Firaxis: Please, please, please, eliminate placing heads to each tile to get ressource. Adopt some kind of system where a city produces a fraction of the total ressources.

It would simplify city management, improve city placement, and most of all, it would IMPROVE THE AI. I still believe that the AI has a really difficult time in civ 2 and smac figuring out where to best place those heads in the city radius.

Me and some others are developing a civ game - Guns, Germs and Steel: Tools of Conquest (the game formerly known as OpenCiv3).

Our goal is to take the best from Apolyton and combine it into a game. We are focusing on historical accuracy and a killer gameplay. We are changing all the basic features from Civ2 (like population and economy). One of our features is a real population - so no more heads - and a population on every tile. This means that we are removing a lot of the tedious city management. We are also trying to implement the rise and fall of great powers, a recruitment system and an advanced trade and economy model.

We are still in the early stages of development, so nearly all aspects of the game are changeable. You could post your population/city model in our forum. I am sure it includes features we can use!

Anyone is welcome to participate. If you just have one idea you would like us to know about just post it in our forum (currently the alternative civs forum). If you want to spend more energy on the project it would be even better. Everybody are welcome, no matter how much or how little they want to contribute.

You must manage how many workers are "general purpose" (no placement, they use available resources on city - dynamic - radius), and how many are specialist (still no placement, they simply are way to focus your production effort, as you ask for.

(But I was just wondering, if special workers are available, then doesn't that sort of defeat the purpose of "no-heads" - oh well... )

entertainers (more happyness)
farmers (more food)
laborers (more mineral/production)
merchants (more trade/money)
scientists (more research)

IMHO, this will be less micromgmt, because you don't have the need to redistribute "heads" when your settler/engineer improve a city tile.
You still can specialize a city with special workers, deduced from city workforce, but without the need for looking for the best special tiles: AI will have a better life too, with less choices to take.

You must take in account also that:
- city radius increase with city size growth (from two to four square of radius around the city, I suppose it means from 9 to 45 squares area!),
- a "first come, only user" rule is added to cope with cities overlapping (first city owning a square will keep it).

Apparently you'll have less needs to look at every growning city, at least until they don't start to overlap badly. But, of course, I'll wait for the real game review to understand if this model will be any help