Water instead of Food

[Deliverator]

I think this Water for Health alternative could be a really good way forward, provided we can give it enough teeth. Thirsty replaces unhealthy. There are a lot of good ideas here.

Minor points
1. I think fresh water should come from the wells and not just windtraps.
2. Could we keep the Desert Grass and Dew Collectors? That is one of my favourites.

 

[Ahriman]

Minor points
1. I think fresh water should come from the wells and not just windtraps.
2. Could we keep the Desert Grass and Dew Collectors? That is one of my favourites.

1. Sounds doable.
In this case, you might want to remove the fresh-water-everywhere from the city windtrap (and just make it a health provider and maybe +1 gold), to make fresh water a bit rarer.
Either that, or make the city windtrap, the windtrap improvement, and the well all provide fresh water in adjacent tiles, but do NOT allow drip irrigation/soil enrichment etc. to spread fresh water.
So you can only get a food bonus from a non-bonus resource if it is in adjacent tile to a water supplier.

2. I like both of these, they have great flavor.

 

[davidlallen]

I would suggest; rather than making vanilla Food into water, make City Health into water.

Cool! This has a big impact on the system. But it "feels" very do-able. If there are any Fury Road players out there, we "reskinned" culture as safety. For a post-apocalyptic world with very dangerous terrain, the cultural borders represent how far away you can keep your population safe. That fit very well into the theme. I think reskinning health as water should work.

We have to think out the implications from the design standpoint a little more. For example, one key source of health in vanilla is bonuses, and then buildings which amplify the benefit. Like banana -> plantation -> grocer. If we use water as health, it seems that plant bonuses should *cost* water.

So far everything sounds like an xml/graphics change, which is good, but we need to keep in mind whether the AI will understand how to use these things.

 

[Ahriman]

Yes, this has a big impact.

The main impact is in changing buildings that give health or unhealth bonuses, either directly or through resources.
Many existing buildings give health bonuses that could be perceived as providing water (like the Quanat or whatever), but many others (hospitals, Suk doctors, etc.) currently give health. These buildings would need to be cut or amended.

We have to think out the implications from the design standpoint a little more. For example, one key source of health in vanilla is bonuses, and then buildings which amplify the benefit. Like banana -> plantation -> grocer. If we use water as health, it seems that plant bonuses should *cost* water.

I'm not sure about this.
I'd think of it this way; a food bonus resource basically represents a naturally occurring area of some crop, with its own water supply. Its perfectly possible that you could harvest the crop without needing to irrigate it more, or even to tap into their water supply for your own uses. Basically a bonus food resource represents a water supply; think about oases in deserts, plants grow there because there happens to be a natural water supply, like a spring or aquifer. So the bonus food growth at that oasis really represents the water supply, not that some random plants happen to be there; the better agriculture is possible BECAUSE of the water supply.
Or imagine a bunch of cacti growing in the desert; if you set up an operation to harvest them, you could eat them, or you could extract water out of them, or both.
So its perfectly possible that some food resources could still provide positive health (ie water) from a building, or at least do no harm, because they're using their own water source.

Definitely though you could make the highest level farm improvements require water:
So you have drip farms (0 food, +1 with fresh water, +1 with bonus resource)
Growth complex (1 food, +1 with fresh water, +1 with bonus resource)
And Mark III farm (don't know what name) that gives 2 food +1 with fresh water, +1 with bonus resource, but also gives +1 unhealth to the nearby city, because it takes some water to irrigate intensive agrictulture.
Or you could make the mark 2 farms give +1 unhealth and the mark 3 farm give +2 unhealth.

But I WOULD make city improvements that require lots of water have unhealth penalties.
This could include gardens, urban plantations, industrial plants, spice factories and refining plants, etc.

As far as the AI goes, I think it would mostly handle it.
The AI will still build windtraps whenever possible because of their tile yields, even though it didn't understand how they provided fresh water.
It would still build wells because these, like pastures/plantations, activate the bonus resource, and will give tile yields.
It will still build buildings that give health bonuses if its city is low on health.
It will still build farms where these give positive food bonuses (ie where they have fresh water).

Some of these changes would even improve the relative performance of the AI; the AI only really chooses improvements based on the tile yields of particular tiles (and I think to some extent of the needs of the nearby city that uses them). Its never really been any good at understanding how long chains of irrigation can work; in vanilla civ the AI often does badly on maps that have few sources of fresh water, because it doesn't understand how to build long chains of farms out to other cities so that farms can be built there too.
This problem goes away if drip farms etc. do not in fact spread fresh water. The AI will build wells and windtraps because of their tile bonuses, and then build farms on the tiles around them where a farm has a positive yield, and then build cottages and turbines on the other tiles.
(This will be even better if you require drip farms to require fresh water access in order to be built; so you can build them only on a fresh water resource, or adjacent to a windtrap or well.)
The one thing the AI won't understand is that it should choose to place its windtraps adjacent to bonus resources that get farms built on them, but this is probably managable.

You could also make the city windtraps give some other bonus or make sure they have a sufficiently high AI weighting so that the AI always builds them.

 

[koma13]

You mentioned this a while back, and I did not quite understand then either. What do you mean by immigration here? Moving population from one city to another does not seem to be what you mean. What is the mechanic for getting a new population point in your city? Spending 100 gold?

Well, I would like to have an ingame representation of immigration/emigration to/from outside of Arrakis (remember that scene, where Duke Leto asked Gurney to convince emigrants that worked for the Harkonnen to stay on Arrakis?).

We could create a counter (similar to the great person/general counter) that if full, grants you some population (or an addition military unit). The counter could be increased maybe by culture, unworked tiles or financial situation. When conditions in you empire are bad (famine, unsuccessful wars, high revolution index) , that counter would go backwards and if empty would lead to emigration. To get immigration in a city you would need to have enough food to support an additional population point. There also can be some coincidence involved. Civics could increase or decrease (slavery) that too. We could also make an event that occurs when you conquer a foreign city.
In general that could give us an additional way to alter/increase population not 100% related to terrain values.

 

[Ahriman]

While I realize my opinion doesn't matter much, I'd vote against such a system.
It seems needlessly frustrating and confusing for not much gain.

The biggest argument I would make against it is the lack of transparency (particularly if it involves randomness). It is likely to be very frustrating to just randomly lose population points from your cities.

And in most societies, migrant workers are a pretty small proportion of the total population/workforce (rare exceptions; some of the middle east oil states, with large numbers of expats), so its not really important to keep track of.

I also think the cost of harsh societies losing workforce and benevolent societies gaining them is much more easily handled with the existing happiness system.
If you whip your people to death through slavery (which isn't worth it atm given how hard it is to get food), then you potentially lose even more workers from the long-term unhappiness. If you build what could be a Harkonnen UB, it provides extra unhappiness. If you act benololent and build your people lots of happiness infrastructure, or are just a nice charasmatic Atreides, then you don't suffer from unhappiness and have a larger effective workforce.
One thing the mod needs is to make happiness a little more difficult to acquire; get rid of a lot of happiness inducing buildings, happiness never seems to really be a binding constraint.

 

[cephalo]

You know, I never liked the health system in Civ4. If your city lacked health, you just keep playing and the problem will eventually go away. It was rarely the limiting factor.

I think it's simpler and easier to just get rid of health and maybe even happiness, and just replace food with water. Dune is not a place where people go for happiness or to develop their culture. It's a place of war. Everyone wants to control the spice, because nobody can be trusted to share. This isn't about finding happiness on Dune, and if anything it's more risky to ones health.

I'm thinking that a unit of population is on a different scale than in a game about human history on Earth. Food is something you bring with you. You aren't sowing fields with grain to support huge cities.

 

[davidlallen]

I'm thinking that a unit of population is on a different scale than in a game about human history on Earth. Food is something you bring with you. You aren't sowing fields with grain to support huge cities.

I had thought of that also, especially if we make a map which only covers the polar region. My math says the 60 degree polar cap is 1/16 the area of the whole planet. So if a normal civ map covers the whole planet, the polar map you have made is sixteen times smaller.

We could divide all the statistic reports such as population, number of soldiers, tons of food etc by 10. I'm not sure how that actually affects gameplay; maybe it doesn't.

BTW, looking forward to another rev of your mapscript... ?

 

[Ahriman]

I think in the Dune world an awful lot of the food *is* still produced locally. Interstellar shipping is immensely expensive, planets still have to be mostly self-sufficient.

If you could import food, why not drinking water? If you didn't need the water for agriculture or industry and were only using it for human consumption, then the daily mass of food a person eats per day is similar to the daily mass of water they drink; and the water waste can be recycled more easily than the food waste output can.
But definitely the fluff tells us that mass-importing drinking water would be infeasible.

Removing health and happiness would be pretty boring really, and health is a logical mechanic for constraining city growth.

 

[cephalo]

I think in the Dune world an awful lot of the food *is* still produced locally. Interstellar shipping is immensely expensive, planets still have to be mostly self-sufficient.

If you could import food, why not drinking water? If you didn't need the water for agriculture or industry and were only using it for human consumption, then the daily mass of food a person eats per day is similar to the daily mass of water they drink; and the water waste can be recycled more easily than the food waste output can.

Removing health and happiness would be pretty boring really, and health is a logical mechanic for constraining city growth.

Do the books ever talk about how people feed themselves on Dune? They talk alot about water, but one would imagine that food would be every bit as scarce.

Civ4 uses water in a very indirect way, I think just to make things simpler. I'm thinking that since water is the fictional issue on Dune, then it makes sense to reverse that aspect of abstraction. I'm not sure you want to keep track of two items of produce unless you can really tie it to the Dune universe.

Health shouldn't come up in my opinion since these are times of advanced technology and low population density. On ancient Earth people didn't know about the importance of hygene and so health was a major issue.

Happiness also doesn't make much sense here. People come for jobs either spice mining or soldiering. Although, you could call happiness 'morale', and then you are talking about making life on Dune bearable, rather than 'happy'. Changing 'happiness' to 'morale' might be more appropriate.

 

[Ahriman]

I don't think the books ever really talk about the food of the local populace.

Definitely the Fremen aren't importing massive amounts of food from off-world, and I don't think anyone else is really either (otherwise why can't they import drinking water?).

I'm fine for no "health" in the sense of hospitals and such, but the mechanic (having to get water resources and build structures to prevent growth from being choked off) works fine.

I see no problem with having water modeled twice, one in fresh water access for farms, and another as having enough water to allow for population growth.
If you wanted to make water even more important, then increase the basic unhealth/thirst of each citizen to 1.25 per population point, rather than the base +1.
Water discipline civic could also reduce the unhealthiness (ie thirst) of each citizen, so you didn't need as much water to keep people alive.

And whether you call it happiness or morale, its still the same mechanic; people are happier and potentially more productive under Atreides rule than under Harkonnen rule for example.
You can think of the production penalty from having "unhappy citizens" who don't work as basically just being the productivity toll from ill-treatment, and for not providing enough creature comforts.
Though Harkonnen are probably better at whipping people than other factions; they could arguably have a structure that gave a hammer bonus from unhappy citizens (like the genejack factory in the Planetfall mod, or some of the Calabim stuff in FFH?).
But the mechanic still works; importing luxuries or investing resources in building up better amenities for civilian workers will improve their productivity.

Another thought; Atreides should get a penalty to espionage point production, which would have the added effect of making them more vulnerable to espionage.

 

[zup]

Can you live food alone, but change health into 'water'? Then remove health boni from food resources. Increase unhealth from population. Many buildings that logically use up water will give high health penalties. Make unhealth a real issue, something that will collapse your economy unless you do something about it. Keep/make a water resource that gives health, a deposit of ground water or something, which has a cumulative bonus (like life mana in Fall from Heaven). A windtrap improvement could add some health to a city, as well as providing farms with much needed irrigation. Farm type improvements are pretty much worthless without irrigation (maybe just +1 food with a food resource such as sword grass). Irrigation makes them a worthwhile investment.

Also, maybe rather than building more advanced improvements (drip farming obsoleted by growth facilities) they could grow like cottages over time. Mines are dug deeper, farming operations expanded and such. Admitted, it leaves you very vulnerable to pillaging as improvements are more difficult to replace but that is not necessarily a bad thing.

 

[Deliverator]

This is exactly what Ahriman has suggested if you read above.

At the moment I think Water for Health could be the best way forward. Both food and water are necessary for growth. People are a bit prejudiced against health because it has never really had any teeth compared with happiness - but we can change that. This way we keep the flavourful food boni we already have, plus we can add water producing boni/improvements from my suggestion list such as Underground River/Well and Desert Grass/Dew Collectors. We can use the nice water drop graphic instead of the health red cross (we'd need a thirst icon to replace unhealth).

Ahriman has posted lots of good ideas here that could work really well. Perhaps we can put together a patch to test rebranding health as water and see if we can rework the boni, improvements and buildings in such a way as to make water a real necessity in city expansion. It would be good to try removing a few superfluous buildings at the same time.

 

[davidlallen]

I started writing the xml for "water as health" and immediately ran into a problem. When you build an improvement on a bonus it gives a benefit such as happiness or health. At *every connected city*. So that one spring you discover when you have 6 cities, would immediately give a water benefit at every city. That does not seem right. I can modify the buildings to give and take water, which makes sense. We can have wonders and civics that adjust water by continent or globally which also seems fine.

But I cannot think of any way to make improvements give water only locally, instead of globally. What do you think, is there a way around this or is this not really a problem?

Deliverator, could you post the icon you have anyway, in case we find a workable system?

 

[cephalo]

I started writing the xml for "water as health" and immediately ran into a problem. When you build an improvement on a bonus it gives a benefit such as happiness or health. At *every connected city*. So that one spring you discover when you have 6 cities, would immediately give a water benefit at every city. That does not seem right. I can modify the buildings to give and take water, which makes sense. We can have wonders and civics that adjust water by continent or globally which also seems fine.

But I cannot think of any way to make improvements give water only locally, instead of globally. What do you think, is there a way around this or is this not really a problem?

Deliverator, could you post the icon you have anyway, in case we find a workable system?

Can you tune the game so that it's ok that it spreads to every connected city? That doesn't seem like it needs to be so bad. It mimics the health mechanic which makes it easy to understand.

 

[Ahriman]

I would say 3 things.

a) There should be a handful of resources like water springs that do in fact give +1 health in every city you control.
But many fewer than there are in vanilla. So instead of rice/wheat/corn/pig/cow/sheep/banana/fish/crab/clam etc. you could have maybe 4 global health resources: spring, aquifer, desert grass, and one other.
So spring requires a Well improvement, aquifer (or Deep Spring) requires a Deep Well improvement (with a higher tech), desert grass requires a dew collector (with a desert survival tech
Make the resources fairly common, so its not that hard to get 1 of each for even a medium-sized empire (so there aren't too many bonuses to being big - being big should be its own bonus) but you don't keep getting more and more bonuses from expanding further.
[In contrast; in vanilla civ a small empire might have 3-4 health resources, but a large one might have 6-7 food resources; the more variety of resources are, the bigger are the total bonuses you get, and you get a slippery slope reward for expansion; bigger empires have more health and happiness resources and so get bigger cities, so can expand even more.]

Should sand trout provide water or food? I forget.
The existing Dune mod resources (burro weed, sand verbena, etc) stay in, but just provide tile food bonuses.

b) Certain terrain improvements, like the windtrap and well, give a localized health bonus in the same way that forests do (maybe +1 health each?). So having a Spring resource near a city gives a small tile food bonus, a small global health bonus, and a localized health bonus for that city.
It still makes sense for tubers (=dune forests) to provide health to their local city.
On earth, deforestation leads to a reduction in rainfall and humidity.
Though you could drop the bonus from +0.5 to +0.4.
My one worry is the AI has a tendency to clear away all forest quickly, whereas it might need to keep some here for the health bonuses.

c) Certain structures provide an intrinsic health bonus (like the city wind trap, quanat, etc.), certain others provide a bonus health from the water resources (maybe the reservoir gives +1 water from the spring and aquifer resources) and maybe some of the food resources (eg a food processing plant could give +1 water from the cactus resource and the phibian root or burro weed resource - you bring back the stuff growing in the wild and extract the water from it).

So water supply for a city depends a tiny bit on global resources, but mostly on local terrain improvement infrastructure and city building infrastructure.
So, you have to invest in workers and city improvements in order to have a large city.

 

[Deliverator]

But I cannot think of any way to make improvements give water only locally, instead of globally. What do you think, is there a way around this or is this not really a problem?

Mmmm. I'd really like water to be a local issue.

How about changing Water to Food as originally proposed, but then switch Health/Unhealth for Food/Hunger?

That way water can be a local issue which I feel is appropriate for Dune, and food (or lack of it) is a more abstract restriction on growth, which is also appropriate given that food is not mentioned much in the books.

This would mean that we keep the flavourful food bonuses that Ahriman doesn't want to lose, but we can have the water-rich and water-poor terrains that was one of the original motivations of this idea. I think we can improve/reduce my list of water producing bonuses to avoid the 10 different-sorts-of-spring problem.

Plus it is very natural to have things to have things that are both sources of water and food.

 

[Ahriman]

Well, my design above would still make water largely a local concern.

Substituting water for health is a pretty easy change. Making water food and food health is likely to get pretty confusing for normal civ players.
I guess you could do it that way though. Then you'd have to change all the food improvements to be providing water (greenhouses and drip-irrigation farms don't really provide water) and fresh water access on terrain wouldn't really make sense.
But localizing water and making food non-local doesn't really make that much more sense than making food local and non-local water; both would be moveable around a single planet given Dune technology.

And I wouldn't worry too much about things providing both water and food, because food and health are already substitutes. Something that gives more health is the same as something that gives more food if the city is thirsty (ie if unhealth > health).

My idea for this is that health should be nearly *always* a binding constraint; water sources are rare enough that cities will nearly always have unhealth > health.
This also means that food from terrain needs to be widely available.

 

[Deliverator]

Making water food and food health is likely to get pretty confusing for normal civ players.

I thought the same, so we could call it Nutrients or Nutrition and have new icon for it. Unhealthy becomes Malnourished. We could use the Planetfall/SMAC Nutrient icon perhaps.

Fresh water can just mean water. It is produced by the water bonuses, and then you can irrigate from there to add +1 water to the surrounding tiles. We might have to make irrigation harder/slower as I've said before. I think that would be simple for people to understand.

With the Water for Health model, I can't see there ever being contention for water resources.

 

[Ahriman]

With the Water for Health model, I can't see there ever being contention for water resources.

I can, easily. If at nearly all times your unhealth > your health, then getting more water resources is a crucial way to increase your city size.

If a new water resource boosts growth in your entire empire (because its a health resource), then you should definitely fight for it.

With your way, water resources are just tile improvements. Why would you go to war for just a single food tile increase?

There will be more contention for water if water is health than if water is food.