i was just pondering, while looking at some screenshots and looking back at QnA sessions; why are the populations so low? their have been several claims that over a million people could live in a city at any given time, and yet all the screenshots are nowhere near that figure. also, in a post cataleptic world, is "a million people living in a single city" practical? should the figures be closer to one thousand??? what do you think?
When you are starting out you will probably have very few people, simply because you are rebuilding from scratch. However your world will remain post apocalyptic only until you and the other channellers rebuild it (or cause another apocalypse).
most likely these are starting cities. It looks like the cities actually start to take up more space (because its not a square single-tile size in the screenshot) so they probebly don't have a fully grown city implemented yet (at least not to the point where they want to show screen-shots of it). I imagine that a city with over a million people would take up A LOT OF SPACE. I mean look at new york, LA, Chicago, or pheonix. And these people don't have appartement skyscrapers, so like that city would be pretty darn expansive. I believe B. Wardell (frogboy) mentioned somewhere about the cities growing some special way
Hey, magic skyscrapers... although don't sue when your children grow three heads that turn you to stone if you gaze on them. Actually, come to think of it that is a problem that solves itself.
I want big populations because I want big armies, once my civilization is well established that is. Frogboy said that their goal is to be able to have battles encompassing thousands and even tens of thousands of combatants. I'm all in favor of that because of how epic that would make battles later on in the game feel, but it would only really be practical/possible if we can have very high-pop cities. 1 million people might be a stretch but we need tens or hundreds of thousands at least.
Also, remember that you need population to make units. If you make an army of 1000 men (supposedly, that's a very real possibility), you'll loose 1000 men from that city.
Also, big cities will take a huge amount of space, seeing how every time your city goes up one step, you'll physically expand to an additional square.
It is alway moddable.
What is less modabble is the quantity of RAM you have in your computer.
Bigger armies means more RAM load.
Time to upgrade to a 64 Bits OS perhaps ?
People tends to focus on bigger map = Bigger RAM but with crazy modding we can have bigger city = bigger army = bigger ram
Personally I don't enjoy huge maps. It takes to long to play, it takes to much micromanagement. I prefer smaller maps. I wonder if most people enjoy big lar maps or smaller medium ones.
Like GalCiv, it seems fairly obvious that, YOU, will be able to select the map size. In the MP envirnoment, the Host would select it and it would display in the Game offering Selection window.
Don't like Huge Maps? Avoid the games noted to have a Huge map. And if you select a small map, it would also be prudent to assume your Tech levels will be limited as well as you and the enemy will be interacting with each other much sooner.
So as with most of the games that offer large armies, time is required to create them, and the only way to allow for that time to be accumulated, is to make sure the enemy can't send his first 4 grunts, with pitchforks, over to your village and wipe you out in the first 3-6 minutes. Base/City Rush FTL. (shudders)
Who knows, if they have to walk to your village, it may take them the equivelant of 5 days in Turn time, to do so and by then, you will have, hopefully, had the time needed to produced yourself a 15 grunts army, with pitchforks, to repel such a bad idea.
I love huge maps, although there is a limit. For example in galciv2 the biggest map size was too big for me. But there was a lot of needless micromanagement in galciv that I'm hoping will be cut out in Elemental. For me, the ideal map size is inversely proportional to the amount of micromanagement: the less tedious micro I have to deal with, the larger the map I want to play.
I think in Elemental I'll enjoy tremendously huge maps also because of the huge, unbalancing spells of the late-game. Those should be fun to use on really huge maps
IMO, if it is possible to have cities coming anywhere near a million population, the game needs a hierarchy of city types and the biggest ones need to be limited to one per very large chunk of the map. I'm thinking of places like Tenochtitlan before the conquistadores and Rome at the height of the Empire.
Or maybe instead of 'classes' for cities, we need a way to have cities share claims on resource tiles so that something like a distant buffalo herd could be exploited first by a pure outpost, but as that outpost grew, the distant city would lose a slowly growing share of the food output to the local population.
If resources are done right, I'd think there shouldn't be a need for such artificial limits. To take your example, as the outposts grows it requires more food, thus there would be less for the larger city. If you divert a major portion of your resources to a single city, it limits the resources available to the rest, creating a natural limitation.
Personally I think that a city with a million people should only be possible on a huge map after a loooong time and a lot of effort and planning. Based on the goal of being able to field multiple armies each consisting of ten thousand or so soldiers, I'd like to see normal large cities reaching 100,000 or so. Assuming a soldier:civilian ratio of ~1:10, this would allow each large city to field its own 10,000 strong army. A population of 1 million would be double the widely accepted max population of ancient rome (~500,000)...
i like the idea of maybe one or two really well planned out million-man cities per civilization towards the middle/end of a larger map, and then a dozen or so smaller cities wtih several hundred thousand people.
I definitely agree, perhaps to the point of thinking that megacities have no place in the game anyway. A lot of my response to this sort of stuff will depend on how the game treats time--and if even a fairly long game lasts only a few game years, breeding a million people (or even gathering most of them from the wilderness) shouldn't be possible. But I haven't seen anything from dev-land about how much internal time a game on a Most Ludicrously Large map might take.
Re the hard limit, I mostly talked myself out of it by finishing the first blurb and more than half-expect that resource logistics will provide satisfactory limits to sprawl. I just threw the hard-limit idea out there to see if it got kicked or patted on the head.
This goes back to the discussion in the "1 day = 1 turn" thread. There is no way that whatever timescale is chosen to equal one turn will be realistic - it is physically impossible to do and still end up with a 4X game that is fun to play. The devs could choose to make population growth realistic, but then other things (like unit movement and construction) would be incredibly unrealistically slow.
So in my opinion, I don't care how the game treats time. Especially when it comes to population. Right now 1 turn = 1 day. Let's say a small-medium sized map will take ~1 game year (365 turns). Human population growth in modern times has varried between 1-2%. So that leads to a natural population increase over the course of the game to be... 1-2%. So unless there are huuuge throngs of people hiding in the hills, or if SD changes the timescale of one turn by a LOT, population growth simply can't be realistic if you want the game to be fun.
If you make 1 turn = 1 week, then it'll take 2 game years (104 turns) for your population to double with a growth rate of 5% (which is huge). That means if you start out with a population of 1000, it would take ~13.5 game years (702 turns) to reach a total population of 100,000, in your whole civilization.
If you make 1 turn = 1 month, then it'll take 24 turns for your population to double, and 162 turns to reach a total population of 100,000. Neither of these scenarios seem particularly satisfactory to me... One is way too slow, the other seems way too fast.
I personally support the notion of having population growth be a variable set at the begining of the game. Just at game creation you can choose a speed at which population increases. That way if you want a marathon game, you can, but if you want a fast game that doesn't have much time wasted while you wait for cities to grow to a managable size it can go pretty fast.
how about spells that affect pop growth? or what about how the TW series did turns? ie 1 turn is 6 months iirc. this takes care of population growth. if they included something similar along army movement (ie movement points depending on types of troops and commanders, etc) this could also be resolved.
I just reread this and I can't believe how huge a mistake I made... I blame it on being late.
With a more realistic population growth rate of 3% per year (natural + magic + refugees), population will double every ~24 game years, and you get the following figures (assuming an initial population of 1000):
1 turn = 1 week: 1248 turns (24 years) to double to 2000 population. 8112 turns (156 years) to reach 100,000 population...
1 turn = 1 month: 288 turns to double. 1872 turns to reach 100,000.
1 turn = 6 months: 48 turns to double. 312 turns to reach 100,000.
Quite frankly, even the 6 months thing doesn't seem that reasonable to me (keep in mind that these populations are your total empire, not an individual city). This is obviously a simplified population growth model, though. But nonetheless, making population growth by turn realistic would make other aspects of the game equally unrealistic (or just plain unfun).
For one, it would take 156 game years (with a growth rate of 3%) to reach a total population of 100,000 - and if you care about realism then your army would constantly be dying of old age, and unless you make a magical excuse for heroes and channelers, they'd all be dead.
Secondly, if the time scale were, say 1 turn = 6 months, my channeler would have to be able to do a whole lot each turn, and my units would have to be able to move real far. If my channeler could only cast a handful of spells in 6 months he'd feel mentally challenged to me, and my armies and units being able to move a realistic distance per turn would probably be WAY too much for the sake of gameplay. And building something like a castle would still take a huge amount of time, if you want to be realistic. It took an average of ~10 years to build a castle (that's 20 turns if 1 turn = 6 months), and usually that was just until the castle was habitable - work would usually continue for years afterwards strengthening defenses.
My point is that there is no way for all the different timescales of all the different processes that will be within the scope of this game (and any other 4X game) to be both realistic and be fun. So in my opinion, screw realism. Choose a timeframe for each turn, but ignore it completely when it comes to deciding actual gameplay.
a postapocalyptic earth would have a much higher growth rate then 3% each year. Once a person is in a well nurtured enviorment and with a fertility age of 16, with 1 child each year for 12 years, that is alot more then 3% each year that we have now in our overpopulated world.
lets say the channeller goes overboard with new land to populate, and makes plenty of food awailable by exspending massive amounts of essence, well that kingdom should easily have a pop growth each 30 years of 4 times the population.
The population can explode, As long as the human race has plenty of food and a secure society with lots of room. A low fertility rate is afterall why some species die out. A max fertility rate with a corresponding growth rate of 3% each year is not viable in hazardous worlds. it would be the death of the species. A lower growth rate then the humans is one important weakness for the fallen.
i think the population growth rate should be made semi-realistic. maybe a compromise between absolutey insane banging, and realistic, quaint banging.
The operative 'persons' here are the females, and 1 child per year for 12 years will definitely reduce their lifespans. Plus, breeding patterns like that more or less require extensive cultural support--for example, a patriarchy with paternity as a primary status factor or an analagous matriarchy. Absent overwhelming cultural values, very few free females with sufficient access to subsistence resources will want to be almost continously pregnant for over a decade. It would inhibit their ability to help ensure the success of their earlier offspring.
But that's basically starting with a digression. For this sort of debate, I mostly favor the "don't overvalue realism" perspective. However, I think that options to let players use a completely abstract 'calendar' would be really nice for folks who might be having problems suspending disbelief in a number of areas, including population patterns.
I'm also starting to wonder if the Elemental population story and mechanics might include some analog to the GC2 notion that a given planet has an uknown, undocumented population off in the wilderness that can swell citizen rolls without the need for locking nearly all the adult females into child production. It would work better for me in Elemental than it does in GC2, where we can now plant colonies on formerly 'hostile' environments yet still see the 'normal' population growth curves. Elemental is one world, and the cataclysm could easily have left substantial refugee populations that can choose to join the new channeler-centered factions.
Actually, human population growth has been higher in the past 3 centuries than it ever was any time in the history of mankind. This is due to a combination of relatively abundant availability of food and housing, better food quality, improved personal hygiene, sanitation, and modern medicine. None of these increased the rate at which people gave birth, but they decreased the mortality rate - people lived longer. Less deaths each year mean a higher population growth for the same birth rate.
So the only way a post apocalyptic earth would have a much higher growth rate than 3% (and 3% is pretty much the max - it's usually half that) is if all of those mortality rate-reducing factors were present. That is pretty much nixed due to the 'post apocalyptic' modifier . Now in the case of Elemental you could say that magic can take the place of all/most of those factors, I guess, but to go for a sustained growth rate over the low single digits is not realistic. Unless, there is also population growth due to immigration.
That would require a pop growth of 5%. So if you include refugees joining you from the hills, fine, that's close enough to realism so that only a jerk would complain. But that brings us back to the problem of how many turns will that take? Well let's see:
1 turn = 1 day: 10950 turns for population to quadruple1 turn = 1 week: 1564 turns for pop. to quadruple1 turn = 1 month: 360 turns for pop. to quadruple
So as you see, we have still not solved the problem of how to make pop growth realistic and still be fun. Even at a growth rate of 5%, it would take ~95 years for a population of 1000 to reach 100,000. That's either 34675, 4950, 1140 turns for your total population to reach 100,000. And that's if you start out with 1000, if you start out with less the time goes up dramatically. I dunno about you but that's unacceptable to me - unless the first several hundred turns play really fast.
On the other hand:
1 turn = 6 months: 60 turns for pop. to quadruple (190 turns to reach 100,000) - even too fast in my opinion1 turn = 2 months: 180 turns for pop. to quadruple (570 turns to reach 100,000) - actually not bad imo
But unfortunately, 2 months/turn still forces a whole slew of other things to be unrealistic. So if a large majority agree that population growth should be realistic, and don't care about any other time-scale realism, then I'd vote for a 2 month turn system. On the other hand, if it's not important to many people, or if there are lots of disagreements over which time scales should be realistic, then I'd vote to screw it all, let SD determine an arbitrary time-scale and give people the option to make it generic "turns."
That's completely untrue. The only possible way for a race to die out is if population growth is negative. If growth is always positive then it will grow and grow until it reaches the carrying capacity of the environment. So any race that has ever died out has either had a consistently negative growth rate, or died due to some major catastrophe. To have a 3% growth rate in a hazardous world would be a miracle - we have less than a 3% growth rate and our mortality rate is tiny.
Yes - it's the weakness that balances the superior strength and abilities of individual fallen.
common plebe ftw!
abandon 'realistic' growth rates then and adopt a fantastical calender of 14 'eargs' per 'suan', with each 'earg' consisting of 3 'fuineth' and 6 'la' per 'fuineth'; montag, luan, naile, dasa, sanch, anyung. every turn can be an earg or multiple of earg and growth rates set at map selection screen if one choses (or allow the map generator to chose the best rate based on map type).
Pardon me for having started doing 'online' nonsense with a modem that required a Bell standard handset, but what the frak do you kids around here mean by FTW? I thought it meant "fuck the world" for a while, but I've finally bothered to try looking it up and I'm utterly confused.
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