13-02-2001 03:25									#2
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yeah, CGN is not visited frequently enough. it's a shame, posts like this stay unread there.

	13-02-2001 10:54									#3
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Well I got 10 hits there...and so far none here

C'mon people!

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	14-02-2001 10:41									#4
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It's an okay system, but I'd rather have Regions in the late game, rather than expanding city radii. (See the thread-killing system I suggested here.)

But I might like to have some sort of option to change the configuration of the initial city radius. So that I could start out the game with a 9-square city instead of 21.

	13-02-2001 23:21									#5
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I thought we had said stuff about this fairly recently but I can't find the thread. To make this work, the evolution of a city needs to be very different. Initially, you really would have farms right outside your doorstep because the easily degradable material had to be sold within a day or two of harvesting. Only easily stored foods like grain would come any great distance (and animals that could be walked to the slaughterhouses under their own power.)

Sea trade routes and granaries for storage would allow dry goods to be imported great distances and saved until needed. The grain fleets from Egypt to Rome allowed that city to rise to in excess of a million people at a time when the largest before it had not topped 200,000.

Improved storage methods, road design and railways made this far more widespread. One of the biggest problems for WWII Britain was food production because it had relied on overseas trade for so much of it.

The only way I can see this working in Civ is that once you have built a transport network you can assign tiles to farm for a city as long as it is within transport range. Once you have efficient railways and ports this could be almost anywhere in the world. Cities themselves would grow along these transport links rather than equally in all directions regardless of terrain. Like the Eastern seaboard of America, the cities could rub shoulders with each other on the coast and extend their influence inland.

In game terms this would make for much easier city placement. Almost anywhere will do once the roads are in place and a coastal city can get goods from anywhere ships in its port can reach. Unfortunately the movement and distribution of goods then becomes very complex. Blocades and supply routes become almost essential to implement. A great idea, but not one that I think is ready to see the light of day in a Civ game yet.

	14-02-2001 06:32									#7
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Obviously you wouldn't have the option for these things right away...but later in the game when populations are expanding and spilling over.

I also agree that city radii should start small and grow with advancement, population growth, immigration, and better life expectancy

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	14-02-2001 17:01									#8
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City radius is a concept I think would disappear using this system. Once cities get food and goods being transported hundreds of miles from overseas or overland to support thier population or industry, no radius is adequate. Three tiles distance over mountains without roads will be less practical to reach than ten tiles by road or fifty by rail. It becomes a function of individual tile distances from the city based on the transport method available and how perishable the goods are. Coal, oil, metal ore and such can take ages to reach their final destination provided their value is greater than the transport costs because they do not degrade.

Supplying cities in this way could be a delight for micromanagers but doesn't strike me as the sort of thing Sid would approve of. Imperialism II takes this approach to a certain extent and it works quite well for the shorter timespan, limited resources, limited number of regions that the game has. All resources have to travel by road (later rail) and sea back to at least one city in the home country. There they go into one big pot for spending any way the player wants in any territory they own. The right type of unit must be present in the tile where resources are spent, but travel to any other tile takes only one turn so engineer types can bounce around the map as much as required.

	16-02-2001 11:53									#9
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Good idea about the suburbs, but should probably be tech dependent, namely, industrial revolution or automobiles, or some such.

If you think about it, sprawling cities like we have today would have been impossible to live in even a hundred years ago. This being due largely to the era's transit system (few automobiles, some horse/buggy, and much footwork).

	17-02-2001 18:40									#10
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I propose a complete separation of food supply and birth-rate + death-rate. Of course there would be a connection between the two, but it would not be direct.

	17-02-2001 20:08									#11
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I concur the suburb idea is a good one - but yes, it should only come into play later on in the game (after industrial revolution).

	22-02-2001 15:09									#12
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Why does the population of the city matter? If the city is still "size" X then adding suburbs or extended city tiles doesn't change the number of population icons that extract food, shields, and trade arrows from the terrain. So before we worry about the representation of the physical city we need to inject some urbanization into the model.

Besides, you'd be hard pressed to find a metropolis that extends more than one tile at the map scale in civ2—about 100 miles across. The Boston-DC corridor may be 300+ miles long but it is quite narrow. Some metro areas are more circular (London, Paris, Moscow) but they still would fit within one tile (any overlap into an adjacent tile would be insignificant).

The tiles are huge and the "city" radius is really a state or province with the city as its capitol. A special tile improvement might serve to increase population representing a second major city within the province. Growth could be determined from formulas (x sizes smaller than the principle city) or by requiring some action or management to grow.

There should be some costs connected with them. City improvements should increase in maintanence cost to "cover" each secondary city. Secondary cities should be considered one developmental "level" below the principle city, so that a city with an Aquaduct would have secondary cities limited to the equivalent of size 8 (although they would enjoy the Aquaduct's health and fire prevention benefits).

I think such an idea would still be too dependent on terrain, whereas the primary concept of "city" is trade and production generated within being more efficient than that extracted from raw resources. But if more city improvements directly produced shields and trade arrows then there would be a reason for multiplying this effect through secondary cities within the radius.