What should be the driving factor for non static resources that are produced per round? For instance City hubs create a static amount of resources to represent the amount of said resources a population will produce. This is someone inaccurate as others have pointed out that you can potentially have a level 5 city with next to a 0 population still producing the same numbers. What I am asking for is what should the following numbers be based upon for realities sake?
Taxes or more appropriately gildar generation -
This is a very complicated number as people make money based upon getting paid for the goods or services they supply. The average person will only supply X amount of gilder per person but a store multiplies this effect because each store services Y*X number of people. What I am saying is that I believe gildar generation should be based upon total population a city has including soldiers that belong to a city. Remember that a soldier is still paying taxes just like everyone else. Things like gold mines should have a direct gildar generation as they are.
Production -
This is a hard one as it seems odd that we are using raw materials as our basis for production and not bodies. Typically people are what drive production not materials. You need materials to supply production. So it would seem that a production rating or resource in this game would be derived from a multiplier of how many available bodies, as in are actually within the city are able to produce goods and services per body. Things like workshops and mills should increase the multiplier effect of production per body since all they really do is make it easier for people to do their work per body. So if one person can do more the aggregate number increases giving a higher total production. This changes the production resource from being based upon materials to being based upon people. To deal with materials make them a single flat bonus to help initial settlement as after all you can only produce something when you have the materials. Say 5 production per material and .1 production per available person with staged increases of .01 for things like workshops. With a city of 600 you could potentially have a max multiplier of about .25 per person available so about 150 production which is similar to what you can already do. This helps to make population a more important resource.
Research -
This is also a hard one as research and development is a direct and indirect product of people. You can have labs that are focused of the best and the brightest but sometimes the greatest break through's come from the guy/gal in his/her back room of his/her house. This strikes me as hybrid resource similar to both taxes and production. There should be a static resource for the general population that is in city and then bonuses for certain buildings that are build like libraries and universities. The bonuses could start as a static increase of the base research per population then a % increase or stay the same as production and just be flat per person bonuses. That is a balance issues that would be ironed out with trial and error.
Unrest -
This is the main non static resource that I think I have the biggest issue with because of how it was implemented back in FE. I have not really figured out how to address it until now. Unrest is best described as those not satisfied with how things are. This generally occurred the farther away from a countries capital they were as well as in the larger cities. So in effect for the game distance from capital increases total unrest by X and unrest per citizen in the city increases it by Y. Small villages would not have much unrest except when the tax man came calling. So when taxes are raised beyond what is considered normal people got much more upset when they were lower they were happy. 0 Taxes should have 0 global unrest effect other than the effect of distance from the capital as well as the amount of people jammed together. There should be a linear scale of unrest from zero to low to normal then a exponential increase in unrest for everything above that as people really get angry when taxes are raised unduly. Now for distance from the capital unrest modifier the city hall improvement should cut this in half and a court system should cut this in half again leaving you with a fourth of the original value. The disconnected city zone of control for a gain of 15 unrest makes sense as well as the line of communication has been cut so less information to the city leaders is getting through which makes people nervous. Finally troops were always used for unrest reduction for the longest time and still today. I propose a unrest reduction in the city they are at to be 1% per troop. This in effect creates a way to pay for unrest reduction by hiring troops to quell rioting.
I think that is about all I can think of. Please critique or add as you see fit.