Citizens appearance should be more randomised and names...

I agree with you that citizens need not appear every 10 turns. I would prefer a mechanic where you have to wait a fixed number of x turns after you get a citizen and from then on have a, say 50% chance every turn that a new citizen appears. The fixed number x could be something like 8 in the beginning, but decrease with increasing global population, something like -1 per triplication of the population, so you had to wait fixed 7 turns before the 50% probability kicks in for 3 pop, 6 turns for 9 pop, 5 turns for 27 pop and so on. So population increase would have a meaning again, at least in this respect.

All numbers would be subject to balancing and could also be influenced by race traits and techs.

I like the idea, that total population has an effect on the citizen appearance rate.

I think that the Citizen mechanics should be modifiable by things the player does. For example, if you increase research, you should get more Galactic Citizens that could start out as a level 2 or level 3 Researcher, but maybe a level 1 in other vocations.

Likewise for other areas:  More shipyards?  You should be seeing more Galactic Citizens come out of high school or vocational college with Engineering strengths.  More Research facilities?  Scientists.  More Stock Markets, Shipyards, AND production plants, plus a history of building a lot of colonies and starbases?  Then you'll see more of everything, including administrators, spies, and leaders.

Also, a larger population should INCREASE the the frequency of Galactic Citizens, not decrease.  Assuming that all other factors are equal, it should stand to reason that in a larger city, you simply have more of everything.  More schools and universities, more hospitals and research facilities, more pizza places, more taco stands.  The same should apply to a galactic civilization, yes?  Big civilizations should produce a greater number of "great people", even if part of that is because there are more people of all types.

Yes, NYC may have a lot of bad schools, but the closer I get to the city, the better the pizza gets.  Fact!  Oh, now I'm hungry...  

Limiting it (or the rate of occurrence) to population size makes sense. Good ideas, people.

The citizen rate is fine at a fixed rate of one every 10 turns.  If isn't broke, don't fix it.  We've already had enough bugs from unnecessary tweaks.

I`m asking to improve a mechanic, not fix it, there`s a difference.

So we must not suggest any improvements because of bugs?

I`ll take that under advisement... after I throw your views in the waste basket. Cheers.

LOL, now that made me laugh!

And yes, I still think other factors should um.. "factor in" on the frequency of Great Citizens.

I like the 1 citizen every 10 turns the way it is.  Citizens are a resource, and the player decision as to how and where to place them adds a lot to the game.  Basing their frequency on population, in my opinion, ruins the Tall vs Wide leveling.

Not to mention that there are techs which unlock specific citizen types (e.g., spies, legions*), as planetary projects, right now.

*legions are technically not a citizen, but being able to build them means that I do not HAVE to make a general.

As far as the citizen names go, the first time I tried to edit them from the Civ builder, it gave me a list of programs to use to edit the file, I chose Notepad, and added some names to the list.  The second time I hit the same button it threw me into Internet Explorer.  So something similar might have happened to you.

Anyway, go to My Games\GC3Crusade\Factions\FlavorText and find your CivName_stringofhex_CitizenNames.xml file and use a decent editor like Notepad++ to edit it.  Worked for me, I now have a lot of unique names.

Thankyou, Sir. That`s great.

Is there a file size limit?  I'm thinking of using my local white pages, heh!  

There's a section for last names, then another for male and female first names.  So the file would be a lot smaller than your white pages  

Can you explain a little more? I put in the names, but it`s not working. Am i suppose to make a new `<text> Name </text>` for example and a new one for each name? I have done this but it`s not showing up. How do you do it? can you paste an image of how yours looks? Also what does <PreferenceWeight> mean? What will changing the number from 1 do?

Ok, here's what mine looks like:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?>

<FlavorTextDefs
xmlns:xsi="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema-instance"
xsi:noNamespaceSchemaLocation="../../../Data/Schema/FlavorText.xsd">


  <!-- ** Citizens - Last Names ** -->
  <FlavorTextDef>
    <InternalName>LASTNAME</InternalName>
   
    <FlavorTextOption>
      <Requirements>
        <ListenerFaction>The Holy Crusade_6E3BE95263664BAFB0FFDD6E7A36AB48</ListenerFaction>
      </Requirements>
      <Text>Smith</Text>
      <Text>Jones</Text>
      <Text>Peers</Text>
      <Text>Reynolds</Text>
      <Text>Pinder</Text>
      <Text>Edwards</Text>
      <Text>Clarke</Text>
      <Text>Lloyd</Text>
      <Text>Sellars</Text>
      <Text>Saxon</Text>
      <Text>Hall</Text>
      <Text>Evans</Text>
      <Text>Green</Text>
      <Text>Underwood</Text>
      <Text>Cork</Text>
      <Text>Cooke</Text>
      <Text>Sharpe</Text>
      <PreferenceWeight>1</PreferenceWeight>
    </FlavorTextOption>
  </FlavorTextDef>

  <!-- ** First Name - Citizens ** -->
  <FlavorTextDef>
    <InternalName>FIRSTNAME</InternalName>

    <FlavorTextOption>
      <Requirements>
        <ListenerFaction>The Holy Crusade_6E3BE95263664BAFB0FFDD6E7A36AB48</ListenerFaction>
      </Requirements>
      <Text>Bob</Text>
      <Text>Joe</Text>
      <Text>Jim</Text>
      <Text>John</Text>
      <Text>Terry</Text>
      <Text>Steve</Text>
      <Text>Paul</Text>
      <Text>Leo</Text>
      <PreferenceWeight>1</PreferenceWeight>
    </FlavorTextOption>

    <FlavorTextOption>
      <Requirements>
        <ListenerFaction>The Holy Crusade_6E3BE95263664BAFB0FFDD6E7A36AB48</ListenerFaction>
        <GenderMale>false</GenderMale>
      </Requirements>
      <Text>Sarah</Text>
      <Text>Jane</Text>
      <Text>Rosie</Text>
      <Text>Holly</Text>
      <Text>Sara</Text>
      <Text>Danielle</Text>
      <Text>Sophie</Text>
      <Text>Alexa</Text>
      <Text>Lucy</Text>
      <Text>Melissa</Text>
      <Text>Rhian</Text>
      <Text>Katie</Text>
      <Text>India</Text>
      <Text>Laura</Text>
      <Text>Amy</Text>
      <Text>Kathy</Text>
      <Text>Susie</Text>
      <Text>Sophia</Text>
      <PreferenceWeight>1</PreferenceWeight>
    </FlavorTextOption>
   
  </FlavorTextDef>
 
</FlavorTextDefs>

I don't know what PreferenceWeight means.  Perhaps you can repeat it after each Text entry to weight how often each name appears.  I haven't tried it yet.

Edit: What the heck happened to the spoiler tags I put in?  Don't they work on these forums?

"And yes, I still think other factors should um.. "factor in" on the frequency of Great Citizen".

There already is a mechanic for building citizens if you want them more frequently.  The higher your production the faster they can be built.  And since production is based on all the other "factors",  they don't really need to be factored again IMO. 

The question of whether they are too hard to build is another question all to together.  You can probably mod the cost if you want more faster.

Quoting Moser_Alchemist, reply 15

"And yes, I still think other factors should um.. "factor in" on the frequency of Great Citizen".

There already is a mechanic for building citizens if you want them more frequently.  The higher your production the faster they can be built.  And since production is based on all the other "factors",  they don't really need to be factored again IMO. 

The question of whether they are too hard to build is another question all to together.  You can probably mod the cost if you want more faster.

To your highlighted statement above.:  Nobody said this in all of the threads I read on this topic.  I've been lead to believe that the frequency was fixed at 1 citizen per 10 weeks and my gameplay reflects that.  I have not observed what you say above.  I only have a problem with the 1:10 ratio because it does not fit at all with how real people in their real communities work. 

And yes to your observation about "being factored in again".  You see, when real communities produce the best of the best and they do it over the course of multiple generations, this too has a compounding factor.

Better, stronger communities with strong education systems and moral codes tend to produce a greater number of outstanding citizens, who then build better, stronger communities with strong education systems and moral codes.  Wash, rinse, repeat.  Excellence would rise until great people begin to die off faster than they are created.  Such a decline could happen for any number of reasons, such as War, disease, a broken education system, a broken code of laws, corruption in government or law enforcement, or any factor that might put downward pressure on excellence or cause a rapid depopulation event.

Interrupt any positive cycle, and the decline can happen just as quickly as the rise; sometimes in as short of a time as a single generation.  I can't say if the Iridia, Yor, or Altarian cultures would experience this in their societies, but if you look at the great rise and fall cycles of human civilization over history and you'll see that I'm right.  For humans, at least.

I guess since Crusades doesn't kill off its elderly "Great Citizens" (assuming I don't work 'em to death), then I guess it's balanced out.  Sort of.  Even so, I still have a problem with 1 every 10 turns being fixed with no other inputs deciding this.

Just to clarify: the reference to higher production making citizens faster to build applies to the planetary project that recruits a new citizen.  You still get a new one every 10 turns, but you can also build one through the planetary project or find a new one through a ship yard project.

Strange... I did that. I must`ve  missed something. I will go back over my text. Thanks again.

So it's a one-off deal.  That doesn't really apply to my points, but thanks anyway.

Just to add a point, not only is it a one-off deal to recruit a citizen, it is very deliberately very expensive.  Even a high production planet can spend quite a few turns building a single citizen.  You have to be pretty desperate for citizens or expecting to be idle on several planets for a long time before it is a practical or significant addition to the overall citizen accrual rate.  

Another point was made that seems to be getting lost.  The purpose of the steady rate of citizens was indeed to balance out some of the dynamics between Tall and Wide empires.  If you have few planets, settling citizens can make more sense than leaving them working for the government.  The way I look at it is once you get over 10 planets, it is better to have a citizen in the Government doing 3% than one planet getting 30%.  This is not a complete arithmetic comparison, but so far for me, a usable rule of thumb with room for exception cases.

All that said, I can see where really wide empires would want to have some sort of affect on the Citizen rate, and the desire to mod that in.  Good luck folk.  I do really wide myself, but have settled for using conquest to achieve it as well as a Colony rush.  Legions, Administrators., either way gets me planets.  :)  And using Legions lets me save my Administrators for Starbases!

Did you start a new game?  After I created my list of names I started a new game to try it out and they seemed to behave as I would have expected.  However, I then loaded an older save, where I was playing the same faction but had started the game before creating the list.  In that game I've now gotten 3 new citizens, but they all have the same name (interestingly, one from the list) and the same portrait.  So mixing the default names and the new names in the same game might be bugged.

Something strange is going on. I did start a new game and it worked better, but it became fixated on just a couple of names; it won`t touch anything else and starts going into number mode. Your thoughts on mixing the new and old might be right. I will experiement on removing all of the old.

So I figured this would be an easy first-attempt for me.  I'd love for some spoiled real-life people to come into my civilization so that I can put them on some God forsaken ice world someplace as workers, with no beaches or even skiing available.  Yeah, it's like that!    

Anyway, I followed the instructions above and within the FlavorText folder, I only see "This folder is empty".  Is there a magic trick I'm missing?

The very first time I hit the button to edit the citizen's names, I was able to get into Notepad and edit the file, and when I saved it that was where it put it.  What happens when you click on the "Edit Names XML" button?

wrong thread