Please give it all the criticism it deserves

Don Weaver's (aka don Don) draft of an alternate / complementary model is here:
Proposed Clash Data Elements & Population Model
We'll have to pick between them quickly, or figure out some way to fuse them together to our advantage.

All the latest crop of models will be locked in soon (basically by 6/5 for sure), so speak up now if you see something you don't like. Remember to criticise them from the vantage of both playability and practicality to implement.

A special thanks to everyone who crashed to make the 5/30 deadline . I still owe a proposal on Diplomacy... Maybe tomorrow.

Hmmm, yes; unfortunately I work and live mostly at night. As I look over stuff I haven't looked at for a couple of weeks (this project is moving faster than I thought) I see that my ideas are more of a population dynamics model, which naturally includes economic elements. I am at this very moment putting it into a form suitable for being picked over for any useful bits and pieces.

Your piece is chock-full of good stuff. I've been looking at your proposal especially with respect to the water requirements you set out. I'm trying to figure out the right scaling between the water available, and the area of the land you're talking about in the "Water Resources and Movement Costs by Landform w/Terrain Modifiers" table. Specifically say we had a city of 50k people. That requires 100 water in your model. In the table a river only provides 8 water. Is there some multiplication factor I'm missing to get from the 10-ish number for a river up to a 50k pop. city? And what is the terrain area for the terrain that you have in mind? Also, supposing I want to build an aqueduct to get to 100k population. What are the requirements (higher by x amount or whatever) of the water source for the aqueduct?

Thanks,

I (think I) understand your ideas, and how they fit w/ Marks original proposal.

I forsee bitter land wars in early years over water rights... hmmmm.. that's about what happened if I remember...

For playability, I am concerned, however. This is *SO* much more complex a model than the civ-model... "good land, build farm, get food.. UGH!.. bad land, build mine, get minerals .. UGH!!"

Thanks for the feedback . In terms of simplification, what are you looking for? Or what do you percieve is tough? The reason I ask is that this model can be even Simpler for the Player than in Civ2. If you only play with the tax rate, things will go along and you'll have... "big war, more taxes, crush enemy, Ugh", "war over, lower taxes, build economy, Ugh." Its only if you want to fine-tune the other stuff that it becomes progressively harder.

I agree completely that the model is 100x more complex than in Civ, but the complexity really only confronts the player when the player wants it to. This complexity may be an issue anyway...

For what its worth, in Clash v0.05, I have the old econ system, which like the one we're considering, made for possible hands-off operation,. When I'm feeling warlike in that
proto-game, I can go on a merry conquest phase and never even Touch the economy. How much more Un-complicated from the player standpoint can you get? Of course I'm losing some advantage with respect to the case where I'd be finetuning everything. But the 20% loss in effectiveness is made up for by being able to play several hundred turns worth in an hour or so.

So what I am saying is expect people to try to control every single variable. The game should be complex enough so that better players have an advantage over others but it should be simple enough so that multiplayer works (since multiplayer is all that matters)

Not so in life, however, where you have to support the enormous cost of military operations and make your people unhappy caused you killed a bunch of their kids. AND you have to assimilate the new folks who wont be as useful as the prior citizens [Can anybody say "East Germany"].

We're going to have some of those features in Clash, so I think it's going to be *SIGNIFICANTLY* different than the "other games"...

------------
Mark,
I'm one of those who MicroManages as much as I can. But if it gets to the point that it's more fun to stay late at work instead of playing, 'cause the game is too complex, it'll just be shelf-ware....

We have to strike a balance, and as is usual for this design: if the AI is good, all will be well. R2D2 where are you when we need you!?

First, my compliments to Mark and Don. Your models are detailed and very high quality. You have raised the bar, gentlemen! With that, let the nit-picking...uhhh...constructive comments begin:

MarkE - "How the game model for infrastructure works":

Infant Mortality: The commentary links low ancient world life expectancy (@40 yrs) to "education shrinkage". And on the face of it, this appears to make sense. But isn't the average largely a factor of HIGH INFANT MORTALITY? Past the age of seven, most city dwellers could expect a lifespan which would carry them into their sixties. As for the "Short, nasty, brutish lives" of the country folk.....well, they're not big education consumers anyway! It's also true your shrinkage factor is very low (3%), so my entire argument is pretty close to a moot point.

Population Growth and Healthcare: Later in the section you note that improved healthcare will increase life spans, thus reducing the education decay rate. A corollary would be to greatly increase the population growth rate. All those children are now growing up to have families of their own.

Slave Labor: At the end of this section, it's noted that within a province "the people" will do most of the road building, while outside it the construction will be handled by "engineers". What about slave labor? Slaves were utilized extensively throughout the world until relatively recent times, as both production and agricultural labor. No economic model can be complete without the inclusion of this critical component.

MarkE - "Miscellaneous - Fisherman"

Overfishishing: As we are learning to our sorrow, the technology of fish extraction CAN lead to serious overharvesting problems. Should this be added to the model?

Don - "Population Unit Types by Occupational Class"

Clerical Class: I didn't see a "Religious" grouping in the table. It's quite likely that this class existed as far back as cave dwelling times (shaman), so it would seem appropriate to model them. There are corollaries with the "Official" class, so the easiest thing would be to group them there. But there are important differences too.

Don - "Water"

Bolsons/Acquifers: Not actually a section, but I wasn't sure where this observation belonged. Most of your discussion on water refers to surface or "ground water" type sources. In recent times (possibly earlier?), man has learned how to tap extremely large and deep sources of water. I'm very cognizant of this because the city in which I live (El Paso, Texas) draws most of it's water from the Hueco Bolson. This deep water source provides enough water to support a city of 600K plus another 1.5M across the border in Juarez, Mexico.(And probably another million across the desert southwest.)

SeaWater Distillation: Many of the large Persian Gulf cities now gather much of their drinking water from this technology. As you may recall, during the Gulf War the Iraqis poured vast amounts of oil into the gulf in an attempt to destroy these filtration plants.

The river/spring source is in addition to whatever the climate/terrain provides, and 8± is just a minimum to be worth including in the model. The table is a rule of thumb, and I assume that generating tropical and temperate rain forests or other unusual climates would be part of map generation. Any navigable river would be 2-4 times as big, and major rivers would be on the order of 100. I would imagine that continental watershed rivers (Mississippi, Amazon) could easily be many thousands.

I hadn't worked out the details, but I was originally thinking of a simple summation watershed runoff calculation in the initial map creation to get a rough size and distribution of rivers. Rivers are shown as "4W±" in Forest because forested areas have much lower runoff coefficient than unforested areas. Hills, plateaus, and mountains have higher runoff coefficients, so the available water is adjusted (but the runoff calc, if implemented, would use the raw figure). I didn't mention this because it may be too ambitious.

Kull: City population has to be pretty big before you'd have hundreds of religious officials/professionals that you might want to differentiate from the secular. The "Rivers/springs" adds to water available. Water control tech will enable tapping of deep aquifers (how to model that might be tricky).

Thanks for reviewing this, and the comments .

I can't believe I didn't explicitly mention population growth! Clearly this should depend on an overall health level. The overall health level would be derived from:

1) Food Level - Food consumption per capita (effect would increase rapidly for initial amounts beyond subsistence, and then get into a diminishing returns regieme).

2) Health/Water Infra Level - Effective Health/Water infra. I say effective because for a more densely populated area you'd need more H/W infra to reach the same health level.

3) Contraception and other forms of birth control when the people want them (probably determined by culture, education level, and per-capita income)

These factors won't be just added together, we'll have to come up with some simple function to do it, since great healthcare does little good if the people are starving.

Here is what could be a simple model for demographic growth :

datas :

- G = generation length (or age of reproduction). Varies with culture, education.
- Nr = natality rate (number of children in a generation, between age of reproduction and 50 years). Depends on culture, education, contraception availability. Fe for modern epoch, occidental civs it would smth like 2 over 1 generation of say 25/30 years.
- Db = death at birth rate in %. Depends on general heath, and particularly on hygien. Depends on the availability of food.
- L = life length; depends on health
- Wp = Women population. If no difference is made between sexes, half the total population.

Bg = number of birth in a generation
Bg = (Wp/2)*Nr*(1-Dr)

Ny = number of births in a year
Ny = Bg/G

Dy = number of deaths in a year
Dy = 1/L

Ay = Added population in a year
Ay = Ny - Dy (may be negative)

Tl = turn length in years
A = Added population in a turn.
Then A = Tl*Ay.
You can round this to heads, and carry the remainder from one turn to the other.

The computings are at the province level.

Diseases are handled through generating a number of death which are substracted from the population, so are famines. If no famine, but food is not enough for the new population, Db is raised accordingly. I think we should allow for moderate pop excess to eventually have effects such as health decreasing because general nutrition, hygien (water)... is available. Will also allow for dispersion of people in new settlements and migrations for econ. reasons.

IMO mobilized population is substracted from province pop until it returns (or not...). Track is kept of this mobilized pop to allow for war unhappiness or eventually proudness, and other stuff like that. So in case of war death people simply dont return to the province. In case of civilian death (if the war wages in this province) this is handled like for disease or famine.

One point about the slaves : IMO they have had important economic roles in the history, for their labour, but also for the trade they generated.

By grab new land I didn't mean from other people, I just meant land lying around on the ground (I guess all land is just lying around on the ground because it is the ground but you know what I mean). For example if I wanted to double my farm production I go get some new land and make some more farms or I could force more production out of my current land. I am not referring to taking land that people are trying to keep from you. That should be handled by combat.

The reason for this is to force conflict. Conflict is what seperates games from entertainment (the sign of a decadent society). Which is more gamelike: two players struggling for availible land (not necessarily military conflict) or two players sitting at home digging irrigation ditches? CLearly the first is because it involves player vs player conflict (essential to the definition of a game). It is true that some people will run the program for entertainment purposes and that these people are over represented here however many others want to play a game as a game, a chance to make others lose.

Also remember that if realism and fun are found together it is pure coincidence. If realism was all that great I'd go outside and give it a try. Saying that Clash is different isn't a good reason. If Clash is different is is almost certainly either better or worse than other games. If Clash is better in this particular way then why haven't other game makers caught on? I am not saying that this or that particular idea is better or worse than the stardard but that different often (but not necessarily) means worse. In order to "prove" (the value of any particular game concept varies from game to game of course) that a concept is better you should be able to express why. Good game mechanics do one or more of the following: increase conflict, favor the better player but make the game as close as the skill levels are (example: a great Clash player should win most of the battles but the other guy should win some too), teach the player how to be better at the game, are simple but lead to complex interactions, etc..

My judgement at this point is to stay fundamentally within the model I've proposed for the Econ system. I definitely will add some effects of water availability as included in don Don's model.

In my estimation, putting his and my model together would result in a model that is way too complicated. The models are not Seriously incompatible, although it would take a fair amount of work to merge them. Don's model would treat the demographics and trade within the province in a more detailed fashion than mine. However, intra-provincial trade is already Very innacurately treated to improve gameplay. This is so that we can have decent sized provinces. Clash provinces are much too big for Real economic units in ancient medieval times. Given the fact that a decent model of the world is already badly broken Inside the provinces, its my feeling that adding a Lot of complexity to the system just to improve something else in the general area isn't worth it. Some others also found that model a bit too complicated, which certainly was weighed in my evaluation.

This is not a final decision... We will be closing off the high-level aspects of the models soon, but we could discuss it for few days yet. If anyone would like to cite particular areas of Don's model they think we should use, or contradict my assesment, this is your chance. I firmly believe that open discussion and concensus is the way to go about this.

Don's model has a lot of very useful information in it that I'm currently looking into ways to use... I'd like to thank Don for writing up his model. He's the only one that put forth his own model to demonstrate what Specifically he thought was wrong with mine. I will definitely use his water-availability information in some way. Probably availability of water locally will modify the cost of health/water infrastructure. This will mean that 'dry' areas will have to invest more for cities to grow to a large size.

1. Production functions for each province.
A production function is something of the form
CC = K1*(R1^a)*(R2^b)*(R3^c)
Where CC = the total output of the province measured in Clash Cash
R1, R2, R3 are productive inputs
a, b, and c are exponents (want a+b+c<1 so the economy has diminishing returns.)
and K1 is a scale factor.
There are a couple of nice features about production functions of this form. First, a player that has an abundance of one input can, to some degree, substitute for an input he lacks. This is a feature that is largely missing in Civ. Second, the impact of all the technology, productivity, and growth issues can be handled rather simply by this one function. Examples include
A. Impact of technological change:
Technological change can be either factor favoring or factor neutral. A change that would be factor favoring, such as the discovery of an improved mining technique, would increase the coefficient of the factor it favors. A change that is factor neutral (literacy might be an example) would increase all coefficients equally, or, equivalently, increase K1.
Historically, the sum of exponents is pretty low in early years, and increases until the sum of the exponents is close to 1.0 in the modern era.
B. Increased productivity is usually modeled by increasing K1.
C. Economic Growth:
All you need to model economic growth is one or more input that can be stored at a savings rate S (set by the player), and applied to next year's production.

2. A government sector that collects taxes at a rate T (set by the player).

3. A utility function for each province. This helps determine the happiness of the various provinces. The utility function can have a form similar to the production function:
U = K2*(((1-T)*CC/P)^d)*(x^e)*(y^f)*(z^g)
Where P is population and x, y, and z are other factors you might care about such as pollution. You could even make one factor privately provided capital and another factor government provided capital, so that what the government takes away in taxes is given back, but not completely, in public infrastructure. If believe that private investment is more productive than public investment, then make the coefficient on private infrastructure larger than that on public infrastructure. Again, you want d+e+f+g<1. Exponents and the scale factor can reflect various technologies in a manner similar to the production function. For example, the discovery of medicine might increase K2. Note that happiness depends on per capita income. Only (1-T) of total income is available to the populace after taxes, thus decreasing happiness.

4. A simple trading sector.
The necessary condition for trade to be profitable is
PD > PO + C*D
Where PD = price of traded good at destination
PO = price of good at origin
C = transport cost per unit distance
D = distance.
Trade becomes more or less profitable (or not profitable at all) as origin and destination prices change.
Trade also becomes more profitable (or even becomes possible) as transportation costs fall. One effect of technology would be to lower transportation costs (eg., navigation, railroad) making trade either possible or more profitable.

Sorry for the long post. I hope these comments will be of use.

"As an advice giving profession we are in way over our heads"
-Robert Lucas Jr., Nobel Prize-wining economist.

[This message has been edited by Adam Smith (edited June 07, 1999).]

Please, please, please don't rely on the 1% hardcore gamers who indulge in number orgies - think of the majority who like to understand what's happening by having a superficial glance. PLEASE don't make it too complex - a good game LOOKS like there is much complexity, but the player absolutely mustn't be confronted with it.

Thanks for the ideas. I had considered using a production function approach way back when, but I thought it would be a little too abstract. Diminishing returns should come out in the model anyway, but just because of limited sites for production. I'd though of making the diminishing returns aspect stronger than that, but again IMO it was getting too complicated. We will definately have Taxation and trade big time

I do plan on using a utility function for food, goods, and services the people desire, as well as 'infrastructure' they want. This is a little different from the usual approach, but I think it'll work...

don Don: LOL

Dominique: I've put up a poll just to do some research on the numbers/no numbers thing. Lets see what they Really are

I guess this is where to ask about the Econ. Model data needs ? The Programming Team needs to know what data you're going to require to be stored for each city or province or area or whatever-it-is-called. I know ~you~ know what I'm talking about, but I'll reiterate for others, so we can continue to get input from all.

Specifically:
what item of data [name or number or etc.]
how big each item might be [length of text or maximum value of a number]

And, if you know, how often do you think you'll need it.
E.g.: "only when a population grows" or "every turn" or "once per game" or whatever.

Everyone expects this may change as we go down the path, but it will be a place to start.

Post it in the Programming Thread

Thanks

The system seems to be based on the idea of Upgrading the economic unit from the City to the Province, a larger, but undefined precisely, geographic entity. Economic Units have varied in size throughout history, and it’s a Good Thing to see an attempt to model this variation in a Civ-type game. The problem may be that the variation is too great to make a good game model.
The reason the city is a focus of CivII/CtP and of historical studies is that the city appears to have been an absolute necessity for civilization to start up. The concentration of surplus allowed Service arena workers to be supported, including those in the religious, political, artistic, and engineering fields that more or less defined the “rise of civilization”.
Which means, simply, that the single city is the economic unit for a lot of the early period: the City State was one of the two “civilized” governmental/political units In The Beginning (4000-2500BC). The other was the God-King Empire in Egypt, and that arose because the Nile River defined boundries and irrigation project size and provided communication and transportation between various sites and cities. In Mesopotamia the individual City State with and without vassels was pretty much it until the 8th century BC when the Assyrians started putting governors into conquered cities and integrating them into their Empire - instead of just burning them to the ground and hauling off everything that didn’t burn.
This indicates the major parameter for your Economic Unit/Province: communication & transportation technology. The Mediterranean became the Cradle of the Roman Empire because bulk goods could be transported all over the area by sea. There was NO WAY to transport bulk goods other than by river boat or ship. Your first Province that spans more than one city will either be elongated up and down a navigable river, or centered on a body of water that allows cities on its coasts to transport and exchange goods and services. Inland, it’s back to City States or individual cities, unless Roman Roads or other Tech advances spread the Province out.
The ship technology allowed sea-based economies enormous reach. English port cities were drawing food from the Grand Banks of Newfoundland, 1500-2000 miles away, as early as the 16th century (first English settlement in New England was not Plymouth Rock, it was a shore base for fishermen in Maine!). Only with the advanced canal building (locks, tow paths, etc) in the 18th century and the railroads in the 19th century did you get a similar spreading out of land-locked, non-river based Economic Units inland.
Your Economic Province Model, then, will have to be based on a Really Good Map Editor. One that plots nice long navigable rivers like the Rhine, Danube, Don-Volga, Tigris-Euphrates, Nile, Hwang-Ho, etc, all of which tied together historical economic entities like your proposed Economic Provinces.

The values you propose for “quality of roads bonus” are off by Orders of Magnitude. To give some Hard Figures, here are Haul weights and distances per day (avg) for your proposed road types:
trail man/pack animal
50-100 lbs for 15 -20 miles
dirt road wagon/cart
500-1000 lbs for 10 miles
paved road wagon/cart
1000-2000 lbs for 15 miles
modern highway truck
80-100,000 lbs for 500 miles
railroad (early) 19th century train
250-500 tons for 200 miles
railroad (modern) diesel unit train
10,000 tons for 500 miles

In addition, remember that the wagon/cart has a Maximum distance it can travel of about 5 - 6 days before the draft animals have eaten the weight of the wagonload in fodder: you either need a large infrastructure of feedlots and spare animals, or that puts an Aboslute Uppoer Limit on the distance you can transport a Bulk Load.

Contest: who can think of a name for Money Unit?
Why not change it with the period?
Ancient: Talent, Drachma, Solidus, Obol, Daric
Medieval/Renaissance: Mark, Ducat, Florin
Early Modern: Pound, Livre
Modern: Dollar, Euro

This would give the Gamer another little indicator of how far his civilization has progressed.

In Development, don’t forget in assessing People’s Desires as a motivator that those Desires change over time due to changing conditions, social situation, or Tech. “Rising Expectations” is one factor in assessing the Need for Services, but another factor is the Social Strata of society, When you have a society including a strata of Arsitocratic Nobility, they will generate Desires for luxury goods far in excess of their numbers, and far in excess of the rest of the (peasant) population.
Individuals or Groups of (Non-Government) people cannot develop any large project by themselves until the mechanisms of financing them are developed: the Corporation or Limited Liability Company, the Stock Exchange/Market, etc. One reason the earliest organized states are called Hydraulic Civilizations is that the only organization with the ability to build and maintain extensive irrigation projects was the government (King, God-King, etc). There was no individual or group of individuals who could handle the finances or organization. Therefore, until the “modern” financial institutions are developed, Development has to be divided into what individuals can afford and accomplish, like building farms, individual bridges, short roads, warehouses, individual piers and trade infrastructure, etc, and the Big Projects that the government Has to handle: canals, entire harbors, long-distance roads, and such.

One historical influence on People’s Desires were Sumptuary Laws which defined the Display you could put into clothes, houses, trappings, etc. These were common in all pre-modern cultures and civilizations, and make a great form of Government break on excess ‘wastage’ of Surpluses on luxuries.

On your model of Consumer Behavior, I suggest that there could be massive changes in the percentages given based on the Tech level of the society/civilization. To an ancient/medieval peasant who never traveled 10 miles from his home all his life, Transportation is likely to be a 0 percentage! Durable Goods, Housing, Clothing percentages will all be very low at the subsistance level, will tend to rise as the average Income rises. I suspect that the original model was based on a modern middle class, not the typical historical model of peasant-noble or subsistance & wealth with nothing in between.

Terrain & Climate Effects:
There is a body of historical opinion (NOT universal, I grant you) that Climactic Change has changed enough to vary the Food Production per site. Rhys Carpenter back in the late 1960s collected data to show that the Dorian Invasions of the Med in 1500-1000 BC and the spread of the Vikings starting in 800 AD were caused by climate changes that made northern homelands less hospitable. The Norse settlements in Greenland were definitely destroyed partially by the fact that the climate there got steadily worse for the century after they settled.

Merchants.
Note that the earliest Trade was by the group: family, tribal, or city organization. Technically, the individual Merchant-Adventurer didn’t arrive on the scene until Coinage (800-500BC) was invented, allowing him to amass a personal, portable fortune. Also note that Bulk Trade only existed by sea. Even apparent Bulk Trade, like the Tin and Copper traded across Europe from the north to the Med, was in small lots: until the invention of the Blast Furnace and Reduction Furnaces in 400-1000AD, nobody anywhere got more than 50-100 lbs in a single ingot of metal: no matter how early you get gunpowder, you ain’t getting cannon without the ability to purify and smelt metal in large lots that those innovations gave! The early metal trade was in small ingots loaded on carts, pack animals, or ships.

Thanks for the thoughtful response. A lot of the points you raise are good. Some of them were already in the system as it exists in my mind, and others would be good additions.

I second manu's thoughts. If you're interested in joining the project, you and your thoughts about the real world and game mechanics would be very welcome . You could participate fruitfully as historical advisor, model tweaker, or wherever you see yourself best contributing. Anyway, if you're interested let me know and we can take this further.

Back to our regularly sponsored thread...

On the scale of economic units being wrong for inland areas in the province model, you are completely right. Square-sized inland provinces is in fact what I started out with for a province model. In that case inland provinces would only slowly grow larger as better bulk transport technology became available. I thought it made for a very hard-to handle system for the player. Another problem was I wanted the political empire sub-divisions and the economic ones to coincide. For these reasons, and others that I don't have time to pursue, I decided to go with something like the present system. Its broken inland for early ages, but gets progressively more realistic as time goes on. If you have suggestions on how to preserve what the model does in a good way (province-level markets etc.), and also fix the problem, I'm all ears. Most of the things I've thought of to fix it either throw waaay too many clock cycles at the problem, or will lead the player into micromanagement by giving smaller provinces an economic advantage.

'quality of roads bonus' Yep, you got me there . What I was trying to get at was both economic and administrative effects for Internal provincial matters. (When merchants carry trade goods they would use more realistic numbers like those you presented.) For the ancient case the bonus would be primarily administrative, whereas in a modern case, more economic. But I probably need to take another look at what those numbers should be. As always suggestions welcome.

The consumer stuff I knew needed modification for non-moderns. The point about luxury needs being much higher with more skewed income distributions is very good. I just need to figure out how to make it work. I think sumptuary laws I would tend to just handle as a tax on clothing (while keeping overall tax burden the same) just to keep the system from getting More complicated.

What the people will build themselves, vs what government is required for is a good point. Though some of the 'people' stuff is also assumed to be government at the level of map squares or villages rather than just groups of individuals. I think we'll need to see in playtesting what feels better to the player. For example if the people never build aqueducts by themselves it gives a clear way that government spending can facilitate economic growth.

On the Merchants, they were meant to be merchant families, or even larger groupings, not single people.

Thanks again for the insightful commentary.

-Mark

I'm not sure how often don Don checks in here, so you might want to email him.

cya,

Length of growing season does make a difference, and frost problems. But historically there were two problems in Germany, Britain, Ireland, etc. The ground was too hard to be plowed with oxen and primitive plowshares. The Medieval development of the horse harness and a new design of plow helped greatly. Soils in much of Germany are suitable only for barley without chemical fertilizers, while soils in Britain and Ireland are often too rocky or too clayey for intensive agriculture. Gravity irrigation doesn't work well in hilly terrain without terracing, which is a big investment in land improvement with a small payoff for the types of crops grown.

Reading the posts above and the model that Mark presented, I'm having a hard time determining whether population and population growth is part of the econ model or not. So, is population and growth part of the econ model just as labor allocation is?

As I work on this more I'm sure I'll have more questions so I'll be posting them as they come up, I'm sure!

Manu has population growth in the social model. See that thread for the current take on pop. growth, and to make any suggestions on the method he's using. There will obviously be important inputs to the pop growth model from the economic infrastructure, esp health and sanitation... Some of them are listed there.

So, another question. I understand that a province will have a capital, a city. I am assuming that a city founded in a region sufficiently far from an existing province marks the birth of a new province. OK, but within a province there are map squares, and within the squares, sites. If enough sites are worked then the buildup of population density may lead to the creation of a new city. So, the question is, do sites within a map square have unique geographic locations? Or are there just a number of sites in a square, and when enough are worked a city is formed? Oh, and that reminds me, just how many sites are there in a square anyway? Is this number fixed from square to square? Is it fixed over time?

Several things are already coded up already for the province stuff. I will send you the code. Don't use it to build anything yet because I am changing things around right now, and things may change in the next several days. But you can look at it for some answers. The old econ model is used, but the province setup will probably still be the same. Except, as I mentioned in the email, econ and prov are tied too closely together in the old model (which is bad OOP). Province is not Part of econ, just heavily related to it. So a prov Should have an econ object of some sort, but the prov is bigger than that in terms of objects...

Province's capital cities can be in name only sometimes. Like when a new area is settled and you need a place to be capital for the prov. So there is no threshold to being a city that is the capital of a prov. The capital is just Designated by player or AI. However if it is in a lousy location, or the province is a dump, it won't grow very big. Some provinces will have 'rural' squares that are bigger than other provs capitals...

Pirating was common throughout most of history, though it declined in Europe during the medevil ages and is almost non-existant in modern times, however it has played a major role.

Anyway I wish to make a point regarding the provincial sizing model in the Eco Dev Web page. Can I suggest that provinces be sized by the maximum movement technology for roads and rivers. I suggest this because rail and shipping are industrial size concerns and do not principally concern the populous as a whole especially in its view of itself. By the time these great improvers of movement appear the provincial boundaries will be roughly set in the minds of national administrators and in the minds of the population as a whole.

The average transportation net of the province can from then add a production benefit. So initially there would be an impetous to allow the provinces to grow to their "best" size for individual travel. Once this point is reached the provinces really finish growing.

Possibly the intorduction of some socio political idea or tech will allow for regionalisation. Which would allow 5-8 provinces to join into super provinces. For example the British Isles would actually be 5-6 provinces until the introduction of regionalisation. At which point it becomes a single administrative region due to improvements in Rail, Sea and communication technologies.

In most Civ maps the british isles is truely to small to support more than 1 or 2 cities. Possibly a better example is the many states of eastern europe or Germany. Each of the individual princedoms etc would count as a province until regionalisation when the Rumanian provinces join to be Rumania etc. Germany ends up with 3 regions with 20 odd original provinces.

This combines the best of the provincial system with the ability to further decrease micromanagement at about the stage of the game at the point where it is becoming the game killer. These Regions could support multiple unit construction queues to make up for the loss of provincial construction queues.

Just my thoughts on provinces (The idea of which I like a lot.)

Yeah, the regions idea is feasible. My first response was "why do we need them when we can make big provinces?" but I now think that's wrong. The main reason is that provinces aren't solely economic actors. The culture model will use them as well as the government one. So I guess yor solution is reasonable, and I'd be inclined to try it as our first string choice.

I know u have resources and special items that merchants trade between countries, but I'm also wondering what about really high level countries trading with low level ones? FE: Someone who just discovered gunpowder will have no use for a computer and may think its "magic" Image going back to the middle ages with a gun and telling people how to operate it. They'd think u were a wizard.

What happens then if u have a supertechno country who has all these neat cool gadgets that no one wants cuz they can't use them?

Also i was thinking about the pirating again. Although some pirates are former merchants (or currently still merchants also) many are usually lower class or former soldiers who weren't cut out for army (or navy). But I'm saying this also that if we can produce merchants (ai and player) then the player should also be able to create pirates (privateers) or hire them (Letter of Marque" This is a great way to weaken enemy's without ness causing a war. Also plundered cities if the situation is right could be taken over by pirates and they could give it to their liege country (if any) or start a new one themselves (norsemen in nothern scotland did this) or just plunder it.

On another note what happens if ur capital is destroyed? can u have more than 1 at a time (like persian empire and South Africa?