I really like these ideas. Do you have any sense of how the AI will handle changes like these?

I was recently thinking of making some changes like this myself. How far did you get with this proposed mod? The part that is giving me trouble right now is affecting population without using Growth.

I felt that I should elaborate on my previous post further.

Creating a new resource is fairly easy.  I did this for another mod.  With that mod, the problem I ran into was assigning a time requirement along with the resource requirement, but the resource was accumulating/spending properly.

So you would assign an additional resource cost to each building, using the aforementioned resource.  Again fairly easy to do.

As an example, you'd have a 'Followers' variable.  This variable could be named global_population, really any name that floats your boat, as long as it doesn't match a current variable name.  I like the idea of 'Followers' as a variable name, as I don't believe I've encountered it elsewhere in the .xml, and it describes what the pool is quite nicely. 

The Sov would have a new starting trait, that adds x number of followers each turn to the Followers pool.  This bonus could be assigned to a 'generic' trait that all Sovs would have.  Said additional trait would be 'free' so you'd want to take it.  This only becomes an issue with custom Sovs, adding this variable to pre-built Sovs is easy.

Heroes would also have a (lesser) Follower pool bonus included in their stats.  As Heroes are pre-coded, it's easy to add this variable to them.

Buildings would require y number of followers to construct, in addition to other requirements.

Some buildings would add to the Followers pool as well.  Example: A Monument might add +5 Followers/turn to the pool.

Additional bonuses to the followers pool could be assigned via new traits selected as a Sov or Hero levels up.

Building code is handled in CoreImprovements.xml

The trick to this here will be how to handle the current population model, and city hub growth.  I haven't looked at this in a bit, but essentially I was thinking to 1)nerf this in some fashion or 2)ignore it.  Looking at ElementalDefs.xml, I was thinking about zero-ing out these variables (population cost for units can be assigned elsewhere, so zeroing out the last one isn't a problem):

And then having buildings add to city population with a one time addition.  I.E. building a Monument might add a one time bonus of +5 to City Population, and requires 5 Followers to build.  As other functions are tied to city population (research, gildar, etc. production and such), the goal here is to eliminate the growth of these variables in the background, and tie them directly to the building of structures.

This could also bring about the return of housing structures (a la E:WOM), where you build houses to add population to cities, but if the other structures assign sufficient population, then this would not be an issue.  Fine tuning the amount of population each structure would add to a city would be an issue to consider of course, when embarking down this path.

Hubs are tied to total population, and are triggered when a city population reaches various thresholds.  With structures adding to city population as they are built, this will get you to/past those thresholds.

I never did get around to trying this out though.

One other note:

I was thinking of adding Follower bonuses as part of quests.  I.E. you complete a quest, you gain a few followers (one time bonus).  Or a scroll that details your exploits and completion of the quest, that gives you a bonus to followers each turn.  As the story spreads far and wide, more hear of your exploits, are impressed, and flock to your banner.

Hope this helps!

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I think "Population" is a bit magical. I can add any other resource I choose through either

Or

but the moment the Output resource is Population I get no results. What I also thought was interesting, was that when I tried a negative population cost to pioneers, adding pioneers to the queue did nothing, but canceling them from the queue actually reduced my population.

No luck that way either.

I am considering a convoluted method:

1. Rename Food resource display to be "Jobs"
2. Create a new resource food2 to be displayed as "Food"
3. Change cityresourceeffectsdef so my new resource Food2 is created from grains and the original food resource now named "jobs" is not
4. Add +10 Growth to all cityhubs
5. Change improvements to subtract x food2, subtract x "available followers" and add x "jobs"

Expected results: This would make population capped by the number of jobs, which are provided by improvements. Improvements are capped by both grains & the pool of available followers. The Dead faction would still be tricky, it would ignore jobs but still need "available followers" to build improvements. The enslave function would still work to govern their city growth in the same manner as vanilla. (Zombies don't need jobs to hang around a city?) Maybe they need another resouceeffectdef that turns their population into available followers? Slave lords other than Undead would basically be out of luck, maybe a different bonus from enslave could be figured out?

Thoughts?

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OK, so looking through the core improvements.xml, I'm seeing a Prestige variable.  It is usually applied per turn, but I'm curious as to what would happen if you applied a one time Prestige bonus...

So, lose the Per Turn tag, or put 0, and raise the value to say 10.  Attach it to a structure, build it, and see what happens...

I'm guessing here, of course... there's gotta be a way!

OK, before you go that far, I should mention that I spent some time last night trying some things out.

Playing around with the Prestige variable, when I tried to set it to a single fire (per turn 0 or per turn line deleted), the modifier was NOT applied at all, as you inferred.

I tried adding a duration (1), game just ignored the duration variable.

I tried a few other variable conventions (city instead of resource, etc.), no dice.

This is why I get frustrated with the inner workings of Elemental.  Just enough is exposed in the .xml to allow a fair amount of things, but you don't have direct access to the underlying variables involved.  In this case, you and I are trying to add population directly to a city, one time.  But as we don't know the exact variable that is being 'counted' by the city, well we work though a go between that works a very specific way.  In this case, it seemingly only accepts 'per turn' values for Prestige.

I took some time to look through previous iterations of Elemental (EWOM 1.0, 1.4, EFE, and of course ELH 1.4), and while I did find the old 'population container' variable that housing used, I didn't see any more direct references to population adders, specifically one time additions to pop counts.  There is an ability alluded to that changes the starting size of a city, but what that 'pick' (guessing it was a Sov/Race design thingie) does exactly in coding terms I was unable to find.

Soooo, back to the issue at hand.  I'll try a few other things, and maybe some other modders will find the magical variable that is needed to add (say) 5 population to a city one time.  But as you mentioned, a workaround may be in order.

Something to consider.  You could take most of the abilities OUT of city hubs and put them in other buildings, then set the threshold for a level 5 city at say 5 population, hence nerfing that mechanic entirely.  Then you would 'build/upgrade' city hubs through building, not through an auto picker.  This would remove some functionality, but might open up some other doors.

The reason you would do this would be to move population into the background, and move Followers to the forefront.  Since buildings would require Followers to build, you are still (mostly) accomplishing the goal here.

Not an ideal solution though.  I'd still like to find a way to add population one time.  I'm thinking that since (calc) is used in a few places outside of spells, there may be a possibility to get it to work here.  Not optimistic though.

I have limited patience for this, which is why I get frustrated somewhat easily when facing such issues.  Some other games are more transparent in this regard (no/little modding ability, or here's all the variables you'll need). Hopefully you will have the fortitude involved to find a solution.

@tjashen It's a relief to know that it's the game being frustrating and not me missing something. I might experiment with city hubs to see what I could do. Any ideas on how the Dead should factor into this mod? It would be awesome if "Enslave" could affect the "followers" resource instead of population, but I don't know how that would work.

@Primal - A spell, or something you have to produce like the "Produce growth" option could work, but would be a pain to cast/build after each improvement. We would also have to make sure the AI casts it. I would rather err on my "convoluted" solution which requires less player maintenance.

This won't help here, but I just figured out EXACTLY how to do this... in E:WoM!

E:WoM had Population Storage, with some buildings boosting the max population of a city (housing and hubs mostly).  Essentially, you'd assign population container boosts to all other buildings, and lose the housing.  The city pop cap would then grow with each building added, and prestige could function as normal to boost the city size.  Unfortunately E:WoM is a dead game at this point.

WHICH brings up a crazy idea, which would go against everything the current food model stands for...

FoodPerGrain.  Currently, some structures such as docks add a food per grain bonus.

Sooo, you'd assign this GameModifier to all structures, with the thought that each time you added a new building, you'd be boosting the FoodPerGrain bonus, hence allowing more population to live in that city.  Say +1 Food per Grain for a Monument or whatever.

Then, you'd lower the initial food per grain bonus accordingly.  Or, you'd just boost the city hub thresholds (I'm not finding the initial foodpergrain variable in the .xml at the moment), say bumping the threshold for a Level 1 city from 50 to 80, with the thought that +10 Food per Grain (assuming 3 grain) would be provided by structures up to that point.  The downside to this is that cities with a LOT of grain will get a bigger bonus from buildings than cities with lesser grain resources.

Not quite what I had in mind, but it would work at least.

Let's join up with Porcipinee, she can provide us with lots of cookies!

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This makes me sad, because I'm pretty sure I tried that without luck, so I made a mistake, or may be going crazy. I'll go through with the plan to reset to vanilla install and just try that change.

In the mean time, I was slowly plugging through adding follower costs and citizen bonuses to all the improvements... there are quite a few of them I might say. The balance of which is going to be no easy task.

With respect to Primal's question about "AvailableSpecialists" I thought about that, but ended up using my own variable just in case there were some special rules to the existing one. My failures to mod population had made me weary. As a down the line goal, I would love to expand the system to include another tier or two of citizens like "Specialists" and "Master Tradesman". My thoughts are you could get them through schools or for certain structures. So a farm might not contribute to it but a smith or merchant house might add a fraction of a specialist. Then advanced houses would require specailists and add a fraction of a Master tradesman, though the balancing and implications of that have made my head swirl a bit. I like complex economic games, though I'm not sure I could implement much without destroying the AI.