Well, if it doesn't matter then why have them come in from the wilderness at all?

And besides, living in a city with a lot of prestige doesn't generally make you more fertile or virile.  Having extra food, sanitation, and medicine do (or magic spells.)  If we are expected not to wonder about these things, there's really no reason to have a backstory at all, because it is the duty of the backstory to give context and believability to the game.

I don't want to see the "info cards" people come up with to address this.

OK, yes I do.

I'm not sure modeling the transition of population growth switching over from consolidation of wandering peoples from the wilds to birth rates is worth it though. It would be complicated and pretty confusing. How would it happen? When would it happen? Is there a finite # of people in the wilds, and will birth rate become more important once there are no wild people left? In that case, would you be seriously disadvantaged if you didn't focus on prestige building early on?

Here's how it works: You see, after the cataclysmic event that destroyed the world, the fertility and growth rates of plants were severely limited. Hence the massive desolation seen in the wild areas of the world. However, due to the law of conservation of magical momentum, the growth and fertility rates can not overall be increased or decreased. So, this excess fertility and growth had to go somewhere. Thus, it went into the people of the wilderness. They are now plagued with long life, extremely high fertility, and an overall impossibility of population control.

During this time period, a cult rose up and spread throughout a majority of the people of the world. This cult taught the people that these effects were not a curse, but rather a blessing. Giving up such blessings were seen as heretical and thus very few are willing to leave the wilderness and enter into more "civilized" lands.

Thus, when the player increases fertility and growth rates around their cities allowing them to once more till the lands, the people who live there are rendered mortal, and become entirely sterile. Due to the popularity of the cult, many people see this loss of their long life and massive fertility rates as a curse, and so unless the player maintains a good standard of living for the people, they leave the cities and go back to living in the "blessed" wastelands.

The wilds do not, and can not, run out of people. Due to the massive fertility and growth rates the people of the wilds, there is no possible way to diminish the populations of the wilds to the point where there are a lack of people.

It would be great if prestige also drains population from neighbouring cities to your city.

They use the same mysterious energy forces that allow galactic civilizations aliens to increase their population by billions in a few weeks, and somehow educating, training, etc. them as well. 

I think there should also be basic growth-rates via births/food consumption (since the human species has a natural ability, like most complex organisms, to increase fertility rates when food is abundant, and to decreas fertility rates when food is scarce ... I think Stillborns are factored into this equation as well) ...

So to restate, once a population is in a city, it has a natural birth-rate relative to the availability of food (although small enough to not be immediately significant), while migrations, immigrations, and emmigrations will be based upon Prestige alone (I think?) ... and if many people immigrate to your city, you better have a good supply of food, or build some fast! or else they might starve or become bandits / raiders in the countryside :/

Also, if you have an over-abundance of population and you don't want any to go bandit or starve to death, you can lower the average food-ration. However, the size of the food-ration would directly affect happiness, so if you abuse this mechanic, and think you can get away with it ... watch out, for you will soon see revolt! Also, lower food-rations (below a certain point) could significantly, temporarily penalize the prestige of the city ... to organically simulate an emmigration of citizens in search of food else-where (in other cities).

Prestige should be the global perception of how good the city is, while its food supplies and sanitation will effect the quality of life once the immigrants reach the city, so its a balance of prestige and health-care/food ... so if you focus solely on prestige, it will help you initially, and will grant you the occasional massive influx of immigrant slave-labor, although you will also see the occasional massive out-flux of fed-up and under-fed citizens. Still, prestige is a much better method of attracting people to your cities rather than to solely base your strategy on natural birth-rates ... and prestige should always be of some-what concern in order to prevent emmigrations to cities with higher prestige.

A city could attain the same "prestige level" with high base prestige and low rations, or low base prestige and high rations. With low food rations you can support a gigantic population (ie Moscow's 200,000), although the strength and morale of peasant troops from such a city would be weaker (perhaps professional soldiers too?) ... while the morale of a city with healthy or high rations will have an extremely high morale, of course would be supporting less population. So it would be a balance of available food and high prestige (low rations allow to support more people, but lower over-all prestige, or at least happiness/morale)

So in my analysis, it should be a dual-variabled, and incredibly sophisticated system. I have confidence that this can be done quite simply ... with a basic relation. Hopefully my arguments and examples were easy to anlalyze and we can be seeing through the same lense of perception in this one ... as Prestige vs Population Growth might be a murky concept, at least with my examples .... for it still allows for Prestige to effect the relative flow of population, and where the most people tend to go, although over-all population pool is increased over-time by the slow-but-sure natural births in the increasingly larger cities.

Double post

I think Influence, as far as borders, should be more of a "zone of control" type of thing, which can be spread by building new forts, settling a small village, and having patrols or border garrisons. Im not entirely sure it should be a cultural thing, like in Civ 4, as typical culture buildings like theatres, ect, would seem more likely to gain prestige.

Although, I could see certain things increasing both prestige and music. Say, an established musical tradition could increase influence ... if the peoples in the countryside are willing to take up arms to defend the musical tradition. While, say, a grande bard was to hold a grand performance at the Theatrical Opera, it could be either a temporary or permanent addition to the prestige of the building.

I do agree that the most significant population factor in the short-term is Population movement by prestige, but how hard would it be to have a minimal natural child-birth growth factor, and although its minimal, it can still add up to something significant as cities are getting larger. I mean ... I think its kind of de-facto that most places are having positive growth via child-birthing, but I think while early on the majority of child-births would be present in the wilderness, as more and more people enter civilized culture, and there is less uncivilized wild-men, the majority of births will take place in large city centers and in civilized rural areas.

Wild-men, however, will naturally have much shorter lives, and increased fertility, merely as a genetic survival mechanism. Im not saying their genetics are different, but when living out in the harsh out-lands, your population will most likely experience more deaths, and as a natural defense mechanism the same population will have a much higher fertility rate than those that have settled down for jobs. Not to mention the fact that those settling in cities are living more for wealth, prestige, and pleasure, and making babies tends to limit one's ability to pursue such things. Which is why various forms of attempted abortion have existed in structured civilizations since the invention of agriculture. Abortions and Abstinence, combined with the genetics feeling safe in a structured environment, lead to a limited growth-rate via natural births in civilized cultures. As a rule the more "intelligent" and forward-thinking a people, the more obsessed they are about delaying the natural process of child-birth.

Even with higher fertility rates in the wild, however, once there is an abundance of food and health in cities, There will be more child-births in the Cities than there will be in the wild. I think a sophisticated, perhaps geometric, equation for child-birth will be suitable.

I will attempt at giving a crude example: Natural birth rate in a city of 1% for every 10 turns. For every 100 kilograms of spare food able to be produced by the farm-land surrounding a city, base birth-rate is increased by 1%. If you want to increase population each turn, chance the birth rate to 0.1% each turn for every spare 100 kilograms plus a 0.1% base growth-rate. Another genetic mechanism responds to recent deaths. If more than 10% of the population has died, then the birthrate is increased by 1% (on a turn basis). So from a turn basis, 0.1% for every extra bushel of food, 1% if more than 10% of the population has died (in the past 10 turns) ... so that would be 1% extra for 10 consecutive turns. In addition a nursery would increase birth-rate by 1%, and a brothel would increase birth rate by 0.1%. Some sort of civic which encourages parenthood and births would increase the birth-rate by an additional 1%. I just see this as an underlying Organic mechanic to make extreme situations flow more naturally. (increases in birth will be rounded down to the nearest whole number)

Obviously there are many people that can come up with a better form of natural birth-rate than I just laid out. However the system works, it should not really allow for any more than 1 super-city per nation, and each sucessive city should some-how be about 30-70% the size of the previous city. Not sure how to do that, but I don't want all size 10 cities or what-not. I want one size 20, one size 12, one size 8, one size 5 one size 3 and alot of tiny size 1s

I just don't want it to turn into all level 10's ... with monotony ... is what im saying ... and it should be hard to support large cities (like shipping food to said large cities) ... also, especially if we are sticking with prestige, I think over-all availability of food should greatly effect prestige.

A good reason not to do so would be for significant advantage to rely in shipping most of the food into one central capital size 30, and for the rest of the cities to be closer to size 5 or smaller. If this type of polarity is more rewarding than having all grow to size 10s (somehow?) this would be nice.

Of course ... atlhough such high-industry cities will need food for such a population ... I would see Prestige as dimenishing returns, where food-shortages would begin to lower the prestige value at a geometric rate ... so to upkeep a large city you will need to influx food in-order to keep the prestige high.

I think more than a drop in prestige, food-shortages should increase happiness and instability. A city with vast food shortages, unless under-seige by the enemy, should have a good chance of revolt after starving for 5-10 straight turns.

However, a large city should be able to handle some limited food shortages (with enough prestige perhaps?) ... but would need more cities. Also, I think one large/giant city with several smaller cities, as opposed to many medium sized cities, should hold some strategic value I think ...

One possible answer is that Prestige buildings are exceedingly expensive, and its far easier to hold Prestige wars in one large super city, and smaller surrounding cities are less likely to emmigrate to rival cities due to their low populations, so you won't be feeding your enemy with people, instead you will be letting your own super-city absorb all excess people, so as the two giants of prestige pull at one another, all surrounding populations are also naturally pulled to either City A or City B, and only a happy medium is met where the cities in between are of decent size, small enough to be largely immune to the population-pull effects. (something about proportion of total population I should think)