Buildings Should Cost People (maybe?)

This is interesting.

I want to stay away from having "residential tiles". This isn't SimFantasy. But I am intrigued at the concept of certain improvements consuming people.

The issue I would see there is added complexity versus the benefit. You'd need to be able to see both the population of the city and the available population of a city which adds another layer of complexity.  This is okay if there is a pay off for it but I'm not sure if the pay off is sufficient in terms of fun.

To a lesser extent, one of the faction bonuses makes use of this with 'Sacrifical Altars'. The actual improvements haven't been checked in yet, but it a fun way to play as an evil sovereign. 

This reminds me a little bit of the labour allocation pool in Deadlock. I'm a fan of Deadlock, although I don't know if I'm a fan of allocating labour in that way. It gets a little micromanagementy. You'd need a good "governor" system to make such an economy manageable.

I guess the problem now is, theoretically, you could have a city full of production but no housing, and I don't know if population does anything except get your city to the next level. I will experiment with that strategy the next time I load up Elemental.

Well I’m not sure what exactly you would consider doing with a system like this but from my initial idea I can think of 3 main benefits.

 Population importance increases greatly – In my opinion the best argument for considering this idea. Perhaps you already had something in mind to make population more important but a simple work force system makes perfect sense to me.

 Building diversity has more potential – You could do a lot of cool stuff here or leave it simply that some buildings need people in addition to resources and others just need resources.

 Small vs. Large cities could be more meaningful- this would depend on how you wanted to do things but if I want to build economic and food production for a city that might nudge a player in the direction of having a larger city. On the other hand if I wanted a production and military city that might nudge the player towards leaving a city smaller. All of that being dependent on the implementation of the system.

 The downside as you stated would be increased complexity for the player and for development. While adding complexity for complexity’s sake isn’t a good idea adding logical complexity with good context can increase a games fun factor. I don’t personally think adding one more requirement to keep track of will task anyone to capacity. The potential benefits seem to out weigh the cost but you guys know your game better then me so I’m glad you’re even taking the time to consider it.

The idea sounds cool, as Frogboy suggested.   However, it seems to overlap the current mechanism to limit the number of buildings per city (the tile cap).

Perhaps your system could be used as an alternative to the tile cap for cities, as it allows more sophisticated decisions on city building.  The only thing I'm seeing here that could be  drawback is that most buildings are going to need the same population per building tile (I might be wrong here).  IF that is the case then the current mechanism is actually better at limiting the city based on population (higher pop = high city lvl = more tiles), as it is simpler and will have the eact same effect.

However, one work around to the tendancy (in my opinion) to have all the buildings ending up needing the same pop per tile, would be to greatly lengthen the civic improvements so that more advanced buildings riquire more costs but less people to have them running at optimised efficiency.   eg:  mine (current game), needs 10 (random number) pop to run optimised.  later on research mine advancements (BIG trolleys :P), mine's need 2 less people to run optimised.  later on new tech, magic assistance, mines need 2 less people to run optimal (cumulative).

Under the model described above, there would still need to be a tile cap to stop gigantuan cities at high tech levels.  however the extra pop could be used in other ways, as was suggested by Dark, increase training rate.  perhaps give a 1% bonus to training rate for each 100 pop (random numbers to be balanced).  This would make the population freed up from higher advances in other buildings still be useful.

I think it's better the keep things simple. Instead of a per building basis I think it should simply be the city as a whole. The devs have stated that as a city levels up production will get modifiers. This means which a level 2 city produces 2x of something each turn a level 3 will produce 3x of that same item. The problem is the population per building is your getting more production from the same number of people. Also there is the issue larger cities the population continues to double. I mean a level 3 city only requires 250 people but a level 5 city requires 1K. And yet the number of tiles the city has don't even double.

For simplicity sake I think the player should have to maintain at least the number of people needed to reach the current city level. Thus if a level 3 city drops below 250 population they would begin to suffer penalties. This way players don't have to worry about each building they add causing them to go over their current workforce.

Very interesting idea.  I try to suggest a way to simplify yet maintaining the main benefits: highlighting the importance of pop, increase building diversity, increase city diversity.

1. Different building require a differnt # of labour to be 100% productive.   This requirement is different for different city level
2. Individual Building's productivity is pro rated to the labour works there.
3. All buildings inside the same city will have same % productivity.   When this city require a 1000 labour to be 100% productive and it only has 900 working, all buildings produce 90% of its thereotical max.
4. When player finish training 100 knights from this city, productivity of all buildings will drop further to 80%, due to reduction of the workforce.   Military is not considered as labour.

This idea should also work well together with the idea that '1 pop consume 1 food production and 1 prestige production per turn' in the other thread.

A fancy (maybe too complicated) idea -- link population growth with unemployment on top of prestige.   If the city offer too little work, no matter how much local prestige it has, pop growth slows.   This optional concept can be used to slows down runaway growth in biggest cities that have too many prestige producing buildings.

Why not link Productivity directly to the number of people who currently reside in Slums in your City.

The current Slums provide cheaper housing at the cost of Prestige, so if we add a Production Penalty as well, you can only hide a certain sized Slum in a City before the stench start to move "uptown" so to speak.

Since that would likely move the Slums down on the "want to build a lot of" list due to said penalties, we could tie Slum populations directly into the recruitment of armed personnel that come out of any particular city.

If I recall it right, as a city losses population, "housing" will fall into disrepair due to lack of use. One major Pop killer will be the creation of your Armed Forces. So as an army is built, those bodies (pop) come out of the Slums first. If that recruitment process empties a Slum (-300pop), it goes into disrepair or be removed, thus opening room for other Buildings/Houses/Villas etc and turns off the penalties asociated, unless of course, you replace/repair them with more slums...

The idea being is that having a City with +15 Prestige via whatever, when a player knows that +10 will suffice, can then build 5 Slums for a -5 Prestige penalty and not have the City be greatly affected by it.

But if your Pop base is routed in low income housing and the folk are mostly uneducated and poor then overall productivity should take a hit.

Who will run the Libraries/Hosptials after the Army conscripts all the paupers? The rich? HAHAHA!

Actually I have been thinking on this one and the more I do the more it makes sense. It would fix the city deleveling problem.

Because lets face it if a city delevels due to pop loss how are they going to make it work. Especially if the tiles are already built out. Do they disapear, Do they go unused, Do we trust an A.I. to select which disapear and which go unused. That last one is really a sticking point for me because no matter how good an A.I. is it is never good enough.

But if every building required X amount of pop to run and that pop comes out of the available for recruiting pop...

then it would be very simple and intuitive to understand why a L5 city with only 200 people (You just recruited however many legion it would take to do that) remained an L5 city.

Just display it on the resource line as 635/425 Where the first number is current pop and the second number is usable pop for buildings or recruitment. Plus when we get to the balance phase this allows the Dev's another tool to balance with. I.E. how hard or easy it is to recruit larger formations of troops or balancing buildings depending on what they set building cost at.

I've made an update to the idea in post#7.  It is the same idea, just even more refined.  The concept become easier to understand.

1. Different building require a different # of labour to be 100% productive, call this number X in a Level 1 city.  
2. Individual Building's productivity is pro rated to the how many people working there.
3. In a L5 city, the same building employs 5X labour max, thus it can be 5 times more productive than the same building in a L1 city. 
4. Generally, each individual's productivity remains constant for all city levels.  However, for some buildings there will be a "situational" productivity bonus/penalty hinging on the cities' level.  (For example, farms are much more productive in L1 city, due to lack of water, better air or whatever)
5. If all the buildings in a city require a total of 1000 labor to be 100% productive, but there is only 900, all buildings produce 90% of its theoretical max.
6. Then after the player finish training 100 knights from the same city, productivity of all buildings will drop further to 80%, due to reduction of the workforce.   Military is no longer considered as part of the population.
7. City level up/delevel dynamically depending on pop increases/decreases.

Using this concept, houses/building no longer needed to be disappear, rebuild, nor there is any need to decide when one go unused.   There is no micromanagement here, when city level changes.    The valid concerns XeronX mentioned is resolved.

That type of process makes assumptions about those, just anyone, are taken out of the Population, to create the decline and thus the hit to productivity. People with very specific training, Farmers, Smithy's, Miners would all come out last. (please do not site modern wars as an example - we don't get to choose from 35 millions souls)

If the Max size is 1000 for a L5 and 100% productivity, I theoretically should be able to reduce that Pop. down to within 1 Pop. of the next lower level without affecting productivity.

The creation of an Army, as a general rule, does not reduce a cities over-all productivity. Actually, it often stimulates ones local economy. (now we can use modern wars)

So if your idea allowed the player to go down to 750 Pop. from 1000, without a penalty, so I can actually provide for my Army as they obviously need to be fed, trained and armed, fine.

But, if for some reason, and knowing full well, that if I dip down further, say into the 749 region, L4 max (-1) then I could see a productivity hit on the city, with knowledge, that 2 more Pop would resolve the issue.

With that, I could even see a 20% productivity decline per level lost. 2 levels, 40% etc. At some point you may have to recruit a whole population to save the Kingdom.

Actually it increases the overall economic activity not the productivity. The factories at times may not run at 100% capacity because the demand for the goods it produces is not high enough. However in games such as this everything is always producing at full capacity because having to turn a profit on the bottom line is not an issue.

Also in times of war new factories are built or old factories are retooled to be more productive. This would fall under city improvements with new buildings/upgrades in terms of the game and thus not directly effected by change in population.

Most places don't run at 100% capacity these days because if the demand is high enough new factories are built and if demand goes down factories cut back on output or close down. Trying to apply these kind of dynamics in TBS games such as this and CIV doesn't really work as regardless of the Governmental bonuses/penalties the game is still pretty much a dictatorship who depands 100% output from all fields of production. Now that's not to say having to few people to run stuff isn't an issue. As you could easily build a bunch of factories but have no people to work in them.

On a side note though some buildings should probably also have a production bonus based on the population. I mean a market place is bound to do more business and thus generate more income in a large city then it would in a small village.

I'm sure there's also room for Gladiator Arenas that give prestige but reduce the population of the settlement by 1 every X turns due to deaths during spectacles. Oh, and labor camps giving production but killing off some weak workers. When training units, could be fun to be able to use some harsher training methods, giving some sort of a boost to troop training (faster or better results) but on the flipside causing additional deaths.

Yes, any reduction in pop means reduction of productivity.  This is what I want. Simple and elegant.   In this game, why should we care about the training of Farmer, smithy etc?   The only type of training we should care is the army/hero/Sov, and nothing more.

Yes, in  post #10 I am doing away with the exact situation.   When somehow this city population decline from 750 to 749, why should my city’s overall productivity drops from X5 to X4?  It is a huge decline and encourage min-max that Frogboy tries to avoid.

What I am suggesting here is just to remove the artificial Level 2 city has X2 productivity bonus we currently have in the beta.  Instead let productivity floats proportionally to the working population.     Then, in case there is some extra bonus related to City Level, put that bonus at the building’s ‘situational’ bonus field.   Let me use a Church building to illustrate:

You can build a church at any city level, but it start providing employment only at city level 2 (**).  For each city level, church employs 50 more people.  Each employed staff produce 2 Gold per turn.   For Church, its situational bonus  is: “upon reaching city level 5, each employed staff produce additional 2 Prestige per turn”. 

And the ‘situational’ bonus can related to City level , but it can be almost anything.  It is basically a ‘IF’ statement…

(**) it means it require L2 to be operational, but I also account for the situation that when pop drops the city to L1, church will not produce anything.

And it is fun to talk about how to make population decline too!  Just like what Sir_Linque did, building or production that uses population as a cost.  Then maybe there is plague, a spell that poison the wells, your enemy bleaches the city wall;  there should be  a million ways to kill your civilian population!  

I understand your point John but while you make sense in the real world it doesn't have any significance in the game unless the support is there and Brad is shooting for partially realistic at best in my opinion. If this or a similar such system gets implemented you are more then likely only going to have two classes of citizens.

Inactive Military - Can be recruited without impacting a city's productivity 

Work Force - If recruited will impact a city's productivity

Now you could debate whether the player should have the option to select the order of recruitment when a city starts to pull troops from its workforce. I personally feel it should be like a randomized draft where you don't know exactly who's going to be recruited until the training is complete. That way an element of gambling is added to troop training when you start to dig into a work force.

This would be largely meaningless for a specialized town of course since most of the people would be coming from a specific discipline like research, economics, farming, etc. But it would be very interesting for those large LV 5 cities that kind of do everything well but focus in production or what have you. The more I think about this idea the more I like it personally and I dislike the idea of taking a percentage hit to total productivity if a city's population gets to low. That just feels really lame / uninspired to me now.

Agreed. All I was arguing was the #'s and applying a premise. A game can have a Premise based on RL? No!

Slums represent Inactive, Others the Work Force.

Meh ... if your going to have (Lack of Population) = lack in efficiency ... then start the decline once you dip below the pop it took to upgrade the settlement.

I am sure that is what the majority of you meant, however someone saying "Only at max should it be 100%" just irked me so I had to specifically word things.

City = 750 - 2,000+ = 100% efficiency

Hamlet = 40 - 149 = 100% efficiency

While a city below 750 gets a 20% hit, and a city below (town min) gets a 40% hit, and a city below (village min) gets a 60% hit ... while a CITY at 40 pop or lower gets an 80% hit.

So the Efficiency of a settlement would go down 20% per each level it dropped, so only cities could take an 80% hit, while Towns at 39 pop would take a 60% hit, and Villages at 30 pop would take a 40 % hit, and Hamlets could only ever take a 20% hit, and Outposts would never suffer from lack of population.

In this way, its even more simple because there are very definite tiers to City efficiency, so you know exactly how much you will suffer from any permutation of recruitment ... in less than a second of cognitive thought.

Wouldn't it be easier just to have number of people in houses - work force = inactive military? Are you suggesting that only slums provide inactive military while houses provide work force? I don't think having two categories of housing would be a good idea personally if that is similar to what you are suggesting. Also, I don't mind realism in games unless it affects fun factor.

That has already been suggested. The problem I have with that is losing so many people shouldn't affect productivity everywhere in a city. It makes more sense from both a game-play and logical point of view to me for only specific buildings to be affected.

A problem with what you specifically proposed is if a city goes down by let's say 100 people below city minimum it takes a 20% hit to everything. Would you care to explain the logic behind how recruiting 100 people would affect everything in a city by a negative 20%? In addition, I feel making the reductions so linear and based on city level population requirements would provide far to much "wiggle" room to the point of the system being totally ineffective. I'd prefer something more dynamic and precise.

It just doesn't sit well with me I'd much rather have those 100 people I recruited be from my work force where X number of buildings in the city go offline until the 100 return or are replaced. Having a work force just seems like a great way to add population importance while making cities feel more alive and dynamic.

The problem is that its can of worms material, and your only going to need to get more detailed before its going to work in the way you want. Which building are the citizens going to move from? Are you recruiting drill instructors, bakers, butchers, carpenters? Farmers, Merchants, Bankers, Teachers? Maybe 5 teachers and 10 bankers? How will you know?

No ... I say scrap this whole idea before it gets silly.

You're thinking to much Tasunke the number of teachers, bankers, etc has no meaning in regards to the system itself. The only thing that will need to be done is make buildings need a constant number of people to be functional. The numbers would be a balance issue not a system failure which would only be caused if you try to do to much which is why I specifically said a "simple work force". 

Basically you would have something like this

1. I have 5 houses in my city (currently hold 32 people each)

2. My total population is 160

3. My inactive military personal is equal to my total population - the number of people needed to work.

4. If I recruit all my inactive military citizens when I train more soldiers it starts to eat into my work force

5. Random people would be pulled out of productivity structures to be trained (Other options exist)

6. Once the number of people dropped below number X for a building it would no longer function

7. As new people enter my city  or the old personal return buildings that were inactive can reactivate

You are really exaggerating in my opinion about this being a can of worms. Don't mistake you picking poor numbers as an example of why the system itself is faulty. As long as you keep it simple this really would be a great system to include in Elemental if you ask me. I'd like to hear your opinion as to why the system not random numbers chosen by players is erroneous if you don't mind?

Darkodinplus, you have my full support on post #20

To relate to my post #10, inactive military personal is the surplus people living in the city when all buildings are already operating at their full capacity.    Those are the unemployed, as no more work is available in that city.   These people will be the first group people recruited as military people.    Whenever this pool is depleted, further draft will eat into the existing productivity of the city, proportional to the stuff lacked.

This "inactive military" and "workforce" and stuff just sounds complicated and unneccessary and adds macromanagement (I use micro and macro terms from an RTS standpoint.)

The Sovereign question is: What does it acheive?

To play at your best (like I do), you would check your cities all the time to make sure had have enough pop.

....Like going back to bases every 30sec to build new workers in StarCraft....

Darkodinplus-I really like that. 

Frogboy -To me it would be a great way to add 'life' to each and every hamlet, village, etc.  It is also a little bit 'sim' like you say, however, couldn't you just abstract or make a few animations/still works to imply you have 'all these' working people.  The cities are yet to be changed to make unique/fun/active/interactive.

 Tasunke-I believe just the opposite.  That to me echoes 'real' life.  What I do for a living(sometimes, cough, cough) is build stuff.  Houses, Schools, Transit District Depots, Multi-storied parking structures, etc  From real elaborate to hatchet job.  Real big expensive projects and for people who can barely pay at all.  I've been the ditch digger, garbage pick-up guy to laying out large buildings and structures.  I've learned a little bit about residential and commercial concrete, tiling, masonry, plumbing, electrical, carpentry.  I'm definitely not the best at what I do. 

  I've done a lot of other things to in my life(school, military, security, Tech(In tech I've been a full time MIS employee at a software co, a full time production worker in a wafer fab[I worked in Implant], a temp worker at a hardware co[harddrives). 

  One of the things I learned was that if you do not maintain your structures after you build them is that they deteriorate.  Depending on how well the structure is built will determine on how long the structure(or parts thereof) will last without maintenance.  Where I live, if you build a brand new house for someone, you are liable for 10 years.  Your not liable if the homeowner fails to maintain the property; and, that is then determined the cause of damage was lack of maintenance. 

  Many home owners as well as commercial property owners fail to maintain their properties.  That's because proper maintenance on properties can become expensive depending on the size, age of the structure, and who and how they built the structure.  Also because some people are ignorant of maintenance through ignorance(self imposed or lied to), laziness, and unless they have a calendar of their maintenance they forget when they are supposed to do it and why.            

 Quality is a very undervalued asset in building unless it's a state, federal project or some residential and commercial owners who value it.  Many revert to cost as the overriding concern.  Cost is important, but when cost determines the quality, many times it will diminish or reduce a structures 'real' value.

  Point I'm trying to get to is that maintenance requires people.  Sometimes you need more than 1 individual to do said maintenance(this occurs even to professional builders).  Now if your gonna be living in a world without electricity and using hand saws, chisels, etc. then that maintenance is going to take many people. Now we need people to build stuff(not everyone can do it), people to maintain stuff(most don't want to do it), and if the structure is something like a farmhouse with barns, corrals, silos then you need people to operate at efficiency for whatever you are producing/altering[back in the old days when I was a young tadpole...no, no wrong.  Way back when you needed a place to smelt the ores and other additives in a separate location from where smithies were at.  You would have deliveries of raw ingots to smiths who then altered the material to make items like swords, etc.].

 Anyway, that's my argument for goingthe route Darkodinplus is suggesting.  We need people for all those things.  I just don't think we need to make it accurate as far as how many it 'really' takes to build, maintain and produce/alter products.  Make a little chart, keep the math abstract and scaled down, keep it in the background and show some of the workers in stills and animations with audio and or text bubbles when creating buildings.  Make it automated so we don't need to do anything with those 'people'.  They would just add a little bit of interactivity, eyecandy and maybe altered gameplay mechanics to the current city editor.

We already have more than 2 categories of Housing, unless a Palace and a Villa are considered the same as a Slum?

My selection of the Slums was just a way to have a good regulatory # (300 per), for when any productivity penalty kicks in. If I begin to deplete my Town's early on, Huts have 32 Pop. an odd #.

I know the computer does not care, but as a player, nice round values, easily discerned, simply make game play easier.

My 3rd City just posted a pop up declaring a 20% Prod. hit? WTH! Oh right! I just sucked/recruited almost 300 soldiers from that city. Better check the Prestige #'s.

It certainly doesn't matter what anyone does for a job??????.

Here's an alternative thought.

Perhaps, in order to create said Inactive Military units, that get used up before the Prod. based Pop. does (thus penalties) is to add Pop. to the Barracks. That way, then when you build a Barracks and begin recruiting, that Pop. base is automatically removed first, before the work force gets impacted.