(edit: this was submitted on August 20 and was voted on enough to get third place in the SPQR that week)
Background - population efficiency and large cities:
After the changes to the population and trade systems in 1.5 its become clear that the way cities and their efficiency on population output grows has changed - but is still very significant and pretty much uncapped. Big cities are for sure fun, and to an extent, its good gameplay setting up the circumstances that allow them to grow and thrive in size & efficiency. it would probably not be fun to have their size capped in any arbitrary way. However, the lack of restriction s on city and province size beyond how much food you can import and how much you can grow your "population capacity" can end up crowding out other interesting uses of political influence, nation-building and the importance of provinces other than your capital. in 1.5, the limit of food-supply has actually been made more fluid and uncapped than before, since the higher class pops generate import routes that means they can "feed themselves" as long as food is available for import. The scaling of population capacity has become slower as the modifiers available are lower at the start of the game. The modifiers can still grow at a steady rate through province investments, however, and can still reach and exceed the point where the increase to the base pop-cap exceeds the 10 pop needed to unlock another building slot.
Justification / problem
The existing constraints to scaling of city-size and the productivity of these (capital) cities, lacks enough dimensions to make for a compelling balance throughout time and place in the game. countries who cant establish capitals and build cities in favourable locations with access to ports, decent civ value, technology and (ability to build) road networks will struggle to even begin scaling their cities, while civilized nations with access to these things can not only start scaling but reach a point of exponential scaling where other avenues of influence-expenditure and overall attention/investment are not worthwhile when compared to full attention and priority towards the capital city.
A way forward would be to add another dimension to the equation, one that has almost no effect on the smallest cities but a dynamically growing effect on the larger cities. Squalor.
I think adding a new dimension to how we make pops efficient can open more doors than it closes; it can open up more cool ways to rework/improve the trade system, reduce restrictions on the migration system, and more... (with significantly reduced proclivity for such changes to make the largest cities even more "unbalanced" in new ways)
Suggestion:
Large cities in ancient times were prone to get quite messy. I'm not the best informed around here when it comes to historical detail, but enough to find it a reasonable proposition that squalor might be an immersive concept to abstract and model for cities in the game. It seems ok to propose that cities could make room for A LOT people to settle and enable enough production & imports of foods to survive, but that at times, this would be done at a speed and scale that created ripples and problems for these cities and their social/political / economic interactions with their surroundings and overlords.
In terms of game mechanics, I'm sure professional game designers could come up with a neat system that fits with the existing systems in a good way better than I could, I'll just throw out a few rough ideas to tease the reader's mind:
Squalor-growth could be caused by
Squalor-impact could be
Squalor-reduction over time could be caused by
This suggestion was brought to you by a previous discussion I had with @denkt2 on the wider topic.
forum.paradoxplaza.com
... as always, I welcome any thoughts on the topic, and place your votes!
Thanks for reading!
Background - population efficiency and large cities:
After the changes to the population and trade systems in 1.5 its become clear that the way cities and their efficiency on population output grows has changed - but is still very significant and pretty much uncapped. Big cities are for sure fun, and to an extent, its good gameplay setting up the circumstances that allow them to grow and thrive in size & efficiency. it would probably not be fun to have their size capped in any arbitrary way. However, the lack of restriction s on city and province size beyond how much food you can import and how much you can grow your "population capacity" can end up crowding out other interesting uses of political influence, nation-building and the importance of provinces other than your capital. in 1.5, the limit of food-supply has actually been made more fluid and uncapped than before, since the higher class pops generate import routes that means they can "feed themselves" as long as food is available for import. The scaling of population capacity has become slower as the modifiers available are lower at the start of the game. The modifiers can still grow at a steady rate through province investments, however, and can still reach and exceed the point where the increase to the base pop-cap exceeds the 10 pop needed to unlock another building slot.
Justification / problem
The existing constraints to scaling of city-size and the productivity of these (capital) cities, lacks enough dimensions to make for a compelling balance throughout time and place in the game. countries who cant establish capitals and build cities in favourable locations with access to ports, decent civ value, technology and (ability to build) road networks will struggle to even begin scaling their cities, while civilized nations with access to these things can not only start scaling but reach a point of exponential scaling where other avenues of influence-expenditure and overall attention/investment are not worthwhile when compared to full attention and priority towards the capital city.
A way forward would be to add another dimension to the equation, one that has almost no effect on the smallest cities but a dynamically growing effect on the larger cities. Squalor.
I think adding a new dimension to how we make pops efficient can open more doors than it closes; it can open up more cool ways to rework/improve the trade system, reduce restrictions on the migration system, and more... (with significantly reduced proclivity for such changes to make the largest cities even more "unbalanced" in new ways)
Suggestion:
Large cities in ancient times were prone to get quite messy. I'm not the best informed around here when it comes to historical detail, but enough to find it a reasonable proposition that squalor might be an immersive concept to abstract and model for cities in the game. It seems ok to propose that cities could make room for A LOT people to settle and enable enough production & imports of foods to survive, but that at times, this would be done at a speed and scale that created ripples and problems for these cities and their social/political / economic interactions with their surroundings and overlords.
In terms of game mechanics, I'm sure professional game designers could come up with a neat system that fits with the existing systems in a good way better than I could, I'll just throw out a few rough ideas to tease the reader's mind:
Squalor-growth could be caused by
- the number of pops
- unrest
- low stability
- events
- more?
Squalor-impact could be
- Increased food consumption
- Reduced population output,
- Reduced population capacity, (!)
- Reduced migration attraction and increased migration speed (!)
- "Bad" events like fire/disease
Squalor-reduction over time could be caused by
- A base decay (resulting in low / no squalor for most settlements/cities under a certain size like <100-300 pops?)
- Granaries and/or other/new buildings
- Trade goods, reducing squalor produced by certain pop types, etc?
- A new governor policy? the existing decentralizing policy? certain
- Governor traits?
- Ruler traits?
- Laws? ideas? faction-interactions?
- Schemes for owners of the local holding?
- "Coordinate urban development" or similar city-level influence expenditure, scaling in cost if repeated.
This suggestion was brought to you by a previous discussion I had with @denkt2 on the wider topic.
Squalor and giving buildings provincial wide effect, as ways to make smaller cities more useful
The discussion in recent threads have been that the optimal way to manage cities is probably to only have a single city per province and make that city really large. This is mainly because how buildings only affect pops in the city they are built...
... as always, I welcome any thoughts on the topic, and place your votes!
Thanks for reading!
Last edited:
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