Dude, where are my Women? (Wall of Text(TM))

TL;DR

Are there any women in the game appart from Heroines and/or monsters and/Sovereignesses?

If the answer is yes, which are the plans for them / what can we expect?

WoT:

Single white man looking for...

Women. Bastly ignored in games except for Amazon roles, scantily clad heroines and similar things.

I like TBSs in general and I consider cities one of the most fundamental parts of any strategy involving empire building and all that stuff. And yet, cities are always kept as simple as possible. I know it's a matter of macro/micro issue, specially if you get like some dozens of cities in big maps. But the same as combat or magic deserve some complex mechanics, I do think that city deserve that too. Yes, balance, fun and controlled micro should be a priority but it'd be nice to the cores of our empires to be something more than a gold/troops/research factories whose only drawback might be some Morale and/or Cultural problems.

To have a city we need a place where to place it (d´oh!). Once we have the location, we need people to inhabit (for which, the place must be able to sustain life of that kind... obviously). We could have a city full of machomen and no one else. Our population grow for that city would be based on inmigration of other machomen to the city and/or the magical creation of other machomen by the Sovereign, as machomen cannot naturally breed with other machomen.

And altough migrations are nice to have population moving, there will come the time in which migrations are no longer possible or not significant enough (maybe all the machomen of the world are already in your city!!!). That means that in time, your population in the city is going to stop increasing and even start decreasing as machomen get old and die. (another mechanics ignored)

So we need to find the ways to make sure that new machomen populate the world as sucesors of our current machomen. And biologically speaking that means to find another being that can allow the reproduction of the machomen: women. If you convince the machomen of the advantages of mating with women, then you are going to have the best mechanic to increase your population in your city.

So you need women. That means that women live in the city (you are not going to have them in a cave and "use them when needed" right?). Yet where are they? I'm going to ignore other games and focus in the most interesting one: Elemental.

In this sweet game each individual I take from the city, is a citizen less living and producing there. Which is fine and interesting. Problem is: only men? You know, I can take all the population in the first turn and what do I get? All men. I can keep syphoning the population each turn into troops in training and all of them are... men!!!! (you sure you don't keep women in a cave?)

I know that we still have lots of placeholders but that seems totally wrong. It makes me think that the true population in the city isn't the one told to us. It cannot be because I can spend hundreds of turns taking population into militar units and population still increases. Too many immigrations? Population not considered when taxing and/or considerating able people?

If the population we are told isn't real that means that some population isn't being counted. Which kind of population could be ignored when talking about taxes/research/recruiting? Well, kids would be the most obvious choice. I don't think we are seeing kid armies in the game. Who else? Maybe old men and/or disabled people. They simply would not make usefull soldiers (in theory...). And then we have women. They are not considered as possible soldiers (or tax payers!!!).

If women are part of the population (even if we were to forbid them to join the army), they should appear in the population count. It should matter. So if in theory you forbid women to join the army and the population in your city is of 100 (and supposing a 50%/50% ratio of male/female population), that would mean that we could only recruit 50 soldiers from that city. Which makes more sense.

Problems? If we must consider women, why not also kids and old people? (let's suppose there are no disabled people or if you feel Fallen, imagine your population being spartan in nature) For one, I'd say that at least kids don't pay taxes and it's unlikely that you are using them in war or mining iron... And old people? We suppose that no so may people reaches old age (the conditions are not like in our world, really) and those who do are not significant enough to really consider them.

Back to women again. So we take them into the population count, so what now? Well, if we are to count women as part of our mechanics then it must be meaningful. First impact of women as part of the population? Population increase.

Let's suppose that you start in a tiny island very far away from the mainland. In this extreme case, and supposing that immigrants doesn't appear magically in the island (or are expert sailors or something), the population in our city will only increase for a time thanks to migrations and then it'll stop as no more roaming people remains in the island. It'll depend from that moment in the men and women in the city to make sure that population at least mantains itself.

One fertile woman and one fertile man are needed to start reproducing the population. If you don't have at least of each you better thinking of magical cloning or to go Radagast or something. One fertile woman and twenty fertile men are as the previous case in reproduction potential as you only have one able women to get pregnant and give birth to the new generation. Twenty fertile women and one fertile man would be better than the two previous cases because the number of pregnancies are higher and the population could reproduce faster. Even then, a higher number of fertile men would be need because of genetic diversity.

This means that our city has two ways to increase population:

• Immigrations: people leaving wherever they were living to join your city. It's strenght depends of people living in other places and how attractive are the conditons of your city to them to make them move (if possible). Can be strong at first but should decrease over time and only increase in puntual situations.
• Births: to increase the population of a city through births we need a good balance of women/men in it. As long as we keep as many women as men in the city, the population should increase over time (we suppose that the reproduction tendencies try to increase population instead of sustaining it). Having more women than men could mean a "bonus" in population increase (let's ignore practices like poligamy, infidelities and the like, we just get the bonus for reasons not specified, ok? And not big, just a simple one) while having less women than men would make the increase not possible and would lead to a decrease of the population.

To allow women to join the army could be considered a mistake. After all, who else can give birth? As I previously said, you would only need one fertile man while women... you would need some. But there might be reasons as why women should be allowed to join the army. Be it lack of men in the city during a war, special requiriments for certain types of units (let's suppose a Unicorns' based cavalry or that the Sovereigness only allow women to be channelers) or maybe we have too many women around and don't want to affect more the population increase ratios.

New options should be open now too. When attacking a city, you may not only conquer it for example, you may be able to kidnap some of their women and add them to your population. Well, you should be able to kidnap men too but kidnapping their women could potentially hurt them more. These kind of new tactics would be quite important for civilizations like Amazons. Be them Amazons that only admit men in their ranks or in very low numbers, they would depend greatly of immigrations and the freeing (kidnap?) of other women. (or maybe the machomen trying to free the machomen trapped by the enemies!)

But Amazons would be an example of exception to the populations. If they were to get extreme and only allow women then they would need a special mechanism that reflects it in their populations. Which makes me belive that if having women in population is already a no-no, extremist Amazons are even less possible. But they must be considered.

At this point, probably even before this point, someone is asking: "If you want female units in the game, why not just have the possibility of selecting the gender of the unit when designing it but leave the population as genderless?" That would be a nice option that would make me happy (guys dressed as Valkyrjas is not my idea of epic!) but it's not what I'm really talking about (but we better be able to do that or else... ). For some people this game might be just about war and/or economy and/or magic. Sue me for desiring some social mechanics in it (don't get me started with spionage too). And whoever dares to say something along the lines of: "Go play the Sims" is going to lose some face (in my eyes). I'm, after all, just throwing some ideas out there that could improve the game... and I started this wall of text some months ago. Consider it a remix, reduced and a bit polished version (with things left out due to extension) of the original version (which I lost).

I dislike complex systems that don't really add nothing useful. Not sure if adding women to the population could really make a difference. But sure as the death of our sun one day is that cities need something more to them. If I have to write a wall of text (seems that I'm unable to write anything that isn't one, sorry) about social dynamics, cultural clashes and that stuff... that's going to hurt.