Topic: The thing with bees and flowers: population

Currently the game gives you a person whenever you need one. This is not realistic, but it's a game, so what? I thing it is not only unrealistic but also bad for gameplay. Thats why I want to have the population rate defined by the players action. There are basically 2 ways to do this: Have a changeable maximum number and/or a changeable rate of birth. Settlers 3 did it with houses which defined the "maximum" number in the way that you got a certain number of people out of a house. It was basically a good idea but did not really made sense, since it had no lasting effect. You would build a house and then scrap it to get the stones back.

a) So let's take this concept to an higher evolution step: We have houses in the game, and these houses define the rate of birth. Rate of birth is: number of people / number of housing places = birth per minute. (changeable, depends on testing) That means, if you build a big house (your HQ counts as one), you have a people count of 100 (and at the start availabe). That means you would have 100/100=1 one people born per minute. If you have 3 big houses build and 200 people it would mean: (300[houses]+100[HQ] / 200 = 2 two people born per minute. This could be made clear to the player with a simple information window (or on-screen number if wanted).

This would not only make sense and be more realtistic, it would also smooth expansion speed out a bit from the extremes. And it could also work as a sort of mini-handicap: If your borders get sacked and, your soldiers die, you have a higher birth rate. The advancing player (who has to have at least one carrier to the conquered military building) would have a weaker position.

This could also work as a counter for winning conditions. Reach a certain population.

b) Another variation is to have couples live in Houses. The number of couples would determine the birth rate. Couples get married in really beautiful churches or temples and the priests need a special ressource for it (mead for Barbarians, ambrosia for the Empire). Then the couples would move to their new houses (Couples would also need the at the moment useless wares that only exist for making sails for ships.)

This special resource could also be used for "race-specific" buildings with a certain bonus, that can be build by every race but only with this ressource. So you have to trade for it.

"Scratch any cynic and you’ll find a disappointed idealist."

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Although I agree for general gameplay, that it should not be changed, I could also imagine a constrained game setting for expert multiplayer setups where the regeneration rate of carriers is crippled beyond goodness (say about 1 carrier growth every 15 seconds) for all players, to challenge good planning even more :-) That would make playing with very different tribes with different needs and different soldier strengths a lot harder. The "Followers of Ma'a" tribe for example will have less strong warriors, but are good in evasion and will come in large packs... (keyword: Wuselfaktor ) - even more difficult when being carriers constrained.

CMake is evil.

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I believe that this would make the current game a lot more challenging. It would be great to have this option for advanced players.

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It would be better if houses instead limited the number of active workers you have. Each set of houses require food of any kind, the workers have a reduced production if the food requirement is not met. Or make every building that produces/processes items have a requirement on food too and make this control the % of production and the houses only control number of active workers...

It never made sense why only miners need food, and i hate it when the refuse to work totally, especially if its a marble mine and you need the marble to make farms :(. make it like 10% production speed or something ^^.

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I also liked the "idea" of houses in Sett3, but found it was let down by being a one cost/one action mechanism. I like LennStar's idea at point a)

Building the house brings a fixed population increase, but this as ratio with the existing population would be a great way to manage population growth. It would also discourage the destroying of houses once the population gain has been given.

After all, you have all these workers, you have all the places they work, what better to have places for them to live. As the game is about managing an economy then there is future scope (many years in the future) for producing other wares for the houses like furniture and pottery (think Caesar)

I do think LennStar's idea is a good idea.

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