Actually Word 2010 on Windows 7. But I stripped all the HTML out and copy/pasted to a notepad before I put it in here. Did you fix the post or should I re-post it?

EDIT: looks like he fixed it Thanks!

This is actually how things worked, more or less, in Master of Orion II.

I'm told it worked the same way in Master Of Magic, too.

Essentially, in MOOII population units represented the race of the civilization, but you could have a population of that race even if the civilization didn't exist anymore.

You could conquer another civilization and all it's population in still intact.

One of the things I liked about this was the populations kept their racial bonuses, so if you conquered a race better at research you just put them to work as your scientists...better at farming, your farmers. It let you create an Empire, not just a nation, and one with castes if you so chose.

I already made a post on this, but it wasn't as clearly laid out as this one and was mostly referring to MOM and MOOII.

Still, I always loved this in those games and it always seems to me more 'modern' games take a lot of steps back when it comes to complexity, so I hope something similar to this manages to make it's way in...though I won't hold my breath.

While the concept sounds nice, I fear the implementation would be so difficult that it would be meaningless.

Let's consider two ways you could handle it, the MOO2(really good) way and the MOO3(really bad) way.

In MOO2, you had a very simple, but varied way the population affected things. You conquer the Klackon homeworld, which has 10 bugmen living there. The bugmen are good at producing things, so naturally you'd put them to work in the industry-line. You can send the bugmen to other worlds around your empire, if you want to bolster production there. They start as slaves, but can be re-educated to be natural citizens of your empire.

In MOO3, the population did a huge amount of things, none of which you actually understood. The population also migrated on their own, with little to none imput from you. You might one day check a planet, and see that rockmen lived there, but how they affected the colony, you wouldn't know because there were too many variables regarding them, and you couldn't care less because you couldn't directly manage them.

There's also the Age of Wonders way of doing things. Each city had a race, and could only build the things that particular race could(Orc city can build orcish swordsmen, orc shamans, red dragons, and so on). You could choose to immigrate the people of a given city with those of another city(provided you had a city of that race or were allied with one). So, if you are normally human, but have an orc city, you could change either city to either orc or human. If you were allied with the nation that's primary population was elves, you could also change either city to an elf city(but as you have a primary race for your nation, races of other nations don't like living there as much and have worse morale(orcs like other evil races, etc)).

The idea proposed seems like a synthesis of all of these in a way, which I don't think is too good. If an idea like this is to be implemented, it must be very simple, because otherwise(because the game itself is complex), it's complexity will be overwhelming and you won't touch it, making it a useless feature.

I think that all migration should be directly handled by you. Less realistic, perhaps, but a lot more fun because it's more meaningful.

Due to the way population works in Elemental, however, it may be too complex already. I suppose you could cut the population of a town into different peoples(like 100 population full, 20 of which are humans, 20 are egalitarian humans(allow both genders to be recruited), 20 are some kind of fallen, and 40 are another kind of fallen). Then as you recruit a unit, you would choose from which minority to recruit from. But since people affect other things than recruitment as well, the complexity of the population would increase all the more.

Nice idea for a mod at least, even if nothing like this makes it to the game. Personally I'd love it if different races had good, distinct ways that made them different, and handling them was simple and easy. I'm eagerly waiting to see if anyone else has any ideas how to implement it.

I think I always played with a custom race in MoO so I hated all those other races around mucking up my gene pool. Can we say "just slightly" Xenophobic. So without fail I would either Bio-terminate the planets. Or if I wasn't powerful enough for that much hate from the rest, just bomb the hell out of them and exterminate all the rest lol. When you take Unification, plus to reseach and industry lets just say no other race does anything better. Especially since we always outlaw Creative, that really should have been worth 20 points on its own.

    That said the ides you put forth are very well thought out and not bad. Yes it would add to the complexity. But it would also make for a deeper game. Really comes down to if the Devs have already decided something like this is going into the game or not.

I was under the impression that if I conquer a city that is populated by a different race they still become part of my Empire. Then if I draft troops in that city they would come from that cities population. This would make armies made up of various races, right?

Excellent post Btw.

The "only 3 races" is just for the beta I think, not for the final release.

One problem I see : if a city has 2 races living there, then what happen if I build a unit of 1000 "men" ? 500 from race A and 500 from race B ? What kind of skill will the unit get ? (if for instance all people from race A should have the skill forced march)

should the gam elet the player choose which kind of units he use ? Or only a trait choosed at start could let you choose ? Or some trait like xenophobia wouldn't let you build unit from other races ?

There is another thread I posted in that goes into this to a lesser extent, but kind of implies many of the same things you're talking about.

https://forums.elementalgame.com/379634

That first section of yours is basically a carbon copy of my post, but the rest builds on the idea a lot, particularly with migration and integration.  By that same token, those aspects are missing something.

Before I get to that though, I want to reiterate something from my other post in this thread, so people won't have to jump back and forth.

Slavery, Integration, Exile, and Extermination, and/or whatever other choices there may be, should all come with their own bonuses and/or penalties.  (As it's been stated by the Stardock staff before, Bonuses are preferred as they feel better to the players, and it can be done in a balanced fashion.)  Slavery gives you a cheap if somewhat inefficient labor force, Integration has the upside of possibly bringing people around to your way of thinking, increasing the efficiency of the city, Exile would force you to bring in your own population, but you'd receive a bonus to Prestige for showing mercy, and Extermination might also offer Prestige on the same reasoning that Exile does, except for being completely merciless.  (I think there should be a different mechanic for Exile and Extermination, but I can't think of a good alternative at the moment.)

Now, closer to the actual context of this thread...

The issue with migration in multi-racial empires/kingdoms is this...  Since when does a ruler decide where his people should go?  Let's use a real life example here...  America and Mexico.  America receives hundreds, maybe thousands of illegal immigrants every day.  It's not like a policy is going to stop people from doing whatever the hell they want, if they really want to do it.  It only makes sense for an enslaved population to be completely (Read: Mostly) controllable via migration policies.  The rest, however, should maintain their free will.  The only way I can perceive this being done is to limit the max 'Off-Race' population of any given city.

Using your example(s), let's say you start as Human, and that you've just conquered an Elven city.  Let's also add some context by saying this is your second city, towards the end of making this model relatively simple.  (At least to start with.)  Now City Hu1 should have a maximum possible Human population of 100%, but only a maximum Elven population of 10% or 20%. 

My reasoning is, I think most of the folks from City El1 would probably like to stay in familiar surroundings and keep their stuff and not have to move, etc etc., and at the same time, I doubt they'd want to move closer to the people that just conquered them, though some might.  This allows you some benefit for conquering other races, but doesn't allow you to capitalize on their bonuses like only a person playing that race should be able to do. 

City El1, however, should have a maximum Elven Population limit of 100%, since it's an Elven City, but a maximum Human Population of 50%, (Maybe even just 100% again,) since your starting race is Human.  Since you've just conquered this city, your human population might be interested in living somewhere new, so moving to this new, exotic town could be quite the thing for them.  And in fact, given that the Conquered Elves are probably going to be more than just a little mad at you, they'd phase out to some extent, since Humans have a higher total number of possible people in both cities than the Elven population would.

By that same token, emmigration shouldn't be limited to just your cities.  Suppose City El1's residents, instead of just staying where they are, decide they'd rather stay with their kind, being somewhat xenophobic, and you lose all or a portion of the population in that city once conquered, beyond what the city would lose just for the conquering.  So, they'd go to where there are more Elves...  So back to the Elven Domains for them.  The obvious problem with this is, how do we handle the people running away from their former cities?  Easily, actually.  An event, a very simple event.

Let's switch perspective for a moment.  All the above conditions are maintained, but now we're going to look at this from the Elven Kingdoms side of things.  They've lost a city.  For context, let's say that 15% of El1's population died in the Siege, and another 60% (For a total of 75%, which is probably too steep, but bare with me,) have left to return to the Elven Kingdoms.  Now, it's safe to assume that since they've just left a battlefield, they have little in the way of supplies or morale, so we can assume that not all of them make it back.  So we're left with 25% of the original population still in the city, and 25% of the original population making it back to the Elven Kingdoms.  So several turns after the city falls (Depending on the time-frame of turns,) an event pops up for Elven Leader telling him this: "Refugee's from El1 have returned to your Kingdom!  You gain X population."

Now, this is where things potentially get complicated.  You could stop the mechanic for Migration right there, but I like to over-think stuff like this. 

At this point, both races have been exposed to one-another.  Now each has stories to tell the others, and some people, like in real life, get taken by wanderlust and overwhelmed by curiosity.  So now, there's a chance that a small, very small portion of either population migrates to the other Domain.  (Domain is going to be my blanket term for Empires and Kingdoms.) 

When I say small, I mean very, very, very small, and it would have to be mitigated by the current population, either of the individual cities, or as a global whole.  So for every 1000 people, 1 or 2, (.1-.2%,) might migrate to a new domain.  It would have to, absolutely have to be in tenths, maybe even hundredths of percentiles to keep it balanced and disallow the abuse of the Psuedo-Race-Switching.

On the subject of enslaved populations, there should always be a chance for those to go down to some extent.  Anything from .1% to 5% I'd say, depending on circumstance.  (Slaves are always going to try to escape, and for the most part, they're always going to realize they'll fare better in a group than solo...  Though the occasional lone wolf would escape.)  The chances of it going up, however, require specific circumstances, and the chance of this event actually occurring would be very, very small.  .5 to 1% of the time, if that often.  (.3% to .7% seems better to me, but I like to keep the numbers round.)

This would, again, be handled by an event.  "A group of your soldiers comes across a group of (Enslaved Race X,) in the mountains and captures them.  You gain X slaves."  In this case though, the amount would have to be an integer, and not a percent.  The chances of large bands of people wandering into your territory that aren't aligned with a Military would be too small to make it a percentile.  1-20 population, and that's actually a really high top-end from where I'm sitting.

Okay, this is starting to borderline on being a sheer MOUNTAIN of text, so I'm going to stop myself right there and wrap up with this.

The mechanic would need some fine tuning, in all the aspects of the OP.  It's not a bad idea, but I think we're starting to see just how complicated it would have to be to make it both realistic and balanced.  We could always sacrifice realism for gameplay, but when dealing with the element of Free Will, there is no such thing as simplicity.  There's a veritable Ocean of variables to consider in dealing with this, but I hope that this discussion keeps going and that the concepts and ideas in this thread continue to be built upon.  This is a good idea, and would be a very interesting feature to have in the game, but it would require a ton of fore-thought and planning to implement...  Good thing Stardock has all of us to tap for extra brainstorming/brainpower.  =P

Edit:  For clean-up and cosmetic purposes.

Honestly, I really hope they go with "Choice" over "Automation" when it comes to drafting units from a city with a mixed population.