Um, wow?  Why don't you enjoy yerself some karma

Whenever I find myself going back to AoW I try to simulate this "struggling to eke out an existence and prosper in the magic blasted world" feeling that Elemental seemed to be promising back in the day.  Set the game options to no cities and start with a pioneer only for a very slow starting game.

I think that worked!

Right now I don't even pay attention to my population. Does it matter? I just go about my business building anything and everything I need. It would be nice to start seeing checks and balances set in place for decisions we make. Honestly city building just seems to easy right now.

I agree that the Civ style of allocating the population to different jobs would be great - but implementing that would require vastly more work than my current suggestion.

this is a great list of the problems with the system and geta at a lot of what i've been saying all over the shop. i'd go a little further and make some of your ideas more mechanics rather than rules.

relate food direstly to the population: great. but what if we not just make food a requirement for population, but a factor that affects growth? places that have more food (a general resource in elemental for the ability to support people) are always more attractive to people. and if a place has the means to support more people, families will have more children. at the same time famine causes diaspora, starvation and so forth.

so clearly we can make this procedural. if instead of just saying "you require" 1 food per person, take it a step further and divide the total faction food over the total population. we can then relate this ratio to population growth: if it exceeds a certain ratio then populations get a bonus to growth. if it is below a certain level you get a negative. you can add in other bonuses for buildings and so forth as well (you could even add in an extra one for charisma if you liked). so then what happens is this:

population ends up adjusting to meet whatever food supply (and other factors) are available. it then becomes something the player very rarely has to worry about directly. when you increase your agriculture, circumstances improve and population gets a further bonus (so it continues to rise in the long term, but stagnates if your tech and infrastructure stagnate).

this way we get a realistic game mechanic that makes having food an advantage rather than simply a requirement. but the best thing about it is this:

even if growth modifiers are positive, population only grows until the housing limit is reached. so if you're clever, you can cause the growth to happen mostly where you want it to: in the big cities so you can get better stuff (you get economies of scale where it's better to have 10 guys in a city where you have the infrastructure to exploit them, then it is to have them in a farming village). this means that instead of settlement homogeneity, we will get an interesting mix of settlement types.

players can still "spam" settlements to grab resources, but you no longer end up with cities everywhere. which means less micro, more space on the map and more diversity. even better, instead of factions being crippled by the loss of one or two outer settlements, the outer settlements are less crucial in the short term. so losing factions remain competetive for longer and the epic battle comes at the end of the war instead of the beginning.

To the OP:  

While I can see that you're certainly thinking in the right direction here for making cities feel more alive and less "spammy", I don't really like the idea of throwing in a new Settler unit.

What's the point of the Pioneer, now that we have a Settler?  Why would a Pioneer have to accompany a Settler to found a city?  Why not just change how Pioneers work to make them act more like Settlers instead?

I still like Brad's "slot" idea a lot more than this.  The slot system will fit right into the game as it currently functions now, there will be no need to come up with and balance a new unit as well as create loads of new mechanics such as Charisma affecting how people join you, etc.

I mean, your ideas sound pretty good, but I don't see how all of that cannot be accomplished by modifying the existing unit: the Pioneer.  As a side note, I think the point of the Pioneer and not a "Settler" was to avoid the blatant copying of Civilization.  I think the Pioneer was always supposed to act like Civ's "Settler", just with a different name.

I like the idea of ejecting a unit to remove some population, but supposedly this is how Pioneers will work under the new slot system.  They will just require a certain number of slots or specialists to be created.  The only problem I see here, however, is that the slots need to be held even after the new city is founded, or else this would be pointless.

It is a nice idea. But while it is a first step in what might be the correct direction, it does not solve the problem that there is a serious lack of reward for having big cities except for 1-3 Core cities to get the powerful level4/5 buildings that can be built once per faction. Sure, the added income/research is nice (and with your concept of being able to pool your population wherever you want them and a non-linear growth, it would be less slow to level them up), but it does not give cities any bonuses that cannot be matched by two smaller cities.

If this concept was implemented, I would probably use it like this: I would have 1-3 big cities (who therefore have a high population increase and allow me to build the powerful "once per faction" buildings), but instead of keeping it maxed out, I would often built/eject settlers there and push my "countless" other cities to Level 3 and flood the countryside, because it gives me much more gain for the population investment.

To solve this, your concept needs to be expanded, something like this (just brainstorming here, it is nowhere near polished):

- a city can use caravans to "harvest" resources outside of its zone of influence. That could be used to redirect resources that are originally belonging to another of your cities (for example to build up a gold-hub with a lot of bonusses to gold production that grabs two or more gold mines), but also to harvest resources completely outside of your area of influence (but not in another faction's zone, of course), which can be risky, but obviously also very rewarding. This not only gives you more abilities to make your cities specialized by pooling resource types but greatly reduces the need for building cities just to get hold of a new resource which is especially handy if the resource will come into your zone of influence soon anyway.

- There should be more options on leveling up a city. If your city does not have access to a gold mine or library, you might as well leave this town at level 1 forever. In addition, leveling up a city should do more than what it currently does, but that could also be solved with adding more buildings that are unlocked across all tech trees.

This idea is great and I support it entirely.

I think perhaps the way food is implemented should not be as described by Sethai is the better option, however, a squishy limit instead of a hard one. It's a good solution, it gives us an easy ratio that can be multiplied by some base value (pending play-testing, naturally). The only problem I see is scaling rate: Population starts out with low numbers, and food is relatively easy to get. As the game progresses, population increases exponentially, and food increases linearly, r at a decreasing rate if you planned specifically for the acquisition of food early on. So probably the actual equations should look a bit less simple than that.

Saklaus, I like that suggestion. Perhaps merely add a persuade option, and if you succeed, the unit joins you. To allow this to be population related, there would need to be some option to reintegrate military into the civilian population. These are both good ideas, though I think they are separate from the main idea of this thread.

Nerulan, those ideas are not really related to this.

Tasunke, that idea is unrelated, and I also think it's a bad idea. I see no benefit, and it just makes things messy.

Dunno, I kind of like how it works right now (1.09). This game should be about War and Magic, not frustrating population management.

The Progress>  I really appreciate what you suggest.  Great ideas.  Hope SD implements something along those lines.  One 'fine tuning' comment about finding a refugee camp.  If the camp exists, there must be a (perhaps small) source of water and food growing going on there, or the camp would be abandoned, or full of dead beings.  Perhaps, the discovering SOV might wat to keep the resource, as well as the population.  WHat do you think about addressing this idea?