On food, population, and housing

Forum doesn't seem to display my post, weird...

EDIT: never mind, it's working now 

i agree on all points

1) Breaks down as the size of the game increases. It's easy with one city, you see 16 food and know that you can get 16 people in your city, so you build one house that can hold up to 32 and go do something else. But what about when you have 5 cities, and 1600 food (if food production was changed so 1 food = 1 person)? You know you can get 1600 people among your 5 cities, but then you can't just count the number of houses in each city, since that no longer shows guaranteed growth but maximum potential growth. You'd have to see how many people currently live there, how many more your current houses can support, and then how many more houses you have to build to house however many people you want the city to get. For each city. It becomes way too cumbersome and unnecessary.

2) The question here is if the control is necessary. Sure if food was per-person and used up with every 1 population increase you could make a case that you'd like to control which city levels its houses and which does not. But as it is, without having 1) implemented, 2) doesn't make sense in the current system - the food was paid upfront, and you only gain by upgrading, you never lose anything. This makes the level of control, again, cumbersome because you'll always want to upgrade your houses and instead of it being automatic, you'll just have to do it one by one.

3) Why doesn't it make sense? Villas inherently are able to house more people. Granted, Villas are generally much larger than individual houses, so logically should take more plot space if you go with house vs villa comparison, but along with having higher prestige, they just physically are capable of housing more people. (Note, I'm not advocating villas taking up more space, just pointing out that I think this point is a bit silly).

I only see downsides of changing to a food-per-person system instead of the current fund-houses-upfront. Mostly due to difficulty of managing larger and larger populations.

@tesb: I figured you would, I wrote this post after I read yours in the changelog thread

@Annatar11: I think you are wrong, I don't think it would be more difficult than the current system.

The current interface is perfectly suitable to handle this. When you select a town, there is a bar on the lower right of the interface. This bar fills up when the population grows, and when it is full the town grows a level. It also shows an icon of a house, displaying what the current maximum population is due to housing. And a mouse-over shows you the exact numbers, for instance '27 people, 100 needed for next level, capped at 82 due to housing'. It wouldn't be very difficult to add a second icon to this bar that shows food, and a mouse-over that says '27 people, 100 needed for next level, capped at 50 due to food, and 82 due to housing'. And on a larger scale, the resource bar could show, from left to right, the current populatioin of your kingdom, current projected population growth, and food production surplus (i.e. how much your population could grow).

I hope control is necessary. I hope that food will be scarce enough that you couln't grow every town you build to level 5, and wouldn't want to. And IMO there should be something to lose; materials, and living space when uprading to more luxurious levels.

Yes villas are big, and in theory could house a lot of people. But what makes a villa a villa is that it is a luxurious and spacious house for a small number of people. If you let a lot of people live there it becomes some sort of community housing project. A very well build housing project, but still. By your logic, the best most expencive housing would be a giant warehouse filled with beds and whatever else you need to house a large number of people. I doubt a lot of people would call that luxurious living.

It being suitable does not make it advantageous. It's not the UI that would hinder this system, since the UI can be made to conform to any requirement of gameplay design. It's the gameplay design itself that's the problem. One-to-one food gets ridiculous when you have populations in the thousands or tens of thousands. You can easily get a few thousand inhabitants among ceveral cities in a Tiny map. What about when you're playing the largest map size and have 30,000? Or more?

You're also not accurately considering everything you'd have to keep track of.

For example, what if you're not food capped? What if you have 1,237 people, you need to grow to 2,000 and have just enough houses to get there, and have 1,020 food. You want your town to grow, which means over a number of turns, 763 food will have to be used as people come into your city to live. That means, when you're planning your second city, you don't really have 1,020 food. You only have 257 food because you have to be sure to leave enough for the first city to grow.

What happens when you're trying to manage more than two cities? Sure you could add more meters and notifications to the UI, and have half the city info dedicated to keeping track of population and food, but why? This system is vastly inferior to the current one.

It is already scarce enough. As I said previously, this would have a purpose in your proposed system, but doesn't make sense in the current system. Any non-permanent "loss" (like materials) is not a deterrent to upgrading a house, either. If you don't have enough, just wait a few turns. It is at worst a delay.

If memory serves, Villas offer a minimal boost in population over Houses. They do, in fact, provide a prestige bonus, and are more expensive. I find it odd that you have no objection to a hut somehow housing 32 people, or a normal house housing 64, where in "the real world" they can't come close to matching those numbers, but take issue with villas housing a lot of people even though of the three they're the only structure that is capable of actually doing so. And no, a warehouse with beds is not luxurious living, and that's why a slum, despite providing a large population bonus, loses your town prestige!

annatar you could change the food income system as well, to support a food to population mechanic and not a food to house mechanic. the main reason against the current system is that houses upgrade, providing more room for population while not consuming more food, this doesn't make any sense at all.

if you want some big cities with thousands of inhabitants just build some farming cities and add some technologies that increase the harvest (like mills, gardens -> acres -> crop rotation etc.)

as of now any city is pretty much food independent i would like to see cities specialize a bit more and i don't like to see that nearly every city i build is getting to metropolis status.

i guess you played civ4 so you could easily make an ui that supports food income in a city and the available houses could have other benefits then just giving room for population for example you could introduce a tax system where villas, mansions and estated provide the most tax income (and prestige) while supporting the least population. slums, huts and houses on the other hand would be cheap and support more population but that is it.

edit: also i am worried that you soak up all the karma in this forum as well

So, instead of suggesting that since the Hut > House upgrades doubles population to give the upgrade a food cost, you'd rather scrap the whole system and make a new one from scratch?

I agree with Annatar. I don't understand what the point is of replacing the current system with a new one that would make it harder to manage large empires. It's a small problem to begin with, and I don't think "fixing" it, especially in the way you propose, would add any benefit to the game.

well there are some major points on why a new system would be better:

1) different kinds of income: tax (with a lot of villas/mansions/estates) or trade (merchants, markets etc.)

2) city diversity: you can choose between a low tax but cheap to build high population city or an expansive city that need much more room for estates and the like, but it would have more prestige and tax income

3) city specialization: you would actually need to build satellite 'food cities' to support such a prestigious city, while the hut/slum/house city could support its own food since it does not need that much place for its housing

also those are not major coding changes, coding wise. imho the current system is too simple, does not leave much room for choice, lacks strategic depth and it is 'unrealistic' (yes take it with a grain of salt, but you know what we were getting at)

As an aside I can actually see how higher quality housing could lead to feeding more people with the same amount of food, since things like pest proof food storage and a ice cellar could reduce spoilage and waste.

On topic. In MoM(and Civ for that matter) a city would generate food based on 3 factors.

1. The production abilities of the tiles under it's control, IE grasslands produce more food than mountains.
2. The food related improvements in the city such as a storage silo and a mill.
3. The race inhabiting the city might have modifiers such as the farming bonus for halflings.

A city would first have to feed it's own population. If there was food production over and above what the city's populace required it went into a global pool and would then be distributed to cities that were not producing enough food to feed their populace. If a cities food supply was reduced for some reason (siege, spell, change in terrain type) below the subsistence level the people would starve reducing population and increasing unrest.

I see value in that system. I think going beyond that level of detail down to the individual pantries in each house in every city is counterproductive and, frankly, unrealistic. Kings worry about food by the shipload, not by the loaf.

As far as the current system, I don't know enough to really critique it. :/

I don't think any of those are better than what we currently have. Who cares about different kinds of incomes? We already have two, merchants/markets and caravans, three if you count quests/goodie huts.

How is having "food cities" a good thing? If you want realistic, that certainly isn't. It's just a waste a city. I'm sorry but none of those seem like pluses.

well then, we simply disagree since i would care about those things. also it is pretty realistic since every major city needed external food income, rome being a good example of that.

edit: sometimes this forum needs to be slapped in the face, work damnit, just once

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