depicted in the game, but I can imagine the nightmarish graphical mess having each tile Explicitly have 2 + Resources or terrain types in it would be! Not to mention depicting which and how the resources and terrain are being worked, Improved, and pillaged.

 

[dunkleosteus]

I doubt you'd have a single mine though. I think mineral veins form over much larger geographical areas than could be covered with a single mine. If you find a source of copper or iron somewhere, I think you're very likely to find more in the surrounding area, probably for kilometers in every direction, so I think when you build a mine, it's more like there are many, many mines because the whole area is mineral-rich.

 

[Boris Gudenuf]

I doubt you'd have a single mine though. I think mineral veins form over much larger geographical areas than could be covered with a single mine. If you find a source of copper or iron somewhere, I think you're very likely to find more in the surrounding area, probably for kilometers in every direction, so I think when you build a mine, it's more like there are many, many mines because the whole area is mineral-rich.

I suspect that depends a lot on the Technology with which you are mining. The famous silver mines that Athens exploited to pay for the victorious Salamis fleet 'played out' in just a few years, but with the Classical Era technology they could only go a few hundred feet down, with great effort, or until ground water began filling the pit. Modern Open Pit mines remove whole mountains to get at all the veins of ore (a Technology never in a Civ game, as far as I know), but until the Industrial Era, that was simply not a feasible prospect given the technology available. Only with steam-powered pumps and other Industrial equipment could mines be sent underground deep enough and far enough to 'exploit' entire veins that weren't conveniently close to the surface for most of their extent. Another Technology change is the ability to extract useful amounts of metal/material from ores: just before WWII my father as a teenager worked for a company that was 'remining' left over 'takings' from gold, silver, and other 19th century mines. The advance of technology meant that ore that was not worth refining in, say, 1885 was worth refining in 1935: in 50 years the advance was sufficient to make the extraction of tiny amounts per ton feasible both physically and economically.

And, yes, that is an argument for 'upgradable mines' and other Improvements in the game. Civ VI has touched on this by making Farms more productive with certain Tech/Civics and certain configurations, but much, much more could be added, and since most of it would be added from the Industrial Era on, it would add interest to the late game so sorely lacking now.

 

[Boris Gudenuf]

Well, among a few of us we seem to have smothered this Thread, so I'd like to try to steer it back to the original topic: additions/changes in the Tech or Civics Trees.
Specifically, I'd like to make a case for a more varied Tech/Civic Start.
Right now, and in prior Civ games, you start with Agriculture and the ability to 'extract' a few extra resources from certain animals, plants and minerals lying around your Starting Position - in that they make the tiles marginally more 'productive' even before you have the ability to build Plantations, Mines, Quarries, etc. on them.
And you start with, apparently, a population which is a 'blank slate' socially, in that you have NO Social Policies or Civics

I propose a change in which your Starting Civics, and Technology could vary depending on your Starting Position and starting decisions.

Aside from Agriculture, there are several other technologies that had already been discovered and were being exploited by one or several 'cultures' in the world long before 4000 BCE, the game's Start Date: in game terms, they are:
Pottery, Animal Husbandry

There are other technologies that have never appeared in the game, but should be Options:
Boating
Weaving

By 'Boating' I mean the ability to move people and some goods over coastal tiles. NOT 'Sailing', since sail power was not exploited until well after the Start Date (as far as we know so far - tomorrow someone may find a sailing ship buried in 7000 year-old sediments!). It is limited, but does include Settlers or Builders, because people were settling islands tens of thousands of years before 4000 BCE.

Weaving here represents all the 'fiber technologies' - not so much clothing, but nets, ropes and such that allow some serious fishing even from the shore and moving Heavy Objects, bridging rivers/gorges, and other useful abilities.

Under 'Civics', there are potential 'pre-game' or Starting Civics:
Custom - this is basic: every group has rules of 'accepted behavior' without which there is no group. It is the behavior and the acceptance of certain behaviors that Defines the group and indicates membership in the group. This would be the Civics equivalent of Agriculture, so to speak.
Meritocracy - the selection, by whatever means, of specially talented individuals to lead groups or undertakings: a War Chief, a Talker To Foreigners, a Leader of the Boat Builders or Trail Blazers, etc
Divination - the concept that Some People are closer to the Gods, and therefore should be listened to whenever you need affirmation from the Gods

First, 'found' your first City. Then, based largely on that Starting Position, you get to choose 2 Starting Technologies
1 has to be either Agriculture OR Animal Husbandry - because without one or the other you are basically Hunter-Gatherers, and except in extremely exceptional circumstances, you are not going to be able to feed a city bigger than 1 - 2 Population.
The second can be either Weaving, Boating, or Pottery
Pottery only if you have Floodplains or a River in your Starting Position
Boating only if you start on the coast - it can even be on the coast of a lake, as long as it is bigger than 2 tiles of lake
Weaving only if there is at least 1 tile of Forest or Jungle next to the starting city site.

If you choose to move your Settler before starting your city, it is the actual site of the city and the starting radius around it that designates your choices.
You could luck out and get a position at the mouth of a river in the jungle which gives you ALL the choices, but usually, you will be constrained by your Start. That means, in addition to the 'built-in' Uniques in each Civ, the start in each game for each Civilization is quite likely to be a little different.
I think that is a Very Good Thing, because it adds more variety to the game From the Beginning.

Similar with Civics: Custom would be required, you choose one of the other two. Each gives certain advantages or 'Civic Eurekas':
Meritocracy - will lead towards Craftsmanship, Foreign Trade and Military Tradition
Divination - will lead towards Mysticism, State Workforce and Code of Laws
BOTH could lead towards Early Empire, depending on whether that 'Empire' is ruled by a Big Man (war chief) or a God/Priest King.

Obviously, the resulting Tech and Civics Trees spreading from this kind of start will have to change radically: instead of one Civic (Code of Laws) leading to everything, there will be 2 Civic 'lines' from the start leading to, potentially, 7 Early Civics all at about the same level, or requiring various combinations. Like, Pottery allows accumulation and storage of Food/Wealth, so would boost towards the Civics of Early Empire and State Workforce. Boating might be your Starting choice of Tech, but if you have a good coastal start, Weaving would be an early Research choice, because the combination of Boating and Weaving gets you Sailing in the shortest possible time.