I think I got an idea on how to do it. I will try whipping something up following your model and see how it works out.
A gourmet proposal: Making pop produce food
- Thread starter ohmka
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Sneak Peak, but I'll mention the rest in a future mod thread. Just think it's interesting how easy it was to make this mechanic with pretty much no scripting knowledge.
I would suggest to introduce cities not producing food at all.
Can you include a check whether a pop is in a city and if it is true, set food produced by that pop to 0? It would not make sense to produce food by pops in cities.
Can you include a check whether a pop is in a city and if it is true, set food produced by that pop to 0? It would not make sense to produce food by pops in cities.
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While it shouldn't be difficult to do, I'm not sure it's the best idea.
Right now cities are full of citizen with very few slaves, so they wouldn't produce much food.
And more generally, I don't think we should see cities as fully urbanized areas.
It doesn't make sense in a historical point of view, or even on a geographic level (the territory corresponding to a big city in Imperator is rarely fully urbanized even nowadays).
Personally I think more in terms of POPs: citizens correspond to people living in urbanized areas (cities) and thus produce no food, while freemen are mainly farmers. Slaves are a bit of a mix of both.
That would be a bit inconsistent with how pop fractions work and how cities have far more freemen in them than settlements. Hence, I see it differently:
A citizen pop status, to me, is less tied to being an inhabitant of an urbanized area, but more so to owning at least some property and having a certain degree of financial ability. This can vary between being a rich owner of a slave estate in the countryside, and simply having enough money to live on an adequate standard. In other words, I think of "citizens" as a sort-of combined term for "upper and middle classes" of people in antiquity.
Freemen, on the other hand, can indeed be farmers, but they can also be people that live in a city, but simply lack a proper living standard and/or social status to be considered a citizen, ranging from impoverished to simply poor. However, they do retain their freedom, even if they don't have as many rights, and will typically have some sort of a job to live off of.
Tribesmen are wild savages non-adapted to the glory of civilization /end
Slaves are people who are enslaved, without rights, and count as property, and they can be found in cities and settlements alike.. or, well, should, because in the former they mysteriously and quickly vanish over-time in current patch, and, in the latter, 70% of the population ends up enslaved, but lets not get into semantics
I think that, with this thread's system, pops in cities should produce half the normal food and, in metropolises, none at all, but in both cases they should have some additional, tangible benefit instead of food production, since they are not working in the farms, but they are doing something. Perhaps a bonus to their output as a temporary measure, but ideally something different.
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Sneak Peak, but I'll mention the rest in a future mod thread. Just think it's interesting how easy it was to make this mechanic with pretty much no scripting knowledge.
Looks good, looking forward to the mod... and I am of course hoping there will be something similar in the beta soon
That would be a bit inconsistent with how pop fractions work and how cities have far more freemen in them than settlements. Hence, I see it differently:
A citizen pop status, to me, is less tied to being an inhabitant of an urbanized area, but more so to owning at least some property and having a certain degree of financial ability. This can vary between being a rich owner of a slave estate in the countryside, and simply having enough money to live on an adequate standard. In other words, I think of "citizens" as a sort-of combined term for "upper and middle classes" of people in antiquity.
Freemen, on the other hand, can indeed be farmers, but they can also be people that live in a city, but simply lack a proper living standard and/or social status to be considered a citizen, ranging from impoverished to simply poor. However, they do retain their freedom, even if they don't have as many rights, and will typically have some sort of a job to live off of.
Tribesmen are wild savages non-adapted to the glory of civilization /end
Slaves are people who are enslaved, without rights, and count as property, and they can be found in cities and settlements alike.. or, well, should, because in the former they mysteriously and quickly vanish over-time in current patch, and, in the latter, 70% of the population ends up enslaved, but lets not get into semantics
Sure it's a just a question of interpretation.
You could also increase the freemen ratio in settlements to make for free farmers.
But your vision works fine for me too. In fact the devs themselves probably don't all share the same idea of the citizens/freemen entities.
This I like much.
50% food prod in cities. And maybe 0% or 25% in metropolises.
Something different would be freemen able to produce surplus. This was a big demand from part of the community, and would make sense in cities as that would be the area where freemen work outside of the fields.
Metropolises in the other hand are in a weird spot IMO. I don't know what unique bonus they could have that would justify their existence.
To add flat food - local_monthly_food = 1 (= 1 food)
Put it under output_modifier category, this will make it affected by % output increase and happyness.
To add a % modifier - local_monthly_food_modifier = 0.1 (= 10% modifier) though thats a whole different balancing act.
So right now you have every pop produce and consume, wouldn't it be easier to just have one variable per pop type that is the sum of those values.Sneak Peak, but I'll mention the rest in a future mod thread. Just think it's interesting how easy it was to make this mechanic with pretty much no scripting knowledge.
Which is the above would be
Citizen -2.12
Freeman +0.0 (i assume the .01 difference wasn't intended)
Slave +0.90
Tribesman +0.30
No because the food you produce should depend on the terrain/buildings/tech and all.
While the food you consume is always constant.
This way there are areas more favorable for food production than others, and so you have interest in developing these areas and putting slaves in them.
Or maybe you were just speaking about the UI, and I didn't get your remark?
It would yes but this is just using the set up as is outlined in the OP. Which has terrain and grain modify food production. That is the reason freeman have that .01 difference since their production is slightly modified. In a desert or shitty climate they would produce less than they consume. Same with Citizens getting a bit of their negative modifier lowered in Farmland with Grain (would be -2.5 per pop)
It could be a nice simplification however. I'll test that out.
Isn't terrain and climate already a factor?
Are we double dipping?
If you do still want to keep production and consumption independant then make sure not to change consumption by those factors. (Tribesmen is showing an odd consumption value though I am assuming this is just a presentation error)
I think simplifying that to one value would lead to weird side effects like bad terrain making pops not only produce but also consume less food. So its probably better if it is separated into a base food production value that scales with the output of the pop, and a flat, consumption value of each pop that doesn't. However, this can lead to very developed areas that have insane outputs, such one's capital megacity, producing insane amounts of food per pop (250% output isn't even hard to achieve), and that would be op. Hence I think that there should be a territory-wide +x% modifier to pop food consumption, otherwise infinite population cities are easily possible, as long as pop food production scales with output, which I think it should.
I also think that local climate should play a BIG part in food production, as a % modifier to it, since climate differences are one of the main reasons behind some regions having insane population density and others being largely empty. I'll illustrate with an example that is technically outside of Imperator's map scope, but just look at siberia. Its technically forest and plains, so under the current system food production there would be quite easy, yet climate actually made agriculture hard to the point where sedentary lifestyle didn't really take hold.
Overall, I think that, of the easy to implement changes:
1. There should be a modifier which increases local food consumption by all pops by a percentage, bigger the more pops are in the territory, effectively being a soft cap on a city's population.
2. Climate and Terrain should impact food production by a much higher % than they do now, especially the former.
3. Rivers, especially major ones, and the territory being coastal should both give a flat bonus to food production, because they can be used to fish some fish!
4. A single food trade good surplus should definitely produce more food as compared to the surplus food production of 15 slaves. However, slaves shouldn't even produce food imho, since they're preoccupied with other jobs, and they already can create trade goods, i.e produce food, in the first place, as long as they work a territory with a food good like grain, fish or livestock. So, again, slaves should have very small consumption needs compared to other pop types but not produce food on their own.
5. Local civilization value should increase local food consumption (by as much as 50% at 100). More "civilized" people tend to have higher expectations and life standards, i.e they should consume more food. This also gives a much needed disadvantage to being civilized as compared to staying a tribe.
6. Cities should logically have a malus to the territory's food production, since a significant part of it consists of urban infrastructure, and said malus should be much harsher for metropolises. However, I think that this would also reduce food production from imports due to food from trade goods being attributed to the province capital, i.e the most likely place to be a city or metropolis, so unless that can be resolved somehow, it probably shouldn't be changed this way.
Just giving some ideas which I think might work well to make food more of a constraint, but also less of a pain to manage than it is currently.
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Freemen not slaves should produce the most food, slaves was used more to produce stuff that made their oweners rich which was not necessarily food and that was a reason why Rome had to import food from Egypt.
Another possibility would be to have overpopulation decreasing food production, effectively mimicking a Maltusian trap. Cities and Metropolis get the same sort of malus as they have increased infrastructure (and pop cap) at a cost of decreasing the amount of farmlands.
Realistically I agree Climate and Terrain could/should have a higher impact, however it might be a false good idea gameplay-wise. If the bonus is too big, balance becomes complicated. Also as a player it's frustrating to have your empire dreams limited because you started in Ireland.
I think a huge part of slaves where employed in farms, so it make sense for them to be big food producers.
Also because there is no food good in a territory doesn't mean there is no agriculture. Just that farming is not the main activity.
The thing is, overpopulation causes pops to lose so much happiness that being even 10 pops over capacity is likely to bring their output to 0%, and they'll also all migrate away. So that's not really an option without reworking that first. Also, you can increase your pop capacity indefinitely with aqueducts, so while that could be implemented, it should never be the primary means of stopping cities from growing, again, without a significant overhaul of the systems in place.
On the contrary... I think that's completely fine? If different climate and terrain makes each region unique in a way, this adds to the game's replayability, as it means a nation in italy or greece will face a very different kind of challenge than one in armenia or on the tibetan plateau. If bad terrain and climate are constraints towards food, this means you can realistically have less pops per settlement or city in such an environment - and so you'll want to maximize the efficiency of each pop due to them being a very limited resource in the first place, much more so than in fertile farmlands and plains of the mediterrenean, and those kinds of challenges are exactly what makes for interesting gameplay.
For example, optimal city design would look completely different between those two places. When you can afford to have a high population, you will likely spam aqueducts to no end but if you can only have so many pops, aqueducts effectively become useless buildings, as you cant maintain such large populations anyway. Food being scarce also means that you're less likely to focus on research and commerce income, and hence on building libraries or marketplaces, since citizens consume much more food than freemen and produce none, and you need to squeeze as much of it as you can in the first place. If large concentrations of pops also make it harder to feed them, and if higher civilization standards make it even harder to feed those pops, then you end up with a tribal-ish society being an optimal choice, one whose population is relatively evenly scattered across many settlements, rather than concentrated in urban centres, and which has a heavy focus on manpower (freemen and tribesmen). That is not only the logical outcome of such a situation when one wants to make best of what they can get, but its also pretty historical at the same time.
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Overpopulation should be reworked anyway and based on a % over max pop and not on hard values above max pop.
Being 10 pop above max capacity shouldn't have the same impact for a 10 pop settlement (100% above) or a 100 pop megapolis (10% above).
Pop capacity can be increased thanks to aqueducts, but this is just +4 baseline so you need a good amount of bonus to get up to +10 so that it "pay for itself" (and these bonus are IMHO too numerous and large in the current build).
Also there an opportunity cost as you don't have any useful building then.
Finally cities and megalopolis should both have a baseline malus to food production, so that they will never end up being net food producers.
Therefore overpopulation should mainly impact food production in settlements.
Sure it's super interesting to have different game experience, but you have to make sure that it is still viable.
I mean that if starting north means that it is mandatory to expand south, then every game can look the same.
If the difference is in order of 20/30% I guess it's okay. But above would mean that the good land would end up being too good to pass on.
A bit like Trade Company being so good in EU4 that you end up going for them in almost every game, wherever you start (expect if you roleplay ofc).
A softer solution is to make terrain and weather having a decent impact on food production, but a bigger one on pop capacity (amount of good farmable land in a place).
So that playing tall would be difficult in some places, but wide populous empire would still be possible.
The fact is, some regions are just more suited towards being heartlands of empires, just better than others, and that shouldnt be artifically equalized. Noone is forcing a player to expand anywhere. If that is the most optimal strategy, fine, but there's more to the game than "the most optimal strategy". In singleplayer you can play however you want and bind yourself to whatever self-imposed rules you want, whereas in multiplayer there are multiple people so expanding without end is not a viable strategy, as some regions will be sought after by other players and you don't want to come in conflict with everyone. I do agree with you in the sense that all starts should be playable but they should not be equal or close to it. Balance should focus on making it so that nothing is broken, not that everything is nearly the same, with the only differences being spreadsheet ones.
I've had all of these ideas yes and I've been playing around with them. Here's my current implementation
1. For this I've done it by giving each pop an extra .005~ to consumption. Basically means big pop centers will run a larger deficit. Balancing needed.
2. I'm tweaking that a bit but nothing concrete. I actually made them a little less harsh, see point 5 for why.
3. They give a modifier right now, so does coastal, but I may switch it to a flat buff
4. I'm of the mind that slaves should produce food since making trade necessary is half the issue with the current system but I'll consider
5. Playing with Civ values but part of the issue is with the Civ system itself. Ideally, I'd like territories to have a lower Civ value and Cities and Metropolis to have a higher Civ value to represent infrastructure. That is not the case with the current system. Would need to change how Civ Value is calculated (flat mods or bonuses to province ranks likely). Also worry about there being too many malus to food being thrown around (those poor poor Somali republics get genocided in vanilla and it'd be worse if climate is harsher ;-; )
6. If Cities and Metropolis' are balanced to have a higher Civ value, they also will have a larger food production debuff so that will fit this well without a flat modifier.