[Suggestion] City population - improvement / warfare

from Elemental Forums

Yesterday, I had time to play around again :-) This time, I tried to adapt my playstyle in that way it was thought to be played (or at least, how I understood). This differs a bit to my own way of playstyle - feedback on topics which I don't find natural I had expressed already earlier on :-)

But one part I struggeled was the perception about the population of towns/villages. I created my kingdom and had a small little place as a foundation for my first city.I think you start with a population of 1 if I remember correctly. Started to build 2 improvements and a peasant for the protection of my city. Now, looking on the population bar I see -> 0 <- people in town (cause the first one is consumed by the peasant) but in the highest zoomlevel I see people building up my improvement and one lying around in the starting position of the town. After seeing this and thinking again I was even more unhappy because with the current system I could deploy all the population of the city into armies but there will be still the improvements working - maybe by ghosts? It doesn't feel right - simple as this.

So, I was thinking if people should not get an additional source - on a city level. What about that all improvements needs an amount of 1-x people to work? Together with this concept, we could maybe get rid of the tiles for the city.

Advantages:

  • A city feels more natural as the improvements blocks people to be consumed by armies
  • A player hass to decide how many improvements (and people for maintenance) he wants to have in a town and how many people are still free to be used for army building.
  • A grand city which has a lot of improvements which consumes more or less the whole population needs armies from other cities to protect.
  • Lets extend this to resource tiles: they need e.g. 4 people to be send from town there to work. No 'spaming' of resources independed how many tiles would be available 'cause the limit would be the population
  • Armies (especially 'outdated' ones) should be possible to re-integrate into the normal city population.

 

I would not go into the direction to freely distribute all the time the population with the improvements etc. Once an improvement is set or an resource tile is populated with ppl. it should be fixed and no redistribution should be allowed (I don't want to end into a Sim) until that improvement is destroyed.

Sorry for the longer text, but the flow catched myself :-)

BR

Wyl

4,819 views 3 replies
Reply #1 from Elemental Forums Top

Is the "population" of a settlement not the available manpower?

Manpower is not the total number of people living in the settlement, but the number of sustainable and available population for military (or other) service. Manpower is usually a proportion of the total population, i.e. 1/3.

Reply #2 from Elemental Forums Top

Currently the city screen talks about population not about 'military manpower'. And I think with needed population in small numbers for the improvement there is an certain level of thinking what to do and a natural limit to the number of improvements without the need for a hardcap on city tiles without adding real micro-management. Only an additional resource which you have to care about :-)

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Reply #3 from Elemental Forums Top

You do make some good points. :star:   I like the idea that you have to prioritise the improvements you use in your area and not just plop down all the improvements and get them finished in 10 turns if you've got lucky a few times with early goody huts on the map. |-)

Best regards,
Steven.