I just realized Boogie used the word secession instead of succession...

Secession is what the U.P. and Texas think is a good idea..

Nice idea, but i think randomness may be a big issue. What if heroes flock to one player and another player doesn't recieve any? I think if you implement that idea, you should think how to balance a number of heroes each player recieves. It may still be relatively random, but there shouldn't be too much difference between players in each game.

@outlaw: yes, both a food-limiting factor and more options for bigger cities are good things.

But I don't like the food limiting factor because it just take away some options from the player. Instead of limiting the player, the game should let him with choices. Not "you can't go there. Not enough food" but somthing like "if you go there you'll have to take care of <list of nasty things but you can lessen through research, quests, diplomacy>, but if you expand that already existing cities you'll be able to do that, this and that."

In fact, I really like the idea of limiting the buildings to a determined level of a city. If you grow bigger, then you'll be able to build more interesting things.

There's no micromanaging of caravans right now, and no explicit supply lines. Are you in beta 1? None of that stuff made it in, they went with a simpler economic model. Caravans just sort of happen if you have roads built, you don't control them at all.

As for supply lines, far as I can tell the settlement just gets access to stuff. Maybe it needs a road and maybe it doesn't, but you don't have to specify where stuff goes. If it's needed and there is some available, it gets there.

Build 3 houses at one settlement and 1 house at the other. Exact same thing happens, one settlement will try to grow larger and will suck down more food then the other to do it.  It doesn't matter what two settlements you use or where they are, as long as they're connected the game figures out how much food gets there automatically. (The way it seems to work in the current beta is that food is effectively a global resource. You have one kingdom wide pool and everything draws from it. There is no situation where you would ever have food at town X, and want to send it to Y so that Z can collect it. X just puts it in the pool, and Z takes it out.)

The micromangement you're suggesting simply doesn't exist in the game, as it was rejected as an economic model already. It's highly unlikely to come back now.

Anyway, I think it is not a bad idea to be able t control what resource goes where. It could be as simple as having an extr tab in a menu in a city where you can specify how much the city is allowed to draw from the 'pool' as you describe it. I can see that working just fine.

Food isn't global. It's a per/town basis. But ! Caravans add a percentage of every town connected.

For instance you have two town A and B. Town A has 10 food, town B has 20 food. If a road exist between them, then town A get 10 food + 10% from food of town B (2) = 12 total food. Town B gets 20 + 10%  from town 1 (1) = 21. So roads are really important, and caravans delivers gold each time they arrive in a town.

That is actually lame... If B delivers 2 food to A and A 1 food to B, should it not be so that A ends up with 11 food and B with 19? As it is now there seems to be food created out of thin air because there is some trading network. Having food counted like I suggest - where food exported from a town is substracted from the food available in that town - does the job of drawing the food available in all towns more towards the average.

Then again the ability of a town to grow can of course be thought of as a funtion of the 'food available'. In that way, importing food from another town may add to the diversity of the food available, so in the end the quality of food will be better that it was before the distribution. This redistribution therefore accomplished better overall health. This led to the effect increasing population, and since the devs chose to quantify growth as a function of the food available, in order to reflect the better health they decided to substitute everything that affects the quality of food as if there was more food available in total, even though it may not 'actually' work like that.

I hope these comments made sense to other people as well.

That is actually lame... If B delivers 2 food to A and A 1 food to B, should it not be so that A ends up with 11 food and B with 19? As it is now there seems to be food created out of thin air because there is some trading network...

Thing is, trade often had an effect like this IRL. Food didn't obviusly just "appear" but trade made farming more profitable, allowing farmers to expand thier production. Trade should be made extremely valuable, and while I don't know if this is necessarily in, it would help alot with the "Each city is a self sufficient nation in all but name" aspect that haunts these games. New York City couldn't exist without the vast suburbia surrounding it, the many food producing states out west, and a developed trade network.

If food only represent pop growth, then trade should produce massive amounts of "food" for everyone involved.

I think that Food should be a global resource. All other resources are fine as currently implemented, but Food as a global resource could really accomplish something here. Food should be something worth fighting over, and although you can research farming techs to get more efficient farming, or can farm in more places, ALL levels of city should have access to these new types of farms, and There really should not be enough food to go around.

You can have a level 1 settlement with 3 or 4 advanced farms being part of a cluster of 5-10 towns supporting a Size 5 city's food needs. The Size 5 city shouldn't even actually need to build farms of its own, just have enough housing and enough pretige, and those farming communities should automatically ship there food there.

*However the food is only counted globally if its part of your trade network, if its Isolated, that food simply does not exist. As long as the food is there, caravans don't really *matter* as Prestige is what controls food distribution. The city with the highest prestige level determines where the center of your trade network is (your capital, if u will). It will always be the largest city as long as there is enough Housing.

I was paying attention during the 20 page discussion on economic models and on what they decided to implement. If that makes me an expert, then yes.

There is nothing in the game right now where you say "food from town X should be sent to town Y and forwarded to Z, but not to Q." That was one model, and it was rejected because they don't think it'd be fun for a majority of players (ie: everybody that isn't us).

If you need food somewhere, it goes there. Building houses grows the population and means you need more food there.

In fact it isn't so stupid, and it work fairly well. You don't have to micromanage things that doesn't really need to. Food isn't really created from thin air, it's just a representation of how many food is available for population. Roads (and their caravans) just give more food available, it doesn't say that you have "more" food overall. And anyway it's just a way to conceptualize (does this word exists ?) things. Gameplay is always better than realism.

MoM worked like that. And devs already said that they don't like how it worked in MoM.

Every games has something that limits a player somehow. Doesn't reflexively make it a bad thing. Many games use resources which are limited. In this case, food, or healed fertile land, becomes a limited resource for city building. I see it as a good way to add conflict in the game, plus limit city spam.

But there is a reason why the Sahara desert is sparely populated, but right next door in Egypt you have find one of the highest populattion densities in the world. The reason-> lots of food.

The answer to Boogies opening post is obvious: Just make cities basically work like they worked in reality in ancient times!

The first thing I asked myself after I've read Boogies's opening post was how have cities in ancient times been formed and how have they functioned. In most cases it worked like that: First small settlements formed in places where there were plenty of resources. As word spread about the rich resources more and more people gathered and eventually these small settlements grew together and formed a city. However, if these resources ever started to dry out people moved away from the city as fast as they came to it. Other cities formed at important junctions or rivers and harbors. In these cases the resources are the streets or an ocean for means of transportation. However in principle these cities lived by the same rules as the other cities. If a harbor ever tried out, cities moved or even vanished.

The above shows that the most important aspect of any city and the size of that city in ancient times was closely tied to the nearby available resources. No resources, no city. The more resources the bigger the cities became and vice versa. Therefore cities naturally were important strategical places because they were almost always tied to rich resources.

If you think about this it becomes obvious how to limit the spread of cities and to decide how cities should grow and how far they can grow. Just make the cities development depend on the resources available in their nearby vicinity. Therefore, just keep it simple and make it like it works in almost any natural communities dominated by humans. This way you also make sure that almost every player can by instinct understand how cities work in the game.

Have Fun

Xiskio

Well now Im confused, since Tridus makes it sound like it works completely different. I am not in beta, so I can only go off what you guys in beta tell us.

But regardless, I proposed something new for food distrubution, since we are suggesting something new with food footprint model for cities. Since cities will now require a large footprint to sustain itself, we want a way for farm towns to directly feed these large cities. Smaller towns will have a footprint radius much larger than what they'll need to sustain themselves, leaving excess food that can be exported. As cities get larger those footprint becomes more and more contricting, requiring them to import in order to sustain a postive population growth.

As for population growth, what should factor into it? imo, food should the main factors for population growth (but not the only). Its hard to argue this. A mother needs excess food in order to feed her child. If there isn't any food for the baby, the baby dies. No baby, no population growth. Another factor is housing. If there isn't a house availabe, there is no where to live, so you can't live there ...right?..not quite. If the powers that be don't build adequte housing, poor people can always build shanty towns. Imagine shanty houses popping up in inconvinent places, preventing further contruction and lowering prestige (Think Tropico). The player can then build houses to accomdate them, or maybe have the option to erradicate them (lowering or highering you prestige depending on your faction). Which is why I don't like simply using housing as the main switch for population growth. Population growth should (and does) happen regardless of offical housing. Though offical housing could increase population growth substationally, plus add prestige. Speaking of which, another factor I like is city prestige, low prestige means no one wants to live there, which means popultion growth is going to be much lower than what it would normally be. Additioally, there could be many other minor factors that could modify population growth.

So how does the food get to the cities? I guess its all a matter of how fun, dumb down, complicated, simple, or sophisticated the devs want it to be. Since I don't think housing should be the only factor determinig if a city's population should increase, it doesn't make sense to make it the marker determinig if a city will import food. There could many times that you want food sent to a city whithout wanting to build more houses to get it. Maybe you actually want shanty towns. That way you have reserve of cheap bodies to recruit for armies, or for bodies to sacrifice to the gods (if your faction is so inclined). Maybe you want the food sent somewhere safe for later use on a rainy day (which many civilizations did). To put it bluntly, it simplies the system too much in a bad way... by restricting what you can do with the game.

I have already posted how I think food distribution should work, so I won't repost it here. I'll just say its simply a matter of clicking on options in your settlements to 'import/export/sell to local markets/store' excess food. I linked a picture to viusalize how simple it is. Its just a matter of going in and setting a couple options per city. Once you've done that the caravans autuamatically send food in the paths you have chosen. If a player feels this is too complicated and "unfun" then they need to quesion why they even play TBS games.

*This shows an entire kingdom with 2 cities and 5 villages/town, which is reasonable. Distance is not to scale. Black lines are roads. Red arrows indicate direection of of food. Importing has 3 levels priority.