Transition from agriculture to information age

[Dyvim Tvar]

Here's something major that has always disturbed me about Civilization:
In the beginning you need lots of farms if you want your cities to grow,
growth depends solely upon availability of food. To enhance production, you require mines mainly. The more, the better. This is a great concept in the beginning. Holds true up to the middle ages maybe even longer, but then?
In the dark ages 80 to 90% of the population were famers. Today, I doubt more than 5% of the population are actually working in the food production. In the industrial age most people worked in factories producing goods, today most people work in offices producing information or helping/serving others.
I believe this should be implemented. A very good example of this is given in the game Master of Orion II. In the modern age a single farm on grassland should suffice to produce food for a city of size 20 or 30. Not of size 2. There should be buildings that give a set amount of production or food instead of just percentile bonuses. Settlers should be able to build skiing resorts or entertainment parks to give lots of coin (maybe max. 1 per city) and factories as improvements outside. Also, I'd love to see my population explode exponentially with most people being specialists or working on entertainment/information, so that finally a civ has up to a billion inhabitants around 2050 instead of a couple millions...

 

[Colonel Kraken]

Sounds good to me!

 

[Ribannah]

In history, agricultural output was increased by certain advances, like:

- the plow;
- crop rotation;
- interplanting;
- fertilizer,

and not so much by buildings.

This way, the Dutch farming population was reduced from 90% to 70% in the early 17th century, causing an increase of the merchant class by a factor 3.

 

[RandomInsanity]

the space needed to grow the crops is still quite a bit

 

[Dyvim Tvar]

Yeah, I guess it would also make sense to make more techs that truly improve the output of farms. And I guess it's true, that we still need a lot of room to grow the food, but we do not need a lot of people anymore at all. Maybe one could allow producing food with farms not inside the city domain, but just inside the cultural borders. So there is food being produced, but no noteworthy population necessary to do so.

 

[Andyr]

Something like that would be cool-or perhaps have Supermarkets give a food bonus, like they did in Civ 2, or something similar.

 

[Naokaukodem]

The problem is that the same citizen produces not only food, but trade and shields. And that the amount of people needed to do those does not evolve at the same time. So there should have a citizen for the food, another one for the shields, and another one for the trade. It would need a total revamp of the system.

 

[Dyvim Tvar]

Yeah, Naokaukodem, you're right I'm afraid. That was also how it was done in master of orion II (population could either produce food, production or research). But maybe one could just increase the population of the cities so much later on, that the people working the surrpunding area would only be a fraction of the cities entire populace - which could then be a bunch of specialists or so.

 

[Dyvim Tvar]

Or of course you change the modern improvements a little so that every square they are built on produces only one of the three (commerce, food, production)...

 

[Eoin M]

the space needed to grow the crops is still quite a bit

Yeah, that would have been what occured to me. Farms in "first world" countries merely require less people to operate them, they're not much smaller in relation to the output. There's also a tendency towards enormous super-farms rather than the more traditional family-owned farm.

 

[Tigerclaw]

It's possible to Mod something like this in: the tech Biology improves the output of farms by +1. I haven't got the game on this PC, but I'm certain it's possible to duplicate or amplify this bonus, using it on other techs, incresing it's effects, etc. That way it should be possible to create uber farms, easily capable of supporting a huge city, with loads of specialists. It would need a lot of thought towards balancing though, as the game isn't designed for this (particularly with respect to health, production and the like)

 

[Dyvim Tvar]

I just had another nice idea. *grin*
How about introducing three new techs:

1. Geography
-> increases probability that your mines discover resources by 100%

2. Modern Farming (this needs a better name)
-> Allows workers to create food resources such as rice or corn on grasslands or plains (only flat land).

3. Animal Breeding
-> Allows workers to create animal recources such as pig or horse on grasslands or plains (including hills & forests).

This should allow all the above without too much rebalancing and without changing the game too much. AND it
actually is quite realistic. After all, our farms aren't growing grass, are they?

 

[AngryPants]

Here's my idea: a series of buildings that increase food output in the same way that markets, grocers, banks increase cash output. Shouldn't be that complicated to mod in.

 

[Colonel Kraken]

Wow, some really great stuff here.

I just had another nice idea. *grin*
How about introducing three new techs:


2. Modern Farming (this needs a better name)
-> Allows workers to create food resources such as rice or corn on grasslands or plains (only flat land).

3. Animal Breeding
-> Allows workers to create animal recources such as pig or horse on grasslands or plains (including hills & forests).

Is this possible? Hope so.

Here's my idea: a series of buildings that increase food output in the same way that markets, grocers, banks increase cash output. Shouldn't be that complicated to mod in.

Definitely!

 

[Elhoim]

Or a "Farmer Specialist"!

 

[Hypnotoad]

I was thinking about this problem independently of this post and was about to post on it myself...

Here is what I was thinking:

Increases in technology, mostly in the industrial period, made agriculture, mining and fishing much more productive. There should be a number of technologies that make it so that every point of population you put towards taking care of the land counts as 2, 3, 4, 5... 10 citizens working the land. So that once the industrial revolution happens all of the sudden you need half as many citizens to work the same amount of land because one point counts as two working the land. The leftover citizens could all become specialists. Of course, probably your city doesn't have the infrastructure to absorb these specialists, which means they will just be generic citizens. These citizens, of course, would look like factory workers: the industrial revolution sent people from the farms into cities where the best work they could find was factory workers. Then, in the Modern Age the new buildings should allow you to increase the number of specialists you can have of each sort of specialist. This would simulate the move from factory work to office work of various types.

-- The Hypnotoad

 

[Dyvim Tvar]

Have to admit, I like the idea, hypnotoad.
It's actually quite realistic to have all these people just be normal workers.
They should be paying taxes though *g* instead of just producing stuff.

 

[ZippyRiver]

1. Geography
or perhaps Geology would be better for mines.

I have thought about a farmer specialist, but not for food abundance, just stagnation. A max of one per city, produces 1 food, 3 gold. I hate it when a city ends up with one food surplus. It slowly grows to another pop, then your minus 1 food and it starves back down to the original number, only now your granary is empty. Gee thanks. I don't mind micromanagement, but that I hate. And the 3 gold.......He is the middleman from the farm to the market.

Alternately, instead of changing the tile outputs, it could be done with a building. Have a cannery, available with steel for +10% food production. Or a new tech, "welfare" in which you can convert gold into food. Kinda like how you can adjust culture now, only make it city specific.