There is a summary of your ideas up in the wish list forum now.

Again, post away. this is your chance to make this game seriously kick .

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~Kefaed, >>>insert irrelevance here<<<

I propose the following new types of resources:

Industrial Metal Ore (I think splitting into Iron, Copper, etc. might be splitting hairs but its an idea), Gold Ore, Plutonium Ore

Coal, Oil (I'll post my thoughts on fuel supply later, just running through my list of different resources I think are needed)

Timber (I think trees should be considered a resource, not a terrain type, with each square maybe having some ... and as they are harvested, unless some kind of replanting system is in place, are lost)

Diamonds

Horses, Cattle, Wild Game, Fruit ... Horses should be needed for production of certain units, and maybe help aid in food production (haven't figured out exactly how yet).

I think cities should be able to trade resources with other cities (within one civilization or between two civilizations) ... for actual useful benefit.

Most RTS's and TBS's use this basic formula because it combines strategy and "realism" in a nice simple, easy to understand procedure. It has become the de facto standard and people won't have any trouble understanding it if Firaxis implements in Civ3. It will also add considerably to the strategy of trade and city placement. I can't really think of any downside.

With regard to resources, I think the number of resources should be kept fairly small, limited to, say, six different resource types. Perhaps resources could change with the various eras of the game. Once you discover refining, for instance, oil resources might appear on the map, and old resources like wood could disappear.

At the beginning of the game resources are not displayed on the map except for stuff you know how to use (forests, herds, etc.) However, when you discover iron working, then iron resources are shown. If an iron resource is within your city boundaries it produces iron for you, mining it increases the amount it provides as does a "smithy" improvement.

This iron is available to you in any city for building of units and for trade as long as it is connected by road or port to the city producing the iron, however, if you use it to build a unit or structure in the city that produces it you get a bonus to completion time or something.

When you discover steel you can globally select how much iron and coal gets turned into steel each turn based on the production capacity of your individual cities. The steel is then immediately available for use. No transport, no specifying which city does the refining.

There is some discussion in other threads about the way a civ operates -- expansionist, technologist, industrialist, etc. -- eventually gets a civilization set in its ways, and whatever its practices are, it eventually gets better at them with bonuses.

Maybe a Civ that is very industrious, concentrating a lot on unit production and building up its cities, eventually earns itself a good "labor production" bonus. Just a thought. I think the discussion was in the Religion thread buy can't remember exactly.

Okay now to tackle fuel and fuel supply. I think the only way to keep this simple is for a civ-wide fuel supply. I wanted badly a way to deliver fuel to units (and thus a way to strategically cut unit fuel supplies), but the idea of actually having fueling ships and planes is, I think, overcomplicating the issues, especially for a TBS.

This would REALLY throw a wrench into strategically planning your cities, I know, but it makes the game a lot more challenging and realistic. Maybe this should be something that changes on game level though, with the easier levels letting you see all resources from the beginning (and thus better planning cities for them).

DarkEagle: I like your idea. Trade between nations would be a good way to overcome a shortage of a particular commodity.

Khan Singh: I agree with you on the shield system being a bit outdated. I agree with you in that an Imperialism-type economic model shouldn't be used, due to the inevitable micromanagement hell, but that's just my opinion.

Jeff: Yeah, resources should be available on the map only after you discover the tech. I mean, it just isn't realistic to see uranium on the map when you're in the process of discovering the wheel.

How do you guys like the idea of an underlying economic model? Say, in a free market economy(if we use SMAC s.e. terms), the amount of money that you recieve each turn is variable and based whether wars are being fought, the condition of your trade partners, etc. If you were in a planned economy, or a communist gov't, you would get less money per turn, but that amount would be constant, and so on. This was suggested in one of the general forum threads.

How should trade between nations be conducted? Like smac were all you had to do was have a treaty with the nation, or like civ 2 were you had to build a caravan and actively send it to the city, or a compromise of the two?

Almost all resources are finite, some absolutely--when they're gone that's it. But many are only gone until we figure out new technology to find and exploit sources we couldn't before. Some are things we can make more of, if we want or need them and make the investment (trees, horses, etc). Having resources become used-up over time would drive the player into exploring for more, setting up production facilities and/or going after stuff in the possession of someone else. Maintaining or cutting off the flow of resources into a nation/civ has figured pretty high on the diplomacy and war objectives down thru time right into the present and yet Civ2 doesn't really represent that at all. Civ3 should correct that for sure, so I think the idea of resources that get used up over time and ones that start out scarce and unevenly distributed is really critical. This needs to be tied into technology so that with certain advances shortages of a resource become unimportant, because I may not need it any more or because I can now re-explore to find sources that I couldn't find or exploit before. The opposite is also true of course--its one thing to have nuclear technology and its another to have a supply of fissionable material. In general, the tie with technology is real important in that in many (most?) cases the resources that are needed change over time -- not much need for coal right away, later it gets real important. This also needs to be tied to trade in the form of specific agreements to buy/sell/barter money and commodities. This should get tied into diplomacy as well so that I can establish trade agreements which are exlusive or negotiate to cut off supplies of something to my enemies.

On the other hand, food is pretty basic, no food, no population, no civ. Beyond that its been a key trade item, any group blessed with more food that it needs is in a strong trading position when dealing with a group that's hungry. Technology lets me make more of it in the same land area or terraform to make more land usable.

And precious metals, gems, etc, are pretty constant -- they have value because they're scarce and useful.

I don't believe Civ3 should include too many specific resources, too confusing. There need to be a representative set that will tie into the tech tree and give the right "feel". Obvious choices would be food, the coal/oil (fuel) group, precious metals and/or gems, lumber/wood, metals (iron, copper, aluminum, etc). Really the ones included in Civ2 aren't a bad set, tho' I agree that including trees/lumber as a resource seems like something we'd want to think about since an area without a source of wood is a problem in the early period at least. Its not so much what the resources are as what they're good for that's important in the game.

If you make gold an important universal resource, and make raising gold by taxation hard to do, then gaining money through trade will become an important activity, just as it was in history. Just make sure the actual mechanics of trade are simple.

Wee could have two required resources at any time. You would require a certain amout of resource based on you population points. Each resource square might have 4 - 12 pop worth of resource.
If you do not have enough of a resource you loose a percentage of production proportional to the number of citizens not supplied. To be fair to starting civs, give 4-8 free resources of each type.
The maximum loss from each type is 50%, cumulative between the two, with a minumum of 25% production. Up to 10% loss from one type could be fixed with double the percentage surplus of the other type.

The resources are:
wood --> coal --> oil and
tin --> Iron --> alluminum (or other modern metals)
Each succesion takes pace when a certain tech is discovered. The next resource type becomes visiable, but you have a certain number of turns before you swich critiacl resources.
coal at ~steam engine
oil at automobile
iron with gunpowder
alluminum with flight.
(example, your oil/iron civ discovers flight, all the alluminum resources become visiable, but you are still dependant on iron for the next 10-20 turns, to allow you to build the neccisary infrastructure.

Obsolete resources can still be traded to primative civ's or used as regular trade goods.

One other thing we should consider for this thread is the idea of grouping cities into regions (or one national region)

My basic idea is to have a group of cities share all resources. Food is redistributed to provide sustinence level, and extra goes towards growth. You can set what proportion goes to each city.
Trade is not pooled, since it is already a pooled resource we can leave it as it is.
Production is pooled for the region. Then it is divided into 4 catergories (set by sliders), Units, Infrastructure, Wonders, and Capitalization.
Units goes towards construction of units.
Infrastucture is city improvments and terrain improvments (+satilites, etc.)
Only one wonder can be built at a time in you civ. All resources from wonders go twoards this.
Production can be converted into trade. The rate depends on govenment and the overall level of economic infrastructure in the region.
Each government has a max/min for each type of production.

Regions could grow over the course of the game, single city in the early game, groups of cities in the mid game, and your whole empire in modern times (after telecommunications)

I have ideas on how to impliment a lot of this, but I have to go now.

Wood- remains a resource the entire game.
Copper- A resource used only very early, and later to make bronze.
Tin- Same as Copper.
Iron- Not used much early; later used for swordsmen, and much later, everything.
Coal- Not even available until Industrial Rev.; obsoletes Copper. Makes things go.
Oil- Obsoletes Tin at the same time Coal does Copper. Makes things go in the more modern era.
Uranium- Neccesary for Nuclear Power Plants and, um, bombs. Wood becomes obsolete.

Note you don't need to do any labor to prevent micromanagement to get bronze; it would simply say that a phalanx requires 1 copper and 1 tin. Same with steel; it'd require at least some iron and some coal in order to produce a unit, and not a secondary layer "steel."

And what if a unit/structure you're producing requires a now obsolete material? Either the cost has been upgraded to something different (perhaps it costs oil to build a markteplace now, for all the plastics in a mall and the gas consumption to get there?), or you simply don't have to pay that cost anymore (no more wood to build market places! Yay!)

Also, there are never more than 4 resources you're collecting at once.

I would like to have a trading system where you could build the caravans so you could build your own trade routes, so you could potentially completely shut out a city from trade to cripple it economically. But the automatic part was nice, especially since it would give a really nice energy boost to your small towns. So, you could have something like a governor for trade, and only occasionally step in to change trade routes.

I disagree tho' that you shouldn't be able to find a resource before you need it or want it. You might need to tie technology to the ability to find some resources but surface and near surface deposits of oil and coal, for example, were known long, long before they had enough use to make people go searching for them specifically. That's one thing I was thinking of when I said that the ability to find resources should improve over time, today we can find oil deposits in areas where we'd never have even looked 50-100 years ago.

Something else I'd like to see included is SMAC's giving you the ability to gather and transport resources that aren't in a city radius. The supply crawler's ability to do that is a subtle change that has huge impact by making city/base site choice less driven by the resources in just those squares. Also gives a way to temporarily feed lots of resources or food into a city/base that needs it for rapid production or to compensate for a crop failure/industrial failure.

In Civ2, Taxation (or "trade" as it was called) was allocated across three areas: Science, Money ("Economy") and "Luxuries". All well and good. Now, let's look at a real modern country. Science spending, which in Civ2 almost always reached at least 50%, is never more than ten or twenty percent of a government's spending. Public Works and Military Spending, as well as a gold reserve (Civ2's Money), do not make up more than maybe 40% of the economy. Where does the rest go? It goes into the section Civ2 very mistakenly calls "luxuries": Social Welfare, Foreign Aid, Etc. Etc. However, in the game this percentage rarely reaches above 20-30%!

The basic monetary system doesn't work as it should in Civ. I suggest the following: Scrap the "trade icon" system, and replace it with a two resources, food and sheilds. Sheilds are generated both off the traditional sources for sheilds and the traditional sources of trade. They can then be taxed: a high tax rate will mean lots of money to spend on things such as science, etc., but also that your citizens are discontent. To counter-balance this you have to pay large amounts into a social welfare program. Low taxation means less money in your coffers, and more happy citizens, but also more discontended citizens. Also, low taxation could mean higher production rates in certain squares, while high taxationn (combined with adequate social welfare) would mean lower production but few or no disconteded citizens.

These demands on taxation would of course only be of any importance after certain advances e.g. Democracy would bring with itself more discontended citizens if there is no social spending.

Where then, would the modern government that uses all its money that it previously milked out of the peasants for social spending get more? I suggest loan institutes. With the discovery of banking, many great loan institutes grew up and lent large amounts of money to various countries. Look at most countries' economies: they are very much dependant of foreign loans and a large part of the economy goes towards repaying them. I think the loan factor should be increased greatly, with the ability to loan large amounts on interest for projects such as wonders or wars, but which you have to pay back with interest later. If you couldn't, your reputation would crash and you wouldn't be able to get new loans when you wanted to.

The reason i proposed regions is to reduce the micromanaging chore. Instead of managing 30 core cities and whatevery you conqure, you would have 1 - 10 regions, depending on the implimentation and the point in the game. Each region would be more complex that a single city, but overall less than the 5 - 20 cities it controls.

sheilds should be replaced with the following

there should be more than one resource

resource1
resource2
resource3
resource4

you collect all four resources on a national level, then in each city you can build a unit or a building and depending on the size of the city you can build more than one thing. however you must have enough resources and money stored up to build it...then depending on factories and how many people are working on a project that is how fast you build it. to rush build a project requires not only more money but it also requires more resources and people working on it to build it faster. certain units and buildings can't be built until you have a prerequist building in the city.

basically the economics forumla would work like this, you collect resources and money (taxes and trade) then you spend money and resources on buildings and units

units/building
money+resources+labor=time to build

labor is defined as people and factories...a factory instead of boosting shield output would decrease time to build a unit. with every five people a city could work on that many projects at once. a size 5 city could work on one thing and a size 25 ciy could work on 5 things or the size 25 city could concentrate all of its labor on just one project. it would cost more money and resources but the project would build faster.

one more thought about the resources, certain units might require alot of resource1 and resource2 while requireing little or none of resource3 and resource4 or vice versa

simple yet effective and realistic

korn469

Resources:
general shields (labour and man power) from factories, etc, Modern units cost lots of this.
Metal: from mines used in modern units
Fuels: also used in modern and ancient units from forests and mines, also offshore platforms. Counts as wood as well
Animals: Used in mobile units up until armor / mech inf. from resource squares.

General labour generally makes up the bulk of the cost of a unit.

I agree with the need for some things to be built only where certain structures are available, but these structures should be normal ones, like barracs, ports, airports and factories. We shouldn't add unit specific buildings, like in warcraft, because the scale of civ is too large to worry about their being animal pens or not at the barracks, and if the shipyard has suffiecient capacity for a carrier.
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Any technology, sufficiently advanced,
is indistinguishable from magic"
-Arthur C. Clark

So far I've gotten alot of good ideas on how resources should be managed, though I could use a bit more input on trade. Should you be able to cut trade lines? How should trade be affected by differing levels of tech? What about slavery and trade?

That said, I'll suggest my own too-complicated system .

Units are built based on industrial productivion (factories and workers), modified by raw materials (resources). Resources would be gathered from squares, much like the shields are in Civ. Industrial production would be based on things like factories and population (there would have to be lots of city improvements for these). A city's excess resources go into a "pool", which is redistributed to all of the cities in the empire, based on some formula based on their productivity (i.e. big cities get more than little ones) (or, maybe this could be controlled by slider bars). Having fewer resources than production would drastically reduce the rate at which things were produced, and having more resources would give a production advantage (with diminishing returns). There is a possibility that you would need to pay for "infrastructure" to support the redistribution of resources, like the transports in MOO2.

That was confusing and poorly worded, so let me explain via example. Let's say the English have one very industrialized city (London). London only has 10 resource points in its city radius, but has a "production" rating of 25. Since it is "resource starved", it's production is actually lower than 25, say 15. Now let's assume that the English establish two overseas colonies, Virginia and Carolina. These new cities have very little production (2 each) because there's been very little investment in them yet, but there's a lot of immigration, so they have plenty of people, and can gather the abundant natural resources (20 each). Since the colonies are "resource rich", their excess goes into the "pool", and is redistributed empire-wide, proportionally to the base productivity of each city. The pool contains 36 resources, and they need to be divided 2/2/25. So, each of Virginia and Carolina get 2.5 extra resources, and London gets 31 extra resources from the pool. We see now that Virginia and Carolina have 2 base production and 4.5 resources, so they get something like 3 real production. London has 25 base productivity and 41 resources, so it gets 30 real production.

That wasn't very clear either... Basically, the problem I am trying to address is that there isn't any colonialism in Civ II, even though we know it was a major factor in our history. Colonialism has been the major factor driving global politics for the past several hundred years, ending with the last hurrah we call World War II. Colonialism is all about gathering the raw materials in one place and doing the industrial production somewhere else. The Civ paradigm makes no distinction between natural resources and industrial production.

I also agree with the "suburbs" idea. I think you should be able to build a minor settler or something and use it to build a suburb that collects resoures.

Octopus: Another interesting system. I always wanted to be able to take my conquered Indonesian oil and ship it back to Japan as well.

By having new deposits turn up we can eliminate any long-term strangle hold that a resource hogging civ might have but I think shortages and uneven distribution is a good thing for the game.

Also -- as has been suggested, resources should not be infinite, they should get used up over time. Depending on the system adopted for producing things this could be a very natural thing or it might need to be done abstractly, say a specific %chance per year that the resource peters out. I liked the way that Colonization handled this by having a "lode" drop drastically and this could be incorporated by having a source drop by half and then to zero but this probably adds more complexity that is really needed.

And it would be nice to have some control over the "resource richness" of the map via text file parameters. That would let us set up some interesting worlds where, for instance, iron was rare and hotly competed for.

Somehow the vulnerability of having resources imported needs to show up. But I really don't want to end up with loads of iron ore running all over the map while my ships hunt for them -- Civ is too abstract for that level of detail. Despite that, we need a way to represent a blockade and we need a way to reduce the flow of trade (resources) to an enemy.

Perhaps there's a new set of orders that can be given to warships that would be a variation on the 'patrol' idea. This would result in some amount of the overseas trade being lost. Of course, there has to then be a way to counter that -- maybe just as simple as sending ships to attack the "commerce raider"? Done right we'd finally have a real reason to be building a good fleet of subs once that technology was available.

Maybe a blockade is simply putting ships outside the port and issuing that order.

Somehow there has to be a way for the game to figure out the impact of my commerce raiders (subs, pirates, etc) and the effect of the blockade.

Resources come from the terrain. Wood from forests, metals from hills/mountains, oil and coal from resource squares in desserts/swamps the ocean or wherever. More advanced mines/lumberyards give more per turn. Depending on play balnce issues this could be just one abstract type, or subdivided into the different classes of materials.

Labour comes from your population.
Each pop. point produces a certain amount of labour, modified by government, tech and improvments (like factories). Pop points not devoded to gathering produce double or more labour.

Resources are freely shiped throughout you empire (or within a region), and can be shiped between regions on trade routes of some type. Resources are stored for when they are needed, but reserves decay over time, maybe ~5% a turn. Resources can be sold to other empires or abstractly like capitalization. Resources can also be bought abstractly at a hefty premium, or from other civs.

Labour cannot be moved from it's city/region, and cannot be saved.
All units/structures require a certain amount of each component.
Ancient units tend to require a higher ratio of resorces/labour than modern units.
( a legion and a musketter unit might have the same amount of iron in tehm, but much more workmanship is required to make the muskets)
Infantry are less resource intensive than other unit types. Ships are the most resource intensive.
This, combined with the regional sharing of resouces will allow people to develop production centers seperate from the mining areas.
Food from agricultural cities (all pop devoted to resource gathering) is sent to the bigger cities to support industry (only the best squares are gathered, or could have lots of overlap with the resource gathering centers, most pop is devoted to labour) and mining comunities (all pop devoted to resource gathering, but in forested/hilled areas) Production from the industrail centers is used to build infrastructure for all areas, and military units.

This could lead to different war strategies, such as a civ with only one major mountain and hill chain. Attampt to capture their resource producing area and force them to devote lots of their money to try and aquaire resouces from elsewhere.
Or siexe their oil cities and dissalow them from building tanks and ships cheaply.

In Canada, for example, most mining is in the north, on the shield and norhtern alberta, but the bulk of the industrial production is in southern ontario, which is basically grassland. The bulk food production is in the plains, and some in southern ontario/quebec.

My concern is that the new Civ system should be realistic without adding unfun complications and micromanagment.

1) In the initial phase, cities must be self-sufficient and cannot export or import raw materials.

2) Upon the discovery of a particular early (as yet undefined) tech, all cities share the same food. I base this on the assumption that even early Paris (for example) depended on support from other more agrarian cities.

3) Shields or its replacements should be subject to player control after the discovery and construction of railroads. The system would work like this:
a) Factories would be a prerequisite to construction of some industrial age units and city improvements. Power and manuf. plants would have their current effects.
b) There would be a production screen which would list the number of shields produced. These would be the cities currently on the railroad network.
c) The player would then distribute the shields to the various cities also on the railroad network. This could be done by setting the number of turns you want the thing to be built, which would in turn affect the other cities.
d) It may even be possible to buy/sell shields from/to another civ.
Clearly this would have the option of being set by the computer.

4) Sharing of trade between cities may not ever be allowed, but if so should only be late in the game.

Number three is the most important in terms of realism. West Virginia has mountains full of coal which is used elsewhere. A system as described in 3) above would also allow an idea discussed the Diplomacy thread: resource outposts. I could go on, but this is already my longest post.

Something I have always dreamed of, but which is probably entirely impractical, is more variety in mounted units. Say, for instance, that you learn "Animal Domestication" which allows you to build "mounted Infantry." Then when you build "mounted Infantry," it will be either "horsemen" or "camel riders" or "elephant" depending on which animal is available in your region. Each would have it's strengths/weaknesses (horse goes fastest, camel needs no support, elephant is strongest) and you could establish new animals in your area (trade the Arabs for their excellent horses, for instance). These could be visible on the map.

I think SOME resources should be visible on the map at all times, but increased technology allows greater access. For instance, "Deep Drilling" allows you to see more oil/gas, and "Geology" lets you see more Iron, or whatever. I think resources should be depleted, with each square having a set number of resources it contains. Also give forest squares a "growback" which is how many resources it gains each turn if left alone. For instance, a forest produces two wood when traditionally worked, but grows back one per turn. It's base stockpile is between 100 and 1000, depending on the forest. Then, when you get "Replanting" or whatever, you can increase its growback to two. Or, you can follow good ecological practice from the beginning of time by rotating your production. Have it give you a warning at 20 or something that "this forest is becoming sparse." Once it hits zero, it turns into plains, or desert, or something. For mineral resources have no growback. The food resources on a plains/grassland square could operate similarly to the forest, only here you can't actually deplete, you just lose production. A healthy square gives 2 food. Once it's been used down to 0, it just gives it's one for growback. this could be the case even for irrigated or farmed squares. I.e. a grassland stars with 200 "resources." If normally worked, it produces 2 food. It's growback of 2 means no net loss per turn. If irrigated, it produces 3 food, net loss of 1. However, if its resource pool drops below 20, it cannot produce more than 2 food per turn, irrigated or no. With farmland, the square produces 4 food, with a net loss of 2, but if the "pool" drops below 50, the square cannot produce more than 3. This is a rough approximation of the depletion of the soil. Make a Cash Crop land improvement that changes the production from food to money, but takes 5 or 6 points out of the pool per turn. Also, as with the "replanted forest" improvement, have a "crop rotation" improvement that increases the soil growback. Thes would both be terrain improvements, but would come very quickly. They would be easiest implemented in the "public works" model rather than the "settler/engineer" model.

I also like the idea of out-of city industrial complexes. These would be a land improvement that got rid of the resources on the land they were put on, but increased the "industry" of the city. I think the "industry" should represent the maximum number of resources the city can use in a turn. Maybe you have 25 wood coming in, but if your total Industry is 5, you can't use more than 5 per turn. Industry would come from the city square itself, and be based upon the city size (2 or 3 per level, using the current level model) and could be increased with factories on a percentage basis. Factories would not increase resource production. So a size 10 city has 30 Industry. With a factory, maybe, it has 45. If an industrial complex makes 5, then building 3 industrial complexes would raise it to 60. (industrial complexes inherently include factories, and cannot be built before factories, so the factory bonus wouldn't apply to Industry from complexes).

Now, trade routes. I like the idea of regions, but except for micromanagement alleviation, what good would they do? I am the kind of person who woulds put all my cities in one region if I thought it would make me one resource richer each turn. I suppose each region could have a capital. The strength of the capital would depend upon the number of people in the region, and the combined proximity and strength of the capital would affect the corruption/waste in the cities of that region, as well as their loyalty to your nation. Thus, a small, tightly packed nation would want to be in one region, whereas the first city you build on a neighboring continent would likely start a new region, just to avoid corruption. Of course, regions could split off, but this probably belongs in a different thread.

In terms of resource trade, make it require a road. Any resource can be traded, but the maximum amount on a given trade route is inversely proportionate to the length of the route, with consideration of the terrain involved. Say that a trade route 5 squares long on a road (2 cities whose radii touch) would have a maximum trade of 20 resources each way. So city 1, which has a wood surplus of 27, can send only 20 wood to city 2. City 2 has an iron surplus of 14, so it can all be sent to city 1. With railroad, double the amount (so with railroads, city 1 can get rid of its entire surplus). For each amount of distance greater than this, deduct 2 trade from the maximum for roads and 1 for railroads. So with a road, you can't trade ANYthing at all between cities more than 15 squares away... With railroads, you can trade up to 45 squares, with diminishing returns all the way. The total amount could also depend upon technology (supertrains destroys the distance dependance, for instance) or city improvements (marketplace increases maximum incoming trade to 25).

Trade by sea would be possible only between cities with harbors, and would be dependant on the size of port (harbor, port, shipping center) and the distance. Say a base of 10 for a harbor, minus 1 for every two squares distant. The port might have a base trade of 25, and the shipping center 50. Navigation technology could change the amount routes diminish over distance.

The trade could be managed automatically by the computer within given regions, sending surplusses from one city to the nearest city in the region that needed that resource. Cities could also build resource tanks to hold surplusses. For instance, a city with a Lumber reserve could stockpile up to 100 lumber. Alternatively, the regional capital could automatically stockpile whatever surplusses were sent to it... This is another good reason for dividing up your civilization into many regions.

The player could, of course, turn on and off the AI trade manager for each region. Trade between regions, however, would be managed entirely by the player. It would follow the same rules as routes within a region, but all trade would be between regional capitals. This is a good reason to have only a few regions.

Trade blockades on land would be easy. Position a unit on a road and use the block trade command. This could cripple a civilization, especially a colonial one with resources and industry in different places... Cut the supply, and there's no more production. If food is one of the resources being traded, you can do even more damage, by causing famine and food riots in the industialized interior. You could make pirate units that not only stopped the trade, but diverted it to you (with much loss, of course). There could be two kinds, brigands, who are visible and can fight, and "inside operatives" or whatever you call them, who, along with their effects, are invisible. They would be like leeches.

Growth should depend on happiness, government, tech, infrastructure and location.

Food has a strong influence on happiness.
All food is pooled and distributed to a nuetral happiness level automatically. (losses to to bad transport can happen)

The happiness neutral level of food corresponds to current slow groth, maybe 2.2 food / person.
Having more than this much food slightly increases happines and hence growth.
having less decreases happines. At a certain level (~1.5 food/ person) starvation begins. Happiness penalties are SEVERE and pop losses are inevitable.

Inventions like contraception will slow growth rate slightly, but they will also allow you to slow it dramatically where popultion has started to outstrip food supply.

This idea allows the modern phenomina of overcrowding. The population will grow well past the point of sustinablility and then begin to collapse, but with riots and probably revolts in long term starving cities.

Aquatducts/ hospitals increase growth
Cities near oceans and on rivers have bosted growth.
cities by mountains and desserts are reduced.

Other ideas:

Surplus food (over 2 / person) is stored in the grannary. The number of turns of spare food gives the happines bonus (and the minimum time for a full siege) Food decays at a rate of 10-20% a turn, to prevent near infanite stores. Modern refrigiration techs/ canning might slow this.

As for the importance of harbors, I would incorporate it as follows into Section 3 of my post above. In order for a city on the water but not on the rail network to share in the shield distribution, that city would have to devote a transport to shield trade.

As for the ideas above about separating metals and having lots of distinctions between categories of resources, do we really want to have that level of complication in Civ III? I can appreciate the need for realism, but that criterea should be behind fun and ease of incorporation into existing Civ conventions.

n.c.: I agree that too many resources just gets confusing, and that it's too easy to start out on the plains where there's no wood or stone and be screwed (but that was true in the real world too...) The division I was offering was the MOST possible resources. However, I think it would add a lot to the game... I realize that adding too many options at the beginning of the game makes good play balancing impossible, but maybe there should be a "Simplified Economy" toggle, to allow you to ignore all that micromanagement. Since the AI can do it all anyways, it seems like it wouldn't add that much miromanagement, though. For people who want to let the AI run things on the regional level, there could be a subscreen on the trade advisor to tell you what was in supply/demand in each region, so you'd know what to look for as you were expanding, and that would be it, except for setting up maybe a few supply lines from your coal producing colony to your industrial but resource-poor homeland.