Yes, it should slightly reduce the city population.
No, it should not have any effect on the city's population.
It should be an option which can be turned on/off
I'd be happy for it to cost population but with two caveats:
1. It shouldn't be a much smaller reduction than an entire CIV4 poplation point (so perhaps you could increase the population count by a factor of 10 and then reduce population due to drafting by single digits)
2. There should be a mechanism to re-settle unwanted troops to regain the population (or a percentage).
CowboyTony
2. And there should be a mechanism that allows you to recall settled military to arms.
That's why I posted the idea of settled military=Cottage in another thread.
Hi MdB, I've not see that thread, could you give me the link to it, please?Originally Posted by Marthieu du Blois
http://forums.2kgames.com/forums/showthread.php?t=74080
Here you are, CowboyTony.
I think the ability to recall settled military to arms is far too powerful for defenders & it doesn't reflect the effect the passage of time (resettled veterens are only veterens for a single generation). A one way conversion of unit to cottage could work though. It could also add to a city's view of war and reduce unhappiness associated with war...
CowboyTony
Or just make the horrors of war even more visible, that is, increase war weariness.
For recalling veterans (from Cottages):
1) there are things as conscription (in Nationhood) and
2) in history there were examples where a certain minority was given collective nobility in return for military service when needed.
Collective nobility: the villages of that minority don't have to pay tax, laws work for those villages as if they were a village of nobles, but any single man of that minority is not a noble (medieval rights classes).
BtW, in that country there was a system called 'Insurrectio' which meant that in times of risk to the country all nobles had to join the army of the King.
Last edited by Marthieu du Blois; 06-21-2010 at 12:02 AM.
No. Generating units should have no affect on population. The game city takes up a very large land area that represents the population in the city itself and the greater surrounding area. The city's units are recruited in, train in and are based in that area. Although they are in the army they still make up part of the population of the area they are based in and impact the economy, if not productivity. When deployed overseas they are flown home every 6 months to a year if its the modern era, so they still make up part of the population of the area they are based in.
Even in Alexander's time fresh troops were being marched to the front and old hands being sent home to Macedonia. Their tours of duty were just longer.
You guys gotta keep things in perspective-every time you end a turn tons of stuff is happening that cannot be recounted. In the 20 years of each ancient era turn your troops are being returned home after a long career of soldiering and new troops are being brought up. The population is remaining more or less stable.
It should not matter how big the populations of the nations are. In theory an army could exceed it's fighting age male population-we just have to assume those resources were not used to build a force from scratch but rather went into hiring mercenaries. Also, the systems in place in civ that extract tons up upkeep from maintaining too many units are realistic and keep small nations from developing an unrealistically large army. It also slows technology as all taxed monies are spent on maintaining large armies. Thus nations with larger populations in civ have a much easier time raising an maintaining large armies.
I think the system in place now is sufficiently realistic for the generation of armies. If we start nitpicking details like reducing the populations for every unit produced where will it end? This game covers major events. In civ terms the battle of Kadesh was a single babylonian and single egyptian chariot unit squaring off.
I would not buy into population decrease when units are lost either. Sure maybe certain towns lost all their men in the world wars but we have focus on the big picture. For example, Most of the Royal Newfoundland Regiment was wiped out in WWI. The town had sent the majority of its young male population and they were slaughtered almost to man. However, in Civ terms, all the province of Newfoundland PEI, New Brunswick and Nova Scotia might be represented by a single city. So although the town had a decline in population, the overall area was relatively unaffected, maybe zero population growth for a few years then back to business as usual.
We say in Canada WWI lost us a whole generation. Without looking at facts or figures I would guess that the birth rate dropped but the usual trend after a war is a baby boom. So when it all comes out in the wash, over the turns that the war happens in civ, population should not be adversely affected by the deaths of soldiers.
I will end my rant by asking the question I should have asked first: How many men do each unit represent? If it is a regiment of say 1000 men (infantry), than the effect on the population should be negligible. Take into account that the size of artillery regiments, armoured etc will be smaller. Even if a unit is "destroyed" that does not necessarily mean all the men died. It could simply mean the men were routed and over the next several years they found their way back home. During the 1st Iraq war the US took literally millions of prisoners. The Iraqi's units were destroyed-ie they lost combat capability. They men who made up these units were not killed. On the contrary they went home and were reabsorbed by the local population.
More often than not men will not kill even when they are being shot at. It is the big impersonal weapons that do most of the killing. So units defeated by infantry will have fewer soldiers killed than those destroyed by artillery. It averages out.
To sum up, the point I am making is that populations should neither decrease by the generation or loss of military units. The combined factors of human nature, the mechanics of war and the grand scale civ is played at render the present system of no population effect from military units realistic and effective IMO.
Youhatefillingoutthoseforms
Each unit in civ is a battalion, brigade or a full army. One unit is ~10000 people. They do count on even Civ scale, with smaller cities' 1 population point meaning a similar amount of people.
So I say that building units requires population. 1 pop. point each unit.
This is particularly so in your examples the WWs. There many cities from which a unit or two was sent to war lost big parts of their population. These were drafted, but units nevertheless.
Addition: have different unit types.
Mercenary - bought from another civ, high gold upkeep. Fast to obtain. No pop. required.
Conscripted - draft. Last resort, requires 1 pop. Instantly there. Causesin the city.
Regular - built. Slow to build them, require 1 pop, but better than a conscript and cheaper than a mercenary. No
Regular for production-strong players
Mercenary for economy-strong players
Militias for population-strong players
You see, this would allow for more interesting gameplay.
I think that it's possible to say that a new (regular) unit needs Food substraction from the city store. That would be possible in a case of city growth independent from food.
Check out this thread, post #6 (according to post #4).
I see it also possible that the creation of a unit might also put back the city growth by ~half population point.
I totally agree with jaybe, food for army
No No No. If I could vote no more than once I would. Losing population, and/or population growth to produce Workers and Settlers is bad enough. You have to sit around waiting for turns and turns to get units. This represents a long time in game time. Hundreds of years early in the game. The military is an insignificant fraction of the population. Take for example the USA which has a large military. The population of the US is a bit over 300,000,000 as of 2008. The US standing military is almost 1,500,000. That is only ½ of 1% of the population. If the entire US military were destroyed in a single great attack the USA would only lose 0.5 % of its population. Making a military unit, settler, or worker should cost no reduction in population. If a City is attacked, population already takes a hit.
I agree. NO NO NO
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=InsspuvAmBs
In Medieval times, the effect of recruiting an army was more profound as there were simply less people.
In Medieval times armies were a lot smaller. Also, large percentages of the population were not taken away from farming for extended periods of time. It also didn’t take 40 to 100 years to raise a unit of archers.In Medieval times, the effect of recruiting an army was more profound as there were simply less people.
I would be hesitant to support any change that would make waging war more difficult than it already is.
"No! No! A thousand times no! I'd rather see my lifeblood spillin'."
-- Eric Bogle
One thing I would like to see that goes along with the proposal on this thread is a change to the Unit-construction mechanic.
Currently, in Civ a city has only ONE build queue. All units and buildings are constructed in this one queue. In Colonization, units could be "built" by moving a citizen outside of a city and equipping him with guns from your reserve (thus, your city "loses" population whenever a military unit is built).
I would like to see a sort of middle-ground between the two games in which the city has a "Build" queue and a "Train" queue.
The way it would work is that a city is free to build buildings in its build queue, while at the same time, a citizen can be dragged into the Train queue to begin "training" that citizen to be a unit. Training of the army would require only a small number of hammers, but for many units that require armor or weaponry to be constructed (such as guns or swords), the hammer cost will be increased. This way, constructing large armies will cause a decrease in population, and training armies that require advanced weaponry will require additional time to "construct" the weapons. Some units, however, should have to be completely "Constructed" in the Build queue without the need for assigning a citizen. Such units would include seige weapons, tanks, helicopters, naval vessels, air craft, etc.
In this system, a city could be training an infantry at the same time that it is building a factory.
Additionally, any Civ's ability to maintain a large standing army would be dependant on its population.
Finally, by combining a system in which training units reduces population with high maintenance costs and relatively cheap/inexpensive training time, the game could employ a system where military units can be trained quickly as needed, used in combat, and then disbanded back into a city when the war is over to reduce the maintenance cost. So rather than having to maintain an ever-increasing amount of units in constant fear of invasion, a player (and the AI) can quickly build units as needed to repel an attack. Additionally, it would be easier to notice an opponent mobilizing for war, since they would go from having only a handful of units to having many units over the course of several turns.
/signed
If training units really does involve taking up population, I'd also like the ability to bring in citizens from other cities into my 'training city'.
It wouldn't make sense to force all the population requirements solely onto the city that has the training base, especially if you've developed the transport requirements, such as railroads, to bring in recruits from other cities.
I think there could be other solutions to create a military than building it.
-Conscripted - takes population.
-Professional - takes only a little bit of population.
-Mercenary - a Professional bought from another civ, no pop. cost, but high gold cost.
-Warrior caste - feudalism. Takes a fair bit of pop., but provides whoa-how-experienced units. Requires Caste System.
Now I think here are a few ideas.
1) Weaponry and crew are independent.
Self-explanatory. You have to build or buy the equipment, and choose the crew.
2) All units (crew) have a link to a citizen in the hometown.
This citizen doesn't work, but has some effect on the city.
Conscripted -
Professional - no real effect.
Mercenary - link goes to the civ that gave the unit, so no effect (on you).
Warrior caste - the citizen doesn't work even if you join the unit back to the city... neither before you build the unit.
This reflects the families of the soldiers or whatever, the basis is to have a non-working citizen in the hometown of the unit (I mean crew).
3) If the unit is destroyed
The citizen is lost in 50% of the cases. Just think all the WW2 losses.
4) Experience
The crew has the experience level. This is simple. Crew type:
-Conscripted: has 0 XP at the beginning, and joined back to the city as soon as possible due to
-Professional: I think ~5 XP would do it. This reflects the fact that the crew is trained, not just given a weapon.
-Warrior caste: has some 15-20 XP by default, reflecting the fact that they have a lifetime to learn all its little secrets and everything. Requires Caste System and has a major drawback (idle citizens in peace).
5) Volunteers
Volunteers are taken as Conscripted but don't cause
6) Is there anything else I forgot?
While the whole writiup on changing unit health to size is too much for this post, the idea would include for a city being able to generate a certain amount of size points before a city would drop a population point, perhaps based on the calc used for # of solders on the demographics screen.
Isn't it simpler to say that every unit takes half pop. point?
I know this is against my idea, but I think this is another viable route to say that each trained (...) unit throws growth back by ~0.5 pop., no matter how growth is implemented (food or etc.).
I going a bit radical here but how's bout just get rid of population points and just base it on real world population. The way it would work for city production is you click on a tile and a pop up comes up and you type the number of citizens you want working on that tile. You can have any number from 0-10k in any tile to encourage you to go to another tile. Then the way a military unit is created is that you again determine the number of soldiers in the unit. You can have any number from 1,000-15,000. The more soldiers in a unit determines how much damage a unit can take. Once that unit is created you can't add anymore than what you determine it to be at creation. Also it's health is the number of soldiers a unit has currently and it's determined max. Also you can only take only a certain percentage of citizens. Like 33%. That number is determined by your government type. So a military dictatorship can take 50% and a democracy is 15%. Of course this can be modded. Of course this is only a soft restriction. You can take more at you own risk. You do have some wiggle room. For a military dictatorship that fluxuation is big at 50 to 60% and during war it can get up to 75%. For a democracy it's 15 to 17%. During war 25%. And again the reprecussions for taking more than that(and this is per unit) is greater in a democracy then in a military dictatorship(man DICtatorships are so well named. DICtators are such dicks) is least. The higher you get the worse it gets for you. For a dictatorship if it's up to 75% at wartime for a long time the people might just rebel. For a democracy they may just go in to civil disorder. Units might join in. So be careful. Also at the end of a war the casualties will be shown on a pop up. You at the beginning of a war must declare a body count. If it exceeds it by a lot the people will be pissed. They may just rebel against your rule!
B-29 Bomber
You're a bit radical, just as you stated.
The idea is basically good (allow only a percentage of citizens to be a military unit) but
the idea of getting rid of pop. points is not.
I think it would be better with my system that for example each military citizen (read my idea) causes extra
And also a rate of devoting resources (human resource) to military (WW2 Germany scenario).
And one thing that is not represented in the Civ Tech Trees is the effect of the discovery of canning on military campaigns. Napoleon could not have done what he did without it.
First post here, so here goes...
If the population mechanic were set up in a manner whereby a "food point" generally represented a set number of people similar to how it was in Civ 4 (with smaller city sizes at least.), then it would be natural if a given unit type was represented by a set population of individuals. Building said unit could reduce the population by a food point or two as such. If the city is of a larger size whereby one food point represents more individuals, the number of food points the unit takes is reduced.
Now throughout history, Soldiers have usually contributed to the economy while they were part of the city(although less than if they were just working in the fields or the workshops). Full time soldiers that did nothing else were rare until the later periods. Even the Samurai started out as mercenary farmhands.
So in short, I think there should be some sort of dynamic relationship between soldiers and population(a two way relationship if you will)...
Heres a simple idea:
Why don't you have a citizen pop act as a soldier pop? where it can support a certain number of units, this could also affect naval units too but navies would have a very low crew requirement.
Another one could be is have it that you can only practically maintain a certain number of army units based on the number of pops you have and the more troops you have out the faster some kind of war exhaustion occurs and slows your economy down dramatically since everyone is fighting.
Im for the units should act as settlers and workers. I also think that there should be a penalty for losing troops or something, like if 5 units from London died creating -1 pop in London" ex lost generation of ww1. cuz if your units not dying then they could still act as citizens right? ex switzerland.
Realistically, population reduction and food upkeep plus cost is inherent in any army formation. I know other people have diffrences in their playing styles and preferences, but warfare and wars is really a costly business and takes a lot of resources. No matter how you debate this, this is a basic underpinning in warfare. Russia overcame Germany with it's massive population and ensuing army reserves in WW2. Napoleon withered in Russia without adequate supply and support. No more endless supplies and super units please.
I don't think that the production of military units should take away population points. What should happen is that for every, lets say 5 units produced in any given city, population growth should slow down/stop for a little while.
So far an in game negative correlation between recruitment and population have been justified with a positive correlation between IRL army and population size.
A population decrease from activities related to armed forces happens in the event of war. Since forces not actively engaged in war are still able to reproduce, an in game effect of army size could more correctly be introduced as following:
1) cities, with armed forces outside borders, are reduced in reproductive ability.
2) cities, with enemy soldiers near them, are reduced in reproductive ability. (marching troops historically pillage and gathers food as they progress)
3) cities that loose soldiers loose population, since the local boys aren't coming home.
4) the classical loos of population if the city is attacked by the enemy
as for your note2, they dont always, but in civ4 when you march you can destroy improvements and roads by pillaging, which naturally would reduce productivity. So Theyr probably going to do that.
Would Welcome The Idea If It's Done Right
Food should be used to support your armies as well as gold, and you should have specified Future Techs to increase Demestic (food , gold, building production), Diplomatic (trade routes, culture, friendship status), and Military (military production, strength, bombardment range) status. Future play should be way more expanded because thats usually where you should play the most (because it dosen't end until you lose or quit).
Neat idea but realistically how many people do you think join an army in a nation? if the populations represent thousands of people than an army will not make much of a difference. Also the training time allows the population to recover. Now in a forced draft the argument has merit. Oh wait it already affects populations in other civ games.
The U.S. is a weird country that has 310,000,000 people and a standing army of 1475000 equaling 00.4758%(one of the largest per capita #'s in the world). This is not a sufficient demographic to make a change to population yet it has one of the larger armies relative to population in the world.
China 1,340,000,000 vs 3,440,000 = 00.2567% Half the amount of the US army despite being over double the size.
Dude why not have it so military cost Food for Maintanence. In the long run it lowers population rate, but think of it as a nessesary expence for the protection of you cities. It also makes the game alot more realistic which, if I'm correct, is suposed to the the point of the Civilization games.
US army is more... ...Experienced? With highly trained killing machine. What China has in Quantity we have in Quality. Though if you ask me, Isreal has the best trained army. Even though they have less troops they would still put up quite the fight to a larger country such as Iran. I hope they still have Unit Experience in Civilization 5.
I agree with that. Even though China has a larger military, the United States more than makes up for it with better technology. Many of the thousands of Chinese tanks are old and from the 1960s. China is already beginning to reduce the size of its military to allow it to phaze out the old weapons.
In addition, its not just man power that counts, its how mobile and how much firepower they have. The Chinese army is (for all intents and purposes) landlocked. They have around 60 submarines and patrol ships but that's basically their entire navy. The US has several carriers and many hundreds of supporting vessels.
Training helps but an army isn't just all about numbers. You could outman your enemy, but still be stopped by a technologically-superior army. As one historian put it: "three men and a machine gun can stop a whole battalion of heroes."
which irrates and confuses the tank crew fighting a regiment of spearmen!
still a larger civ will always be able to support a larger army than a smaller one, the smaller civ makes up for it with higher-quality troop, plus since its smaller its easier to defend! (especially with the one-unit limit rule)
In my opinion, military production should decrease civilian population because armies are really trained civilians. Makes perfect sense really.
'course you forget mercanaires or today foregin contractors....
its inconsquential but whatever...
Reducing civilian population is too dramatatic if you will, same problem with raising settlers or workers.. drafting works the way it does since you pull up people.. when you raise troops conventially you are actually slowly pull guys together as well as producing their equipment, thats why it doesn't affect pop count that much..
personally i like the idea that each pop unit lets you have one army each, that sounds reasonable honestly...
Yes, I admit I forgot about mercenaries. And I think you're right, even though real, this concept is not exactly fun in video games.
But then again... what games do have this concept?
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