"build multiple buildings in a given city as long as you have the resource (available citizens) to make use of it.  This encourages fewer cities and makes players choose between using their population for building their economy or putting them in arms. "

Wait, so help me if I'm seeing this wrong.  Improvements will be consuming people like weapons consume metal?  So, if I build a workshop the people in my city will disappear into thin air?

If buildings now eat food along with people, maybe we should have an improvement minor faction now that eats everything in site.  Attack of the hungry buildings!

Seriously, please tell me I'm wrong.  Otherwise this is a very, very bad idea.  Something like MoM's and Civ's worker system where you can allocate your population to different jobs is fine.  But buildings should not be eating people like food.

I build dozens of satallites. Every one has a caravan & road. Huge road networks, easy movement for large armies anywhere. I can build up satallites when I need to, town hall to get influence for example. End result is a game win, but not as much surplus food. Less food but more roads. I usually never have more than 4 surplus as I plop down new city/outposts. Especially with the lack of monsters, it's sooo easy to city spam & create road networks where I want with so many caravans in 1.08. I'm a micromanagar, so I like have many cities to begin with, although I don't think this was the designer's intent.

yay for peope focus, that's what strategy should be about. so long as resource doesn't mean what it does for materials and so forth.

if you have a system where income is generated as a proportion of population, and bigger settlements get a bigger %, then you really encourage building up a few, good cities instead of spamming loads to get the minimum bonuses they all give.

if you have a system where food is shared amongst your population, and that combines with other factors, like prestige, to determine growth, then you get a good balance of play: players end up building quite a few settlements, but leaving most of them without housing (ie, small farming communities or mining towns) to supply resources to one or two big cities (because the population is worth more there, where there are better taxing facilities and unique wonders), instead of spamming honogenous settlements. ie, you get economies of scale.

that way war begins with small skirmishes to control resources on the outskirts and ends with a final push on a big city that remains quite competetive until the end, so factions can hang in there for longer, and the final epic battle comes at the end not the beginning.

elemental was supposed to be about bringing a dying world to life. if population growth is determined primarily by food production, and income determined by settlement level and population, then the one who manages to do that gains the advantage they were always supposed to.

Now that is more like it. This would also give us the ability to more specilize our cities. 

Would it be possable to turn up the danger level and reward level of the wondering monsters. They have been nerfed down too much. Or at least allow an option in the game that will enable up to turn us the heat so to speak of the Independant monster units/heros

For those worried about the buildings "eats" up people, he's not talking about using people as a local resource in that manner, basically think of city tiles instead of gold. The city still has x amount of people, but a certain amount is "used" when a building is constructed. If there aren't anymore "tiles" then you can't build more buildings. The only difference is that the tiles here grows over time (since they are people). It's a fine concept, but like I said in my earlier post, they need to relook at their prestige mechanic as if they just add this in without changing several facet of the problem, it will backfire.

... Is it so hard to believe that if a building is already using people, say 199/200 you won't be able to build anything that use more than 1 people? It's really not that hard to do.

Edit to reply to edit: Think of people as local food. You make x food, but are using x amount. What you can build depends on the amount EXTRA you have.

Okay, I think I follow.  So, for example, if my city population displayed (working)286/300(total) then I could either spend 14 people as units or 14 people on a building.  Demolishing a building would then change the population to 265/300 allowing me to recruit 35 soldiers or build something else with it.  That would be cool.

My original confusion came because I was thinking of resources as in metal/materials/gold, not as food resources which work fundamentally different.

This really deserves a journal entry on its own but...

10,000 years ago, humans were mostly hunter/gatherers.

Agriculture changed that. With surplus food came larger populations which could support specialists.  Specialists were people who could defend the village from barbarians, the priest who could help the city get along with "the gods", the people who made pottery, jewelry, metal works, as well as the people who could sell them.  

Currency allowed people to trade more easily as well as provided a way for the village elders to "tax" the people.

In Elemental, the only resource available to me that doesn't "store" is food. That's why I made merchants use food because I could have it reserve one of your food resources.

In v1.09, we will have specialists instead. So a merchant will use up a specialist slot. The number of specialist slots a Kingdom/Empire gets is the total population /10 (the idea is that 10% of the population are specialists of various kinds though historically it's a bit less than that but this is a game not a historical simulator <g>). 

So your village with 80 people will provide your Kingdom with 8 specialist slots. A merchant would use 1 slot. A Study would use another slot. You could build multiple such buildings as long as you have available specialist slots available.  Similarly, a military unit would use a slot (not 1 per soldier but rather 1 per unit giving the advantage to those kingdoms that can field larger groups AND get us back towards a more epic feel because if a unit costs a specialist slot, the base training time of training ONE unit can be lowered and thus allow training of much larger groups to be much quicker getting players back to fielding much larger armies).

This is hardly an original idea of course. Sins of a Solar Empire has a supply level, GalCiv II has logistics (and incidentally, we do plan to introduce more logistics into Elemental to deal with singular super armies).

To the argument "You shouldn't limit the # of workshops by population" I say this: In the real world, and this is a pretty well known fact, that only a tiny % of people are capable of being a specialist. It's actually less than 10%.  Most of us aren't specialists. If it were easy to start up a workshop or run a market or be in charge of a university then what's stopping people from going out and doing that? The answer is that most of us can't do it, only a small % of the population is capable of doing it.

Most of us in the real world are drones.

Now, if you'll excuse me, I am going to go stare at the wall for a bit while drooling.

Yeah, this sounds pretty awesome, and makes way more sense than what we've got now.  I just wonder how exactly this will translate into the interface.  Will I see my total population with something to indicate how many specialist slots are being used next to it?

But, as stated before, 'balanced' is not ultimate goal by itself. FUN is.

As long as factions are balanced, its all good.

I totally dislike this 'nerf everything' mentality most game designers have. Organized was too good? Add some other worthy traits and its all settled.

Game is too shallow as it was already, and removing good stuff makes it even more shallow and boring. You talk about strategic choice, but as of 1.08, there is none. You see, people are already screaming to nerf royal, and once that is 'fixed' same way as organized was, sov creation will not matter at all. There will be simply no choice.

Why not simply bump other traits to same power level, and make you actually be able to choose? I like god creation from Dominions series and MoM muuuuch more, there are no useless stats, you usually want to have everything and have to actually sacrifice something.

I think thats a nice idea.

First of all, this isn't how the specialist slot Brad is talking about works though. It's like making pioneer cost food to maintain. It doesn't work. Both resources are non-perishable. A pioneer maybe using up 10 specialist slot while he's active (as maintenance), but as soon as he settles or gets killed, the resource is returned (like you scrapping a house). The only way to make this work is to actually have pioneers use real population. Because specialist is a derivative of real population, if you use up, say 100 people in your city, then you effectively use up that 10 specialist.

That leads to a bigger problem, now you run into the situation where you literally can't expand for the first 50-100 or so turns (it takes 100 turns to get 100 people without any prestige bonus). This means empires without royalty bonus are completely screwed. Bad start? screwed. Etc. Not to mention the implications of what taking out 50-100 people in a city would do once you get that much.

Even if you were able to get pioneers to somehow actually consume specialist slots without consuming real people, all it does is mimic the imbue system we have now. You spend x specialist to make a pioneer, who will then be able to generate specialist when he settles at a outpost. You still can't require 5-10 specialist thing, because you'll be looking at the can't expand problem all over again.