Food isn't global. It's a per/town basis. But ! Caravans add a percentage of every town connected.

For instance you have two town A and B. Town A has 10 food, town B has 20 food. If a road exist between them, then town A get 10 food + 10% from food of town B (2) = 12 total food. Town B gets 20 + 10%  from town 1 (1) = 21. So roads are really important, and caravans delivers gold each time they arrive in a town.

That is actually lame... If B delivers 2 food to A and A 1 food to B, should it not be so that A ends up with 11 food and B with 19? As it is now there seems to be food created out of thin air because there is some trading network. Having food counted like I suggest - where food exported from a town is substracted from the food available in that town - does the job of drawing the food available in all towns more towards the average.

Then again the ability of a town to grow can of course be thought of as a funtion of the 'food available'. In that way, importing food from another town may add to the diversity of the food available, so in the end the quality of food will be better that it was before the distribution. This redistribution therefore accomplished better overall health. This led to the effect increasing population, and since the devs chose to quantify growth as a function of the food available, in order to reflect the better health they decided to substitute everything that affects the quality of food as if there was more food available in total, even though it may not 'actually' work like that.

I hope these comments made sense to other people as well.

That is actually lame... If B delivers 2 food to A and A 1 food to B, should it not be so that A ends up with 11 food and B with 19? As it is now there seems to be food created out of thin air because there is some trading network...

Thing is, trade often had an effect like this IRL. Food didn't obviusly just "appear" but trade made farming more profitable, allowing farmers to expand thier production. Trade should be made extremely valuable, and while I don't know if this is necessarily in, it would help alot with the "Each city is a self sufficient nation in all but name" aspect that haunts these games. New York City couldn't exist without the vast suburbia surrounding it, the many food producing states out west, and a developed trade network.

If food only represent pop growth, then trade should produce massive amounts of "food" for everyone involved.

I think that Food should be a global resource. All other resources are fine as currently implemented, but Food as a global resource could really accomplish something here. Food should be something worth fighting over, and although you can research farming techs to get more efficient farming, or can farm in more places, ALL levels of city should have access to these new types of farms, and There really should not be enough food to go around.

You can have a level 1 settlement with 3 or 4 advanced farms being part of a cluster of 5-10 towns supporting a Size 5 city's food needs. The Size 5 city shouldn't even actually need to build farms of its own, just have enough housing and enough pretige, and those farming communities should automatically ship there food there.

*However the food is only counted globally if its part of your trade network, if its Isolated, that food simply does not exist. As long as the food is there, caravans don't really *matter* as Prestige is what controls food distribution. The city with the highest prestige level determines where the center of your trade network is (your capital, if u will). It will always be the largest city as long as there is enough Housing.

I was paying attention during the 20 page discussion on economic models and on what they decided to implement. If that makes me an expert, then yes.

There is nothing in the game right now where you say "food from town X should be sent to town Y and forwarded to Z, but not to Q." That was one model, and it was rejected because they don't think it'd be fun for a majority of players (ie: everybody that isn't us).

If you need food somewhere, it goes there. Building houses grows the population and means you need more food there.

In fact it isn't so stupid, and it work fairly well. You don't have to micromanage things that doesn't really need to. Food isn't really created from thin air, it's just a representation of how many food is available for population. Roads (and their caravans) just give more food available, it doesn't say that you have "more" food overall. And anyway it's just a way to conceptualize (does this word exists ?) things. Gameplay is always better than realism.

MoM worked like that. And devs already said that they don't like how it worked in MoM.

Every games has something that limits a player somehow. Doesn't reflexively make it a bad thing. Many games use resources which are limited. In this case, food, or healed fertile land, becomes a limited resource for city building. I see it as a good way to add conflict in the game, plus limit city spam.

But there is a reason why the Sahara desert is sparely populated, but right next door in Egypt you have find one of the highest populattion densities in the world. The reason-> lots of food.

The answer to Boogies opening post is obvious: Just make cities basically work like they worked in reality in ancient times!

The first thing I asked myself after I've read Boogies's opening post was how have cities in ancient times been formed and how have they functioned. In most cases it worked like that: First small settlements formed in places where there were plenty of resources. As word spread about the rich resources more and more people gathered and eventually these small settlements grew together and formed a city. However, if these resources ever started to dry out people moved away from the city as fast as they came to it. Other cities formed at important junctions or rivers and harbors. In these cases the resources are the streets or an ocean for means of transportation. However in principle these cities lived by the same rules as the other cities. If a harbor ever tried out, cities moved or even vanished.

The above shows that the most important aspect of any city and the size of that city in ancient times was closely tied to the nearby available resources. No resources, no city. The more resources the bigger the cities became and vice versa. Therefore cities naturally were important strategical places because they were almost always tied to rich resources.

If you think about this it becomes obvious how to limit the spread of cities and to decide how cities should grow and how far they can grow. Just make the cities development depend on the resources available in their nearby vicinity. Therefore, just keep it simple and make it like it works in almost any natural communities dominated by humans. This way you also make sure that almost every player can by instinct understand how cities work in the game.

Have Fun

Xiskio

Well now Im confused, since Tridus makes it sound like it works completely different. I am not in beta, so I can only go off what you guys in beta tell us.

But regardless, I proposed something new for food distrubution, since we are suggesting something new with food footprint model for cities. Since cities will now require a large footprint to sustain itself, we want a way for farm towns to directly feed these large cities. Smaller towns will have a footprint radius much larger than what they'll need to sustain themselves, leaving excess food that can be exported. As cities get larger those footprint becomes more and more contricting, requiring them to import in order to sustain a postive population growth.

As for population growth, what should factor into it? imo, food should the main factors for population growth (but not the only). Its hard to argue this. A mother needs excess food in order to feed her child. If there isn't any food for the baby, the baby dies. No baby, no population growth. Another factor is housing. If there isn't a house availabe, there is no where to live, so you can't live there ...right?..not quite. If the powers that be don't build adequte housing, poor people can always build shanty towns. Imagine shanty houses popping up in inconvinent places, preventing further contruction and lowering prestige (Think Tropico). The player can then build houses to accomdate them, or maybe have the option to erradicate them (lowering or highering you prestige depending on your faction). Which is why I don't like simply using housing as the main switch for population growth. Population growth should (and does) happen regardless of offical housing. Though offical housing could increase population growth substationally, plus add prestige. Speaking of which, another factor I like is city prestige, low prestige means no one wants to live there, which means popultion growth is going to be much lower than what it would normally be. Additioally, there could be many other minor factors that could modify population growth.

So how does the food get to the cities? I guess its all a matter of how fun, dumb down, complicated, simple, or sophisticated the devs want it to be. Since I don't think housing should be the only factor determinig if a city's population should increase, it doesn't make sense to make it the marker determinig if a city will import food. There could many times that you want food sent to a city whithout wanting to build more houses to get it. Maybe you actually want shanty towns. That way you have reserve of cheap bodies to recruit for armies, or for bodies to sacrifice to the gods (if your faction is so inclined). Maybe you want the food sent somewhere safe for later use on a rainy day (which many civilizations did). To put it bluntly, it simplies the system too much in a bad way... by restricting what you can do with the game.

I have already posted how I think food distribution should work, so I won't repost it here. I'll just say its simply a matter of clicking on options in your settlements to 'import/export/sell to local markets/store' excess food. I linked a picture to viusalize how simple it is. Its just a matter of going in and setting a couple options per city. Once you've done that the caravans autuamatically send food in the paths you have chosen. If a player feels this is too complicated and "unfun" then they need to quesion why they even play TBS games.

*This shows an entire kingdom with 2 cities and 5 villages/town, which is reasonable. Distance is not to scale. Black lines are roads. Red arrows indicate direection of of food. Importing has 3 levels priority.

Fresh water should also be a major factor in growth because water is pretty much needed for anything to grow naturally. Settling near water has always been one of the major strategies in settling, and even to this day coastal regions or regions near rivers are more densely populated than dry inland regions.

A few thoughts here:

The most blindingly obvious solution to me is to require essence to found all cities, not just cities on barren land.  It's quite simple to understand, and would limit city spam quite effectively tghanks ot the hard limit from essence.  The cost on rejuvenated land might be less than barren land, and would need balancing, but would still be there.  As others have said, the other uses for essence also come into play here.

I really, realyl like the idea of having resource buildings buildable away from cities, and am somewhat surprised this wasn't the original plan.

The problem with "essence-costing each time, even on revived land" is that it doesn't make sense at all. If you have revived the land, and have enough people to found a new city, why couldn't you do it ?

Or another idea : why not an infinite tech "New city". You have a limited number of available cities. You want one more ? Research the tech. It would simulate the fact that new cities aren't built just because a leader want it, but beacause some people need to find new place to live. The civilization breakthrough woud mean you tried hard to push your citizens to expand through a new town.

Or you can have a city per 2 or 3 level in civilization. It's limited, but you can still get a new one if you want. No hard limit.

"Oh wise men, please tell us where to live next!"

'Yes, we will tell you, come back in a little bit."

"Wise men, have you found the answer yet?"

"Not quite yet, in a bit."

"Now?"

"NOT YET!"

*years later*

"Come my friends. We can found a new city... Right over there, near the other end of the giant lake."

"Oh wisest of men, you are indeed the grandest of all."

That could be the case with a nation that focus on magic :

"Oh wise men where should we go next ?"

"Dunno. I'm working on a new way to blast things."

"Oh. We'll be eating cookies while you think hard, wise-one"

Having pop controlled by one thing would be best. Having multiple factors is just too complex for too little benefit. If we want water to have a big impact, just set it so that areas near water grow a lot more food.

@ Outlaw, setting the import/export levels of food would be nice, although I don't think we are even having an economic system with that option. Its simply a hard Resource-Availability-Per-Turn from each networked source. This is why the Concurrent "Global Food/Pop Cap" idea is probably the most elegant and fits into the current system with the least amount of fuss.

We have been told by the dev team that the mechanics of the game can be changed fairly easily (as opposed to the Engine). Changing the way food operates (by taking it out of the economics/trading game and tying it directly into Prestige and Population) would, in my opinion, add ALOT to the game, especially in terms of having special, prized cities, and reducing city spam .... as well as having a more natural growth of only a few Prestigious centers of trade and many more outlying villages and hamlets.

Less homogenous, symettric, boring, and more interesting and Fun.

There was an interesting book called "The Warded Man" in which demons came out every night.  There were economies of scale in warding buildings and ground (i.e., wards have to be maintained and there are a limited number of people with the skills to do so), hence you tended to have large cities and small outposts by critical resources.  Same basic theory - there's some limited resource needed for towns and there are significant economies of scale in its use.

Far as I know, that is how food works. Other resources are supposed to work the way vieux described, but I haven't seen it with food. Settlements without their own food don't seem to get a percentage of food, I can grow them to city with no problem (so maybe its 100%).

Could be that food in general just isn't fully implemented in that beta or something, I dunno. I do know that per town setting import/export is a lot like the economic system they already said they aren't doing, so it's pretty unlikely.

I'd prefer food production and the various food resources weren't directly tied together.

If fertile ground is the only source of food, it's a highly unrealistic method, and takes away a lot of diversity in tactics when it comes to depriving production.  I'd much prefer various terrain types were contributors, and the fertile ground locations were simply high growth land.  You can grow food just about anywhere, you just can't grow it well.

I'd like farming and foraging in the nearby terrain to be something a portion of the peasants in the city do, automatically planting and harvesting fields in outlying valleys and other logical places, hunting in the forests, etcetera.  If it's an automatic process of the villagers, I don't have the fuck with it.  The existence of those things gives me added concerns to protect, and added targets to attack.

Perhaps even communities could be started around a settlement that worked the lands next to them to supply the populace, all automated so we don't kill ourselves over micromanagement.

I realize that it would be difficult to explain backstory wise, but the backstory can be easily adjusted with some sort of hand waving or other explanation, or it could just be considered one of those cases where gameplay trumps story.  The essence solution has quite a lot of gameplay advantages over the other solutions people have proposed, and that is enough to recommend that particular solution.

As for a story explanation, perhaps the corruption still seeps into the air, water, etc. and needs to be filtered.  Perhaps it's a tradition of suprerstition that cities have to have some sort of magical stone or ward to represent them.  I'm sure someone could come up with other story explanations for this mechanic if needed.

Should a city never flip back to the original empire (other than recapture)?

If there should be a chance, what would trigger said chance?

Water is ultimately the most important factor, in itself and also as it's necessary for farming.  However hard transporting food is, transporting sufficient water (other than canals/etc.) is harder.  Thus settling near water is more important than settling near food -- especially in a young empire where food distribution systems are lacking or poorly developed --  so water availability should be a more important factor in city siting.  I'd like to see water being necessary for city placement (magical sources are ok).

I disagree that having 2 factors (water and food) is too complex, but if it's decreed to be so, as food is a function of water (as Cerevox points out), I'd put water as pre-eminent.

I think the city flipping is not that bad an idea, given the fact that the peasants were loyal to whomever happened to be lord. It is not like the peasants get to decide what side they would join. If the law says that the uncle of the late governor becomes the new governor and the new governor answers to a different king, then that is who the town belongs to. It sounds natural and logical to me.

In real life there were countless conflicts over who owned what lands because several lords may claim the very same land. Now you can tell me that cities should not switch because that makes little sense and such, but in fact it dos make a whole lot of sense.

The problem with this is that it would encourage a very small number of super cities and not other settlements of any size. Simply because essence is so precious you would always want to get the most bang for your buck. A point of note is that the goal isn't just to eliminate city spam. The goal is to make an RPG-esque kingdom with few large cities and settlements of varying sizes as well as tiny outposts.